How the mighty have fallen: Dominique Strauss-Kahn

He married his third wife, well-known French social and political journalist, Anne Sinclair, in 1991. She is heiress to part of the immense fortune of her maternal grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, a renowned art dealer who represented Pablo Picasso from 1918 to 1939, as well as Braque and Henri Matisse. Anne Sinclair is a member of the board of the Picasso museum in Paris. She donated one of Picasso’s paintings, Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et de sa fille, to the French State in 2008 to pay her mother’s death duties.    

DSK is one of the Parisian socialist elite known as the gauche caviar (wealthy leftists). The news of his arrest provoked a typical French defence reaction familiarto chess players. The French intelligencia and gauche caviar immediately appeared on television denouncing a political conspiracy to eliminate DSK from the presidential election. They pointed out there was presumption of innocence. Robert Badinter, the Minister for Justice under François Mitterand, and a personal friend of DSK and his wife, appeared to suggest that the corollary to the presumption of innocence of DSK was that there was presumption his accuser, Ophelia, was lying. This underscores the evident inappropriateness of the term “presumption of innocence”. The principle at law is that “the proof lies upon him who affirms not upon him who denies; since, by the nature of things, he who denies a fact cannot produce any proof”(Ei incumbit probatio, qui dicit, non qui negat; cum per rerum naturam factum negantis probatio nulla sit). Nothing is to be presumed. Something has to be proven.

It took a full week and many heated debates before anyone suggested that the victim may be Ophelia and not DSK. It took time to recover from the shock of the mise en scène of DSK meekly facing his female judge in the courtroom before being escorted by two hefty policemen, his arms handcuffed behind his back, to the vehicle in which he was to be driven to prison. The copious French bashing that the American tabloids indulged in contributed to the impression in France that DSK was the designated victim. There was nobody else on the screen they could identify as such. 

Apart from a few rare exceptions most of those who were eventually given the opportunity to express the opinion that the designated victim may be Orphelia and not DSK, happened to be women, some of whom, members of women’s rights organisations.

The affair has developed into a Shakespearian tragedy. The immense fortune generated by the artistic talents of Pablo Picasso, a member of the French communist party who painted Guernica in protest of the Nazi war bombings during the Spanish civil war, are financing the defence and buying the conditional freedom of the ex-managing director of the IMF to the tune of $ 5 million. DSK, an eminent socialist, and his faithful wife, both of Jewish extraction, assisted by the best attorney money can buy, Benjamin Brafman, a practising Orthodox Jew, are throwing their combined forces in an all out battle against a poor, frail African migrant chambermaid who appears to be a devout Muslim fairly much alone in the world. The case is being prosecuted by the New York County District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., son of Cyrus Vance, Sr., the former Secretary of State (Foreign Affairs Minister) of President Jimmy Carter. Cy, as he is familiarly known, has a solid reputation for integrity, toughness and fairness. He has twenty-five years experience in the courts and has donated some of his time as a public defender, a criminal defence lawyer appointed by the court to represent people charged with a crime but unable to afford an attorney.

It has yet to be decided if the case will go to trial or not. The strategy of DSK and his lawyers remains confidential. Considering the circumstances as presented to the general public through the media, it is to be expected the dream team will set out to demonstrate that DSK is indeed the victim, as his gauche caviar Paris friends continue to assert.  Who knows? A pocketful of dollars in the Bronx could work miracles.