Quotes of the Day

When her husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn was preparing to run for President of France five years ago, Anne Sinclair told a Paris newspaper that she was "rather proud" of his reputation as a ladies' man, a chaud lapin (hot rabbit) nicknamed the Great Seducer.

"It's important," she said, "for a man in politics to be able to seduce."

Maybe it was pride that inspired French politicians and International Monetary Fund officials to look the other way as the rumors about "DSK" piled up, from the young journalist who says Strauss-Kahn tried to rip off her clothes when she went to interview him, to the female lawmaker who describes being groped and pawed and vowed never to be in a room alone with him again, to the economist who argued in a letter to IMF investigators that "I fear that this man has a problem that, perhaps, made him unfit to lead an institution where women work under his command." Maybe it was the moral laziness and social coziness that impel elites to protect their own. Maybe it was a belief that he alone could save the global economy. Maybe nothing short of jail is disqualifying for certain men in certain circles.

But in any event, the arrest of Strauss-Kahn in New York City for allegedly trying to rape a hotel maid has ignited a fierce debate over sex, law, power and privilege. And it is only just beginning. The night of Strauss-Kahn's arraignment, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted that the reason his wife Maria Shriver walked out earlier this year was the discovery that he had fathered a child more than a decade ago with a former member of the household staff. The two cases are far apart: only one man was hauled off to jail. But both suggest an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust. And both involve men whose long-standing reputations for behaving badly toward women did not derail their rise to power. Which raises the question: How can it be, in this ostensibly enlightened age, when men and women live and work as peers and are schooled regularly in what conduct is acceptable and what is actionable, that anyone with so little judgment, so little honor, could rise to such heights?

Crime and Culture Wars
Let's note first that Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proved guilty and, second, that if he is guilty, he is not a player — he's a predator. This was not just a French version of an American classic, the Family Values Virtuecrat, who preaches by day and trysts by night. Nor was Strauss-Kahn a fallen star like Tiger Woods or Charlie Sheen or one of the libidinous lawmakers and Luv Guvs whose confessions can be as infuriating as their sins. Strauss-Kahn was not accused of seducing his close friend's wife, like former Senator John Ensign, or patronizing prostitutes while prosecuting prostitution rings, like former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, or lying about an affair while impeaching a President for lying about an affair, like Newt Gingrich. On the spectrum that starts at randy, runs through creepy and ends in handcuffs, where DSK belonged became a matter of global dispute even before it became a matter for a grand jury.

This is what the alleged victim told the police: On May 14, at the Sofitel in midtown Manhattan, the maid, a 32-year-old African immigrant, entered the $3,000-a-night suite around midday to clean, thinking it was empty. When she went into a bedroom, Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom; when she apologized and tried to leave, according to a police spokesperson, he chased her down, grabbed her and locked the door. He tried to assault her in the bedroom before dragging her to the bathroom and making her perform oral sex. She eventually fled the suite; hotel staff called the police, who caught up with him sitting in his first-class seat on the Air France flight from JFK to Paris — where he could have been safe from extradition.

With his arrest, a transatlantic culture war broke out. Strauss-Kahn was the world's wallet, a shrewd and nimble financier who had rescued the IMF from irrelevance in time to save the European economy. He was the favorite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency next year. He had friends everywhere who called him far too brilliant to do anything so tawdry, as though being smart and being decent were the same thing. Newspapers in Paris couldn't decide on the headline. "Shock. Political Bomb. Thunderclap," blared the left-leaning paper Libération. The New York Daily News went with "Le Perv." The French, who forbid photographing a suspect in handcuffs on the grounds that it violates the presumption of innocence, were aghast at what followed: "Death by media," one former Socialist minister called it. "If you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime," New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg fired back, which only confirmed the French objection.

Strauss-Kahn was charged with offenses including criminal sex acts, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape, for which he could face up to 25 years. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment; his lawyers suggested that whatever might have occurred was consensual. His wife had wired $1 million for bail, they said — but concluding that a man pulled off a flight constituted a flight risk, the judge denied it.

And so he sat in a cell at Rikers Island, a short flight but a long fall from his $4 million Georgetown home and the life he had come to lead. He was on suicide watch; the victim and her teenage daughter were moved to a safe house to protect them from the cameras — but that did not stop the French press from publishing her name and background or the New York Post from reporting that she was a widow who lives in a Bronx apartment set aside for adults with HIV, a claim her lawyer called "outrageous."

So much for the famous European indifference to the private sex lives of its leaders. DSK's situation is more serious even than that of Italy's embattled Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, 74, who has been on trial for corruption, tax fraud and, most relevant, having sex with an underage prostitute and then using his office to cover it up. These cases are the exception; they will both play out in court, with evidence presented and witnesses called and the conduct of the accused judged by the standards of the law. In many instances of sexual conflict, it never comes to this but unfolds in a murmur of rumors and gossip, even nudges and winks. More often than not, the women involved weigh the stakes and decide to be silent, judging that the burden of proof is high and that they have little to gain and so much to lose. It's no coincidence that when events like this happen, women come out of the shadows to add their testimony; they figure the odds have improved enough that they just might be believed.

Shifting Standards
By now social commentators have the explanations on auto-save: We know that powerful men can be powerfully reckless, particularly when, like DSK, they stand at the brink of their grandest achievement. They tend to be risk takers or at least assess risk differently — as do narcissists who come to believe that ordinary rules don't apply. They are often surrounded by enablers with a personal or political interest in protecting them to the point of covering up their follies, indiscretions and crimes. A study set to be published in Psychological Science found that the higher men — or women — rose in a business hierarchy, the more likely they were to consider or commit adultery. With power comes both opportunity and confidence, the authors argue, and with confidence comes a sense of sexual entitlement. If fame and power make sex more constantly available, the evolutionary biologists explain, it may weaken the mechanisms of self-restraint and erode the layers of socialization that we impose on teenage boys and hope they eventually internalize.

"When men have more opportunity, they tend to act on that opportunity," says psychologist Mark Held, a private practitioner in the Denver area who specializes in male sexuality and the problems of overachievers. "The challenge becomes developing ways to control the impulses so you don't get yourself into self-defeating situations."

Nature matters, but so does nurture. Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop any discipline. Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth-and-prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free throw, often early in adolescence, they may become a kind of local royalty and find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and bad behavior is overlooked or covered up. Any skills they may have been developing for self-control or self-denial quickly deteriorate.

But what of reason, of basic survival instincts? Enter politics and you enter the glass house; there are no secrets and no places to hide. One of the temporarily persuasive defenses of Bill Clinton when he faced charges of carrying on with the intern delivering the pizza was that this savvy Rhodes scholar could not possibly be so foolish as to imagine that anything in the White House goes unnoticed, unrecorded or unrepeated. When John Edwards' affair and love child with his videographer — the very woman in charge of documenting his career — became known, Democrats were confounded that he had ever imagined he could run for office again.

As for Schwarzenegger's latest revelation, it was agony to imagine what must have run through Maria Shriver's head when she discovered the truth. Here she was, daughter of a great political dynasty with its own zipper issues, who had drawn on her feminist capital to save her husband's career at a crucial moment in his gubernatorial campaign. In 2003, more than a dozen women accused him of harassing and groping them through the years, including on the set of his film Predator. Shriver testified to his character in words that voters believed: "You can listen to all the negativity, and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold, who met him for five seconds 30 years ago," she said. "Or you can listen to me."

Now it emerges that even as she was defending his honor, he was deceiving both her and the voters. Confronted by the Los Angeles Times, he admitted that all along he had been supporting the child he had with an employee more than a decade ago. That finally explained why, back in January, Shriver moved out of the house.

Rise and Risk
Anne Sinclair, on the other hand, is standing by her man. "I do not believe for one second the accusations brought against my husband," she said. "I have no doubt his innocence will be established." But he has not made her faith in him come easy. Through his years as a top economics professor, Finance Minister and Socialist superstar, not to mention three marriages, Strauss-Kahn acquired the reputation of a serial seducer. French newspapers reported that Sarkozy had warned him, upon his taking the IMF job in 2007, to "avoid taking the elevator alone with interns. France cannot permit a scandal."

A year after taking the job, in a very public scandal, Strauss-Kahn was rebuked by the IMF for "a serious error of judgment" for his affair with Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born economist who worked for him. He was not charged with abusing his position, but he apologized publicly and in an e-mail to IMF staff. She warned at the time that he had put her in an impossible position, fearful of the fallout if she were to resist his advances. That followed even-more-serious yet undisclosed allegations from a young journalist named Tristane Banon, now 31, the goddaughter of DSK's second wife. She claims that when she came to interview DSK in 2002, the encounter turned into a violent attack. "We ended up fighting, since I clearly said, 'No, no,' " she said in a TV interview five years later. "It was more than a couple of slaps. I kicked him. He undid my bra, tried to remove my jeans ... It finished very badly." As soon as she fled, she said, he sent her a text: "So, are you scared of me?"

She didn't press charges, in part because her mother, Anne Mansouret, a local Socialist official, talked her out of it. Other women with similar experiences say they were afraid that challenging a man so powerful in a culture so tolerant would bring them only ridicule and pain. Paris lawyer Emmanuel Pierrat recalls a young woman who told him of a violent encounter with Strauss-Kahn. "She wanted to know whether I thought what I heard would form the basis for a solid legal case," Pierrat says. "I told her I did." In the end she decided to drop the complaint, fearing the media circus, the very good chance she'd be accused of being a liar or worse. "In addition to my client, I also have a personal friend who came to me and described an unwanted, forceful sexual advance by Strauss-Kahn that she was forced to literally fight off," Pierrat says. "They're all essentially the same account, the same kind of behavior, with only the places changed." Yet once again, no charges were ever filed, and Strauss-Kahn was never investigated for any misconduct.

He was, however, a fatalist. Barely two weeks before his arrest, he had a quiet conversation with Libération editors and admitted that the three obstacles if he were to run for President would be "money, women and being a Jew." In fact, until the Sofitel scandal, the political challenge facing DSK was less his lechery than his lifestyle; it's hard to be a Socialist icon living the life of a plutocrat. Photographs of him climbing into a friend's $142,000 Porsche caused a furor, raising charges on the left that he was a "champagne Socialist." He even sued a Paris tabloid for writing that he was outfitted by a Washington tailor whose suits are reported to run for anywhere from $7,000 to $35,000 apiece.

This was, in other words, a man of great contradictions with a great deal to lose, and his defenders and like-minded conspiracy theorists were quick to suspect a setup. Strauss-Kahn, they argued, was not the type to force himself on anyone. Admirers were more likely to throw themselves at him. Yes, he had a weakness for women, said his second wife Brigitte Guillemette: "But that doesn't mean that he could have done what he is accused of. I don't think I ever saw him lock a door. Violence is not part of his temperament. He has many faults but not that one."

The defense escalated into all-out cultural battle: On the one hand, it was the French who came up with the notion of droit du seigneur, the special sexual liberties that the ruling class can enjoy. Social critics in the U.S. condemned the code of silence that prevented women from speaking up, the mentality that replaces Bourbon Kings with bureaucratic functionaries whose academic pedigree and choice of public service confer an automatic halo upon them. On the other hand, from various tony arrondissements, there was much outcry that the alleged victim was allowed to remain anonymous while DSK's perp walk made front pages around the world. "What do we know about the chambermaid?" was a headline in Le Monde. High-flying philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy took to the Daily Beast, a news website, to deplore a "grand" hotel that sent in only one maid (a buddy system would presumably be safer) and denounced the judge for not showing Lévy's longtime friend the respect befitting an alleged rapist of his international standing. The judge, Lévy complained, "pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other," even though he was a defender of the "proletarian nations" and "the most fragile and vulnerable" among us.

Of course, if the charges prove true, the most fragile and vulnerable among us will seem to have been his preferred targets, in this case a maid who, had this happened in Paris rather than New York, would likely have thought long and hard before daring to report even a violent attack by a man in a $3,000 suite. If the French elite were appalled that an illustrious man, convicted thus far of no crimes, could be treated this way, Americans were appalled that he expected to be treated differently.

"The transatlantic divide has really reopened," says Corine Lesnes, Washington correspondent for Le Monde. But she admits this episode will lead to some "soul searching" in the French media about whether the private lives of public figures need to be handled differently.

Who's Puritanical Now?
To those critics who were quick to accuse the U.S. of a reflexive Anglo-Saxon puritanism: it is well past time to retire that charge. Americans have a long history of electing and venerating the morally compromised, whether Thomas Jefferson, who is thought to have fathered children by a slave, or John F. Kennedy, with hot-and-cold-running girlfriends, including the one he reputedly shared with a Mob boss. There was, to be sure, a period of awkward adjustment in the 1990s, when the shadow world of rumored indiscretions found a public home on cable TV and in the nascent blogosphere; once Matt Drudge arrived, there would be no looking the other way, and it was no fun spending months on end watching a President lie with great conviction about his sex life.

But that was not the end of the story. Bill Clinton left office with a more than 60% approval rating. In 2008, neither John McCain nor Rudy Giuliani considered a gothic personal past disqualifying. Senator David Vitter was re-elected in a landslide last year despite having shown up in the phone records of the D.C. Madam. And now Gingrich is back, with third wife Callista by his side — a better man, he argues, for the soul-searching journey prompted by his past mistakes. There is no privacy anymore, nor an expectation of it, and Americans may seem all too eager to catch the high and mighty in the act — but almost always with the tacit understanding that there will be a second act, and a third. What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start. So the tales of half-naked Congressmen posting personal ads on Craigslist or a governor pretending to walk the Appalachian Trail while actually rendezvousing with his mistress just fold into the great pageant of sin and redemption that is American politics and American life. If Tiger Woods is having trouble rehabilitating himself in the eyes of the public, it's not because of his appetite for escorts. It's because of the pathetic state of his golf game.

What matters is not prudishness — we've left that far behind — but prudence, a sense that public figures should be discouraged from destroying themselves and their families, even if we gawk at the results when they do. And principle: that power is a privilege not to be abused. The cases that involve a lawmaker chasing pages around the cloakroom or a boss cornering a junior employee or a professor pressuring a student for sex all deserve to be taken seriously. And in cases that involve actual violence, they need to be treated like the crimes they are.

— Reported by Bruce Crumley and Jeffrey T. Iverson / Paris; Jeffrey Kluger / New York; and Massimo Calabresi and Katy Steinmetz / Washington

• Nancy Gibbs