[trigger warning]
One of the things about rape culture is that because the default assumption is that men are always not rapists and women are always lying it becomes very hard to get a fair trial because usual conclusions about witness credibility are completely discarded.
The Strauss-Khan case is - as was predictable from the start in outline if not in details - an example of this.
The news over the last few days has been full of "revelations" that the victim in this rape case is not in fact herself perfect in the eyes of the privileged. As a result of these statements of the obvious, Strauss-Khan has been given bail (because he's considered less of a flight risk if he thinks he can win the case? I don't know...)
I'm making this post on the assumption that the news reporting is accurate. There are plenty of reasons - "unnamed source" "close to the defence" - to believe that at least some of it is rubbish, but I'm going to discuss the scenario in which it's all true.
There's been the usual rape apologism about how clearly if she lied about one thing ever she can't be trusted as a witness and is probably lying about this too. Now, if we're going to exclude anyone who has ever lied about anything from being a witness in a trial, we're going to find both prosecution and defence incredibly short on witnesses ... but it's okay if it's a rape case, because it confirms the belief that women lie about rape. (DSK's own initial lie that he hadn't been there, until the forensic report came back, gets ignored)
There's been quite a bit of effort put in by various writers to point out that this is largely irrelevant, and none of the leaked evidence remotely challenges the statements about what happened in that hotel room. That's true, but I think it goes further than that - these facts about the victim, if true, actually make it more likely that she is telling the truth, by making the alternatives less plausible.
Before these leaks, the scenarios were these:
- DSK, a man with a reputation for sexual predation, raped a woman in his hotel room, and then attempted to leave the country.
- DSK was in his hotel room, where he had consensual sex with a woman who had originally turned up to clean his room, who then went to her manager to claim she had been raped by a customer for no explicable reason.
It wasn't looking particularly good already, but if the leaked evidence is true the scenarios are instead these:
- DSK, a man with a reputation for sexual predation, raped a woman in his hotel room, and then attempted to leave the country.
- DSK was in his hotel room, where he had consensual sex with a woman, who after finishing her shift went to her manager to claim she had been raped by a customer, despite having numerous reasons to want to avoid drawing police attention to herself.
It hasn't changed the details or plausibility of the scenario where DSK is guilty at all - as has been repeatedly said, this evidence is irrelevant to the key question of "what happened in that hotel room?".
It has quite significantly decreased the - already very low - plausibility of the other scenario. It's not completely impossible, but his defence should have to work very hard to get back to "reasonable doubt". Instead, because of the massively skewed assessments that rape culture provides1, the case might not even make it to trial now.
Of course, for the various apologists who think "A [vaguely left-wing] man? Commit rape? Impossible!" and have been sticking to that from the start, the calculation is quite different - since one of the scenarios is to them completely impossible, the other can be utterly implausible and still be true.
Footnote
1 Outside of rape trials, in other areas of the law, this sort of assessment is obvious enough. A man walks into a police station, and reports that the previous night he was assaulted and his coat was stolen.
The police ask for descriptions of the attackers, which he gives, and open a case. It's quite likely at this stage that the attack occurred, but people do occasionally lie in crime reports. Maybe he was at a boxing club, left his coat behind, and doesn't want to tell his friends that's where he was because he'd promised to meet them in the pub that night.
The police then ask if there was anything in the pockets, and he says they contained all the drugs he was going to sell. Not only can drug dealers be mugged just like anyone else (so the fact he's a dealer should be irrelevant in the coming mugging trial), but it makes any theory that suggests he made the report up almost impossible (it was a pretty unlikely theory to start with, of course).
But, of course, rape culture discards all this assessment in favour of "well, obviously she was lying."
