‘The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries’: Rape and the Bestselling Millennium Trilogy

Abstract

In May 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, President of the International Monetary Fund, and socialist hopeful for the upcoming French presidential elections, was arrested in New York City for sexually assaulting a chamber maid. Charged immediately, Strauss-Kahn was placed under strict house arrest in New York City, and the prosecution moved to protect the maid, their star witness. By the next month, while the reputation of ‘DSK’ (as he is often referred to) was in tatters and various women had turned up and spoken out about questionable dealings with him in the past, the prosecution began to challenge the chamber maid’s reliability: she had lied on her immigration papers; she had a boyfriend who was a drug addict/peddler, as well as several large unexplained deposits of money in her bank account. Ultimately, the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence and DSK is free to pursue his political ambitions. The DSK affair presents what I consider to be a typical rape scenario: he said/she said, where the one with power and influence — usually the man — wins. Generally, it is cases like DSK’s that receive media attention because of the celebrity of the male in question. Those that tend to attract media attention when they come to trial, such as the high profile American rape cases of William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson, and Kobe Bryant, are undoubtedly problematic, and most probably deter women from reporting rape, given the publicity, the character attacks, and the sheer trauma of the process.