The presidential erection of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

It was a standing joke at the American Club in Hong Kong many years ago that the Chinese invariably pronounced the English letter "r" as an "l" such as in "flied lice". It seems the Americans were so accustomed to automatically translating Chinese English into American English they had great difficulty keeping a straight face whenever their Chinese counterparts brought up the subject of the American presidential election.

That joke came to my mind as I followed the unravelling saga of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sexual adventures as revealed by the investigations of the district attorney's office in New York. Something seemed to suggest that the excitement generated by the prospect of next year's French presidential election, which the polls predicted he would win hands down, had an irresistible psychological and physiological effect on him. In DSK's psyche and corpus cavernosum it was due to be an election of the Chinese English sort or it was not to be at all.

The personality profile of DSK which gradually evolved from these revelations was that of a modern Don Juan drawing on the aura of superior social status and political power as a magnet to attract an infinite number of female victims. His image was that of an amoral sexual predator who knew no limits and was sure of his rights and privileges.

So there you have it, Your Honor, is, in essence, the concluding message of the district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., to Justice Michael J. Obus, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court in Manhattan:

Our investigations establish conclusively that the defendant (DSK) engaged in a sexual encounter with the complainant (a hotel maid assigned to room cleaning) hurriedly, sometime between 12:06 p.m. and 12:13 p.m. on May 14, 2011 in the defendant's suite 2806 of the Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan. However, the complainant (an illiterate black African immigrant from Guinea) lied to investigators on numerous occasions about this and other matters and has discredited herself as a witness. Her claim, therefore, of a non-consensual sexual encounter cannot be considered reliable beyond reasonable doubt and we recommend that the case be dismissed.

The judge acquiesced. An appeal immediately introduced by the hotel maid's lawyer was promptly dismissed and DSK recuperated his passport and travel documents which the court had confiscated.

The leaders of the French socialist party and DSK's supporters were, of course, jubilant at the news. They could now proudly proclaim as Obama had done following the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden some months earlier: "justice has been done". For them this meant that DSK had been found innocent of all charges. He solemnly declared on television "I can't wait to return to my country after this terrible, unjust ordeal".

For the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, affectionately known as Ophelia by her work colleagues and as Nafi by her elder brother in their remote African village in Guinea, the judge's decision could have far worse consequences than the brief sexual encounter with DSK. She now risks prosecution for perjury before a grand jury for the lies she told from fear of losing her job as well as expulsion from the United States for having obtained an entrance visa on false pretences.

It is clear that Nafi is completely out of her depth and incapable of handling the situation in which she has been unwittingly plunged. She is highly vulnerable and unable to provide a clear and consistent narrative either of the hotel incident or of her past life. She even accused herself of having wrongly declared that she had been the victim of a gang rape to justify her request for asylum in the United States. The investigators found that this was inexact. There was no mention of it on her written asylum application. She subsequently indicated that she had been advised to make that declaration by an unnamed man whom she had consulted to help prepare her asylum request. Finally, she told investigators, she decided not to mention the rape in her written application.

The prosecutor noted in his 25 page report:

She had a work history at the Sofitel Hotel of more than three years, her employee file contained no incident reports or disciplinary history and her supervisors indicated that she was a model employee. She had no criminal history and had been granted asylum by the United States Immigration Court. Although she noted that she had originally entered the United States using a visa and papers that had been issued to a different person, she readily admitted this fact. Finally, available evidence indicated that the complainant had no foreknowledge of the defendant's stay at the hotel that might have enabled her to orchestrate an encounter between them, and that she entered the defendant's suite believing it to be empty.

Ophelia or Nafi is evidently a poor, uneducated and very simple person with limited intellectual faculties who courageously migrated to the United States with her 2 year old daughter from her native African village in Guinea. Her life seems to have been a constant struggle for survival. Despite her meagre resources she managed to find a job as a chambermaid and a small apartment in the Bronx in a building rented to people with aids or HIV. She and her daughter have been living in the United States for thirteen years without any problems.

She readily admits she could never have achieved this without a good deal of lying and cheating in order to tell people what they wanted to hear. At every step she was assisted by fellow Africans who knew what she had to do as a single mother in order to survive.

According to confidential information leaked to the press by one of DSK's victims, he admitted in private to having certain pathological problems while fiercely defending his public image as a respectable senior statesman and economist of world-wide renown, socially and humanly irreproachable.

His public image has, nevertheless, been dealt a serious blow by the cavalry charge he made, totally naked, in pure hussar style on poor Nafi when she unsuspectingly entered his suite to make up the bed and do the cleaning. Before the hussar attack he was tipped to become the next president of France. Now, 80% of French voters do not want him to participate in the socialist party primaries.

A political comeback, nevertheless, remains possible. A majority of socialists would accept him in the government, but not as Prime Minister. He still has to face a civil case brought against him by Nafi in the Bronx and two other complaints lodged in France.

The fact is, as things stand today, justice has not been done. Justice was stopped dead in its tracks in the Supreme Court of Manhattan. DSK was not found innocent. He was not judged. The material evidence was eloquent but insufficient, alone, to prove guilt, and Cyrus Vance Jr. saw Nafi as no match for the defence lawyers. He discounted the sincerity of her distress, failing to see beyond the codes of her modest milieu (the underclass of the Bronx) and underestimated the ability of a jury to perceive it more clearly than he could himself. This is admitted in the report "If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so".

That is a very sad and regrettable confession. It sums up the problem in a nutshell, underlining the cultural gap and incomprehension that existed between Nafi and the brilliant district attorney who is the son of Cyrus Vance, (Sr.), Secretary of State to President Jimmy Carter. It is a pity he chose not to proceed to trial. He might have won.

Silence is golden so they say and that is what saved DSK. At no point was he obliged to answer any questions. Anything he said could have been used against him. He followed his lawyer's advice and exercised his legal right to remain silent. He did so for the full three months of the investigation. Neither Vance nor the judge ever heard DSK's version of the story. Nobody did.

The whole thing was a game of poker. Not justice. DSK played his cards close to his chest and Vance failed to call his bluff. The prosecutor should not have thrown in his hand but let the cards speak for themselves.

It made no difference to the judge, Justice Michael J. Obus, whether the case was won or lost. He had no reason to accept just one side of the story. He should have ordered the protagonists to play on. His decision rendered the revelation of the truth impossible.

A fallout from all this is a disturbing piece of information which came to light during the DNA analysis of a section of the floor carpet in DSK's hotel suite. There were traces not only of DSK's semen but of three other, unidentified, men as well. How about that for hygiene in a $US 3 000 a night luxury suite in a four star hotel in midtown Manhattan?