York City mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed it was humiliating, but defended the practice, stating: "If you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that." New York novelist Jay McInerney observed, "The mayor seems to have forgotten about the presumption of innocence, but his statement probably reflects the attitude of his constituents pretty accurately. New York's a tough place. Deal with it." Seven weeks later, when doubts about the accuser's credibility made it unlikely the case would be tried, Bloomberg reversed position, stating: "I've always thought perp walks were outrageous ... [W]e vilify them for the benefit of theater, for the circus. You know they did it in Roman times, too." American-born British journalist Janet Daley remarked that the uproar in the French media over Strauss-Kahn's treatment missed the point about America's robustly open society: "The U.S. does not like secrets. Its political culture takes as a basic premise that nothing should take place out of the public view except the most critical life-or-death security matters ... And it certainly has no privacy law of the kind that has protected the great and powerful in France for generations." A paper by Israeli researcher Sandrine Boudana two years later analyzed responses to the Strauss-Kahn perp walk in French and American print media within the context of the countries' respective cultures. While the predominant theme was French media condemning the practice and American media defending it, commentators on both sides took the occasion to reflect inwardly. Some American writers said the French had a point, and French writers in turn noted the difficulty of enforcing the Guigou law in an era where technology cannot prevent the images it forbids from being viewed in France when published overseas. Others noted that the incident also showed the pitfalls of the French media's practice of not reporting on the private lives of politicians, noting that rape allegations had been raised earlier about Strauss-Kahn on a French talk show with no media followup. Responses and defenses John Tierney says that without the perp walk, reporters "would start buying old snapshots and home videos from disgruntled relatives and neighbors" and use them to depict the defendant, and those images might be more invasive and prejudicial. Some broader social benefits have been suggested, in particular transparency. The perp walk allows the police to demonstrate that they did