Rape Isn't Funny: On Making Excuses For Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Blaming the Alleged Victim

This story has been updated. See postscript.

What is the simplest explanation for the misguided logic suffusing recent discussions of the alleged rape of a hotel maid by the former head of the International Monetary Fund? A generational disconnect? A lack of appreciation for the complex links between social issues and economics? A warning that high-brow progressive culture may be in need of some self-reflection?

Robert Kuttner, the well-known journalist and editor of the American Prospect, responded on his new blog yesterday to recent leaks suggesting that the alleged victim in the sexual assault case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an unreliable witness. Reports are circulating that the maid, an African immigrant, lied about her U.S. residency status on her asylum application (on a lawyer's advice), claiming a gang rape that prosecutors say she has since admitted never happened, and that after the arrest of Strauss-Kahn, she called someone for advice who happened to be in jail on a marijuana charge.

Her current attorney, Kenneth Thompson, says the real reason she sought to come to the U.S. is that she is a victim of genital mutilation and did not want her daughter to suffer the same fate. (The U.S. does not typically grant asylum to people fleeing this practice.) She also, according to a Reuters report, "told prosecutors she was raped in the past in Guinea but under different circumstances than what she described during initial interviews."

Attacks on the credibility of women who bring charges of sexual assault is something we should greet first with skepticism. Such attacks often carry an implicit assumption that a woman -- especially if she is poor, associates with unsavory characters, lives in a dodgy neighborhood, etc. -- may have deserved what she got and is not entitled to our sympathy or to legal protection. Important questions about class, gender and economic status raised in such cases demand our attention. In this instance, the fact that a poor, immigrant woman living in the Bronx knows a drug dealer or fudged the facts in order to gain asylum seems to me neither surprising nor indicative that she is not entitled to basic human rights.

But Kuttner does not explore these issues. Instead, he puts forth a theory of what may have happened at New York’s Sofitel Hotel because, as he writes, "we all know from the date-rape controversy" that rape is a complex issue that sometimes involves mere "seduction" and "misunderstanding." There is something troubling about the attitude conveyed by this construction, which suggests that a woman subjected to a violent crime could easily mistake it for a simple come-on. It particularly stretches the imagination in an instance – like this one—in which a woman was allegedly imprisoned in a room, had her clothes torn, and was forced to perform oral sex on a stranger.

Kuttner goes on to question how someone could commit a rape, as DSK is alleged to have done, and then go on to have lunch with his daughter. Wouldn't such a person be a sociopath? Sadly, I’ll wager that there are plenty of men so conditioned to think of women as disposable objects that they are indeed capable of attacking a woman and then going about their business. One meets them at fraternity parties, on corporate retreats, in political circles, in Hollywood -- basically anywhere men are led to believe that power and privilege give them the right to gratify sexual urges whenever they choose -- even if the objects of those urges are unwilling.

But if one is to follow Kuttner's logic, DSK – who has a long record of problematic sexual behavior -- is not a sociopath, and therefore is incapable of such callous behavior. So there must be another story. He proposes that the IMF chief was instead simply a man who regularly had prostitutes sent to his room while on business trips and merely mistook the maid for a hooker. Kuttner imagines the scene: