She said, "He raped me." He said it was consensual

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, as well as the leader of the French Socialist Party and its presumed candidate for president of France in the next election.

All this came tumbling down in a New York hotel a few weeks ago, when he was credibly accused of raping a housekeeper who had come in to clean his room, not realizing that he was in the shower. I won't rehearse the details, except that the District Attorney's office had made the indictment with great confidence, based both on the woman's consistent and believable story and on forensic evidence collected at the scene.

But the physical evidence can only prove there was sex, not whether it was rape. He says it was consensual; she says it was rape.

Meanwhile, his political career has been ruined, or so it seems. And her life has been exposed to a kind of scrutiny that is uncovering some inconsistencies about what she did after the alleged rape. Far more damaging is that she has confessed to falsifying her application for asylum in the U.S., saying that she had been gang raped in her native Guinea and her life would be in danger if she returned. She now admits that was not true about the gang rape but was added to enhance her case for asylum. In addition, she seems to have been involved with a drug dealer who is now in prison, at least in her being a front for his money laundering (five bank accounts in her name with hundreds of thousands of dollars in deposits, which she says she knows nothing about).

Now, none of this means that she was not raped by Strauss-Kahn. But it means that the prosecutors would have a very hard time convincing a jury to take her word instead of his, when she has admitted to lying to our government -- about being raped -- and has been involved with drug-dealing, at least passively and perhaps naively.

Stauss-Kahn obviously has enormous financial resources and powerful friends and backers. He will have very skilled lawyers whose whole case would be focused on destroying the woman's credibility on the witness stand. All his lawyers have to do is convince one juror that there is a reasonable doubt that she is telling the truth. "Is it not true that you once lied to the United States government, falsely claiming that you had been raped?" Falsely claiming that you had been raped. That's all it would take.

The prosecutors took the initiative in notifying the judge of this new difficulty in the prosecution of their case. The judge has not dismissed the charges but has rescinded the million dollar bail and freed Strauss-Kahn from house arrest and electronic monitoring -- signalling the enormous change in how the case is now viewed. He still can't leave the country, but it sounds to me like a prelude to settling the case without a trial.

The French have been very critical of the U.S. Justice system of allowing someone who has been accused, but not convicted, to be publicly photographed in handcuffs, being led off to jail -- of course prompting the media circus that this became. In France, they are much more discreet in protecting the privacy of the innocent-until-proved-guilty, especially with the high and mighty.

But stories have also emerged in France about Strauss-Kahn: a woman journalist says he tried to rape her years ago and she let herself be talked out of reporting it; possibly a second attempted rape of another woman; and he seems to have the reputation even among his friends of being a lecher who repeatedly forces himself on women. My guess is that he very likely did what she claims, that she is not lying about it.

In the end, though, it's probably the U. S. judicial system that played in Strauss-Kahn's favor. I'm not sure of this, but I think that in France such a case would be tried before a judge without a jury. These new developments, that seem to have destroyed the likelihood of a conviction, hinge on the difficulty of convincing a jury to consider only the accuser's credibility in this particular case, not other reasons to question her truthfulness. That would be far easier to accomplish in a trial by a judge than with a jury. It only takes one with "a reasonable doubt."

So, in the end, it comes down to: she said, he said; and which one do you believe?

Ralph