Not Prosecuting

Tristane Banon, the French girl who claimed she was sexually molested by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2002, is not yet going to court. It seems she has no interest in helping the American prosecutors. But there may be other, more valid, reasons for her change of heart. This report from La Provence has been condensed:

Tristane Banon, a French girl who claims to have been the victim of a sexual assault by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2002, does not wish be a witness in the American investigation, her lawyer said on Friday (May 20).

The American police expected to add this story, as well as information on the 2008 affair of DSK with an IMF employee, to the report of a presumed rape of a maid in New York, a legal source said in New York.

David Koubbi, Tristane Banon's lawyer told Reuters that his client refused to testify before American investigators.

"The presumption of innocence does not exist in the United States. My client does not wish to participate in this matter," he said. (…)

Note: An incredibly reckless remark to come from the mouth of a lawyer. Could this be misinformation?

After DSK's arrest last Saturday (May 14) in New York, Tristane Banon announced through Koubbi that she intended to file a complaint in France, but has not yet done so. Her lawyer (…) explained that his client refuses to turn this into an additional weapon for the American prosecution against Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a case of which she knows nothing.

A writer and journalist, she said she was the victim of an assault by the head of the IMF when she met him for an interview. It was her mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist councillor from the department of Eure, who related that her daughter, then 22, had told her of the event, but that she had dissuaded her from reporting it. (…)

Note: Later, Mansouret admitted she was sorry to have dissuaded Tristane from prosecuting, and spoke of the pressures she had been under.

The journal Nouvel Obs has devoted a page to the legal factors that would make testimony on her part unwise. Obviously, if you are going to file a lawsuit, you must have a reasonable chance of winning your case. There does not seem to be sufficient grounds for attorney David Koubbi to try his luck in a courtroom. Only three charges could be brought: sexual assault, rape, and attempted rape. A charge of sexual assault must be filed within three years of the event. As for rape, nothing she said in her narration of her encounter with DSK indicates a rape occurred. According to French law, for a man to be charged with attempted rape, he must have exposed himself and approached the victim. But Tristane Banon did not speak of DSK's nudity. In the end it would be her word against his.

The article then raises the question of what would happen if, after all, she did bring a lawsuit against him. Would the United States extradite DSK to France on demand? The answer seems to be that such a move would put off his trial here and given the publicity surrounding the case, this does not seem likely.

There is a summary in English of what she said in her account of the assault at The Telegraph.

Tristane Banon told her story on French television in 2007 to host Thierry Ardisson, but the name of her attacker was bleeped out at the request of the television station. In an informative article posted at E&R Aquitaine, she is quoted as saying that she did not feel she would be believed if she went through with a lawsuit:

" (…) So I said to myself that I would just live with it. And what would I have gotten out of it? Money? I don't want his dough. And if it was to sell books about this kind of reputation, frankly, I prefer to sell fewer or none… And then, there was simply the fact that I live alone in Paris. He's with some guy who isn't necessarily a gentleman, he doesn't necessarily have very refined methods… I don't think he would have had me killed, but to mess me up, that would have been possible…"

Tristane Banon had set up the interview with DSK within the context of a book she was writing called Erreurs avouées (Errors confessed) about the worst errors committed by ten male personalities. The publisher, Anne Carrière, removed from the book the pages concerning DSK, even though many journalists had already seen them. When she began to plug her book on television, host Marc-Olivier Fogiel, received a call from Dominique Strauss-Kahn asking him to cancel her visit:

" (…) because he was afraid that I would talk about it since it was a live show. Now it's one person's word against another. That's what Marc-Olivier Fogiel said to me and I don't know why he would lie, but Fogiel said, when he invited me (I still have the invitation), he said 'Listen Tristane, they're threatening to cut me off if I let you on.'"