#IBelievedher #MeToo: Revisiting The People of the State of New York v. Strauss-Kahn a Decade Later

The lyniching of DSK

You can read the full article here.

On the 14th of May, 2011, Nafissatou Diallo, a cleaning woman at the Sofitel hotel on 44th street in Manhattan, accused Dominique Strauss Kahn, then managing director of the International Monetary Fund, former French minister of industry, former French minister of economics and the most popular candidate to the socialist primaries for the 2012 French general election of attempted rape. Four days later, on the 18th, Strauss Kahn was indicted and on the 23th of August, for lack of merit and irresolvable incoherences in the deposition of Ms Diallo, the case collpased and all cahrges against him were dropped.

The lapse between the moment that the accusation was brought forth and the collapse of the case four months later opened the space for the sound and the fury where the traditional American taste for mob justice and invocations of righteous violence germinates. Since the hanging of Elijah Lovejoy onwards, the often violent redress of unfavorable veredicts has helped to enphasize the infirmity of the nation’s juridical project and the precariety of the rule of law in the face of the mighty wrath of American moral certainty.

I knew many of the pious souls, who profoundly impressed by the Frenchness of the Frrench man, cellebrated his pillorying. Even a decade later, one conversation remains distinctly clear in my memory. Over a dinner at a home in the Manhattan Upper West, the cook, a woman in her mid 40ies, well educated and member of the city’s lumpen professoriat put it plainly: “He did it.” she said and added “C’mon.”

It was this last fragment of doubt cast in the guise of a moral certainty and peddled as a passing remark that stayed with me for years to come. Succinct and terminal, the sentence summarized an enormous amount of media noise that ultimatly found its political muscle as it was widely distributed through the digital ecosystem. These three words might well be read as the doctrinal foundation of moral outrage, which a decade later fueled in the “I believe her”recited as a confession of faith, the jurisprudence of guilt by accusation that animates the“me too” movement.

You can read the full article here: https://medium.com/@martin_6311/ibelievedher-metoo-revisiting-the-people-of-the-state-of-new-york-v-strauss-kahn-a-decade-later-1a42e684a8aa