The other night I watched the Netflix documentary on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or, as he is widely known in the press, DSK.
Room 28016: The Accusation is a four-episode series. It was released in early December and reconstructs the sexual scandals that led to the French politician’s fall from grace in 2011, when he was the head of the IMF and the preferred Socialist candidate to challenge centre-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in his country’s upcoming presidential election.
The central theme of the documentary is, as its title suggests, the accusation of sexual assault he faced from a cleaner at the Sofitel hotel in New York by the name of Nafissatou Diallo. A single mother immigrant from Guinea, Diallo reported DSK to the police on 14 May 2011. She maintains until today that the then IMF boss violently forced her to the ground while touching her private parts, and put his penis in her mouth, after she had entered his room to clean it.
Following the incident, DSK left the hotel for the airport, where he was arrested while waiting to board the flight to France that he had booked long before the encounter with the cleaner.
Except for the repeated appearance of a self-righteous Le Monde journalist without any first-hand knowledge of the case, and who is annoyingly hostile to DSK, the documentary presents an impeccably rigorous and balanced account of the events that led to the prosecution dropping charges against DSK due to lack of evidence.
The facts are presented by a thorough array of relevant voices whose testimonies are not deformed by the use of sentimental music or disingenuous choices of footage. Only DSK, who declined to participate, is missing from the list of protagonists featured in the film, and we get a complete picture of the events listening to Diallo herself, her lawyers, the prosecutors, the hotel security personnel, close friends of DSK and fellow French politicians.
Gravely undermined
Through them we find out that DSK did not deny that sexual intercourse occurred, but claimed it had been consensual; that there was no evidence other than Diallo’s testimony to secure a conviction; and that her credibility was gravely undermined after the prosecutors discovered that, in order to get asylum in the US, she had lied about being gang-raped by soldiers in Guinea. Given the circumstances, the court agreed that there were no reasonable prospects of proving DSK’s guilt, so he walked free amid a major backlash that is well covered in the film as well.
For the first three episodes, which focus on the Sofitel accusation, the documentary is surprisingly fair for a production by a platform such as Netflix, with its long history of ‘me too’ activism bias. At the end of the third episode, the viewer is left with a clear idea of the facts that can be objectively established. No conclusion on whether Diallo was telling the truth or on whether the court did the right thing dropping the charges, is forced on the spectator.
But things change dramatically in the last episode. The testimony of Tristane Banon, a young French journalist and writer who had accused DSK of attempting to rape her in 2002, gains relevance in this segment of the series. Citing lack of evidence, prosecutors dropped their investigation into the journalist’s accusation in 2011, a detail that does not seem in the least to rattle the filmmakers’ faith in Banon’s testimony.
Most importantly, in the fourth episode we are introduced to a former sex worker with whom DSK had sex. Her heartfelt testimony takes centre stage, the drama reinforced with tearful music.
Malicious way
The malicious way in which DSK is judged in the final episode of the series is particularly clear from the testimony of the former sex worker, who is identified as Mounia R. She starts by describing the family environment of her childhood that pushed her into sex work at 17 years of age and goes on to recall her encounter as an adult sex professional with DSK as a traumatic situation in which she accepted things that disgusted her. Had she said no, she says, she would not have been paid.
As DSK’s lawyer in that case points out in that same part of the series, nothing in Mounia R’s account suggests that his client forced her to do anything she objected to. She seems to reproach DSK for enjoying the practices that so much repelled her. But isn’t that often the nature of sex work, and, for that matter, of most types of work?
Mounia R was one of the girls DSK’s aides used to recruit for his orgies, a practice for which he was to be charged in 2013 for “aggravated proxenetism” in a trial that concluded two years later with his acquittal. As DSK’s lawyer said in the series, his client had been put on trial for paying for sex, which is not a criminal offence in France.
The filmmakers who had so impartially laid out every aspect of the events covered in the first parts of the film were now openly siding with the accusers. Rather than playing in favour of DSK, the fact that he was acquitted and prosecutors dropped charges in all three cases is presented as a sign of how unfair the justice system can be towards victims. It is as if DSK’s undeniable sexual voracity, added to the accumulation of testimonies against him, were enough to condemn him as a serial rapist deserving social repudiation and punishment.
Moral judgement
In contrast to the courts of justice in the US and France, which decided on facts and potentially criminal conduct, the Netflix documentary makes a moral judgement of DSK. It is evident from what we see in the first three episodes that the authors of the series are capable of balance and have a sense of fairness. But the temptation to berate someone they find non-virtuous seems to be stronger.
In the end, Room 28016 unjustly assumes as a proven reality that DSK is not only an adulterous man with intense sexual habits most people would consider extreme, but also a dangerous maniac who should be removed from society; one incapable of respect for the free will of women.
Before Diallo and those who support her are exclusively given the floor by way of conclusion, the documentary reproduces an interview DSK gave to CNN journalist Richard Quest in which the following exchange takes place:
Quest: “Dominique Strauss-Kahn clearly has a problem with women.’
Strauss-Kahn: “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I have any kind of problem with women. I only have a problem with understanding [that] what is expected from a politician of the highest level is different from what Mr Smith in the street can do.”
One of DSK’s lawyers, Richard Malka, earlier says of the practices for which his client faced proxenetism charges: “We are not always admirable from sun-up to sundown. Sometimes we slip, sometimes we lie, sometimes we cheat. It’s human nature. We have to accept that. You can expect all the morality you want from public figures. If you are unhappy about something don’t vote for him. But it’s not a criminal act. That’s something else.”
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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