WITH ONE bound he was free. But if the dropping of sexual assault charges against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn lifts the prospect of jail for him and closes a first chapter in the saga, it by no means ends it. Any prospect of political rehabilitation, not least of his candidacy in next year’s French presidential election, will remain overshadowed by the civil suits being continued in New York by his accuser, Sofitel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo, and in France by a previous alleged victim of his sexual voraciousness, writer Tristane Banon.
Headlines about DSK having been "cleared" by the New York court are not altogether true, as Le Mondereminded readers – he has neither been declared "not guilty" nor truly cleared. Prosecutors retreated because they became convinced Diallo's crumbling credibility made it impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the sexual encounter was not consensual. The burden of proof in the civil courts will be considerably lower.
And the court of French public opinion is also unlikely to be as forgiving (an Ipsos poll carried out last week found 61 per cent with an unfavourable view of DSK, up from 57 per cent in July). Although there was from the start a far greater willingness in an instinctively anti-American France to accept the DSK line of an innocent man pilloried by a politicised prosecutorial service, unease about how the dismissal of charges clearly reflected the obvious power imbalance between the two in terms of both wealth and gender has also become part of the national debate.
Those still encouraging him to throw his hat in the presidency ring hope the country’s culture of non-intrusion in policians’ private lives will see the public giving him a pass on his sexual mores. France, they argue, is less likely to hold Diallo against him than the US did the comparable Monica Lewinsky against Bill Clinton.
But their attempt to conflate that issue with the more uncomfortable one of confronting traditional male politicians' machismo and sexist attitudes to women is not a runner. What is considered acceptable conduct between men and women appears to be shifting. A suggestion by journalist Jean-François Kahn, combining misogyny with snobbery, that the matter was simply a case of " troussage de domestique" – "a quickie with a servant" – provoked uproar. Feminists and the left are divided and DSK would be no shoo-in as a candidate in his Socialist Party. Discretion, not his forte, would be the better part of valour.