You may remember famous-for-being-famous "public intellectual" Bernard-Henri Levy making a fool of himself trying to turn admitted rapist and privileged fugitive from justice Roman Polanski into some kind of civil-rights hero. Not surprisingly, Levy has now taken to the barricades for accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with similar kinds of illogic and assumptions that Levy's rich friends should be exempt from the justice that might apply to you or me. After some unexceptionable reminders that Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty, Levy complains about the "American judge" who "pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other." (What else the judge should have done is unclear.) After inaccurately describing the American justice system as "accusatory" rather than "adversarial," he enters a world of fantasia in which it's too easy for victims to take alleged attackers to Court and the burden of proof is on the accused, a characterization that will not be familiar to anyone with actual knowledge of how sexual-assault claims are generally handled in the American system. And finally, he engages in some reprehensible victim-blaming, describing a woman who claims that Strauss-Kahn assaulted her as a woman "who pretends* to have been the victim of the same kind of attempted rape." [My emphasis.] The presumption of innocence Levy asserts for the elite mysteriously vanishes when women who accuse them of wrongdoing are involved -- the latter can be accused of lying with no evidence whatsoever.
Alas, as Anna North and Heather Horn show in depressing detail, Levy's rush to blame potential victims and protect powerful accused attackers of women is hardly unusual. The New York prosecutors are to be commended for not submitting to this kind of pressure and taking these accusations seriously.
*Jacob Levy -- as a commenter also noticed -- writes to point out that this could be an error of translation, as the French “pretendre” means “claim.” The victim-blaming that constitutes the rest of the paragraph is actually more consistent with BHL using “pretend” correctly, but I thought it was still worth noting.
