I define O.J. Simpson syndrome as what happens when a beloved celebrity does something so horrible that the only response fans can have without destroying their own psyche is to claim, "It must have been a set up!"
Apparently France had it bad for Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the man who would be President of France but for rape charges he faces in NYC. A recent poll found that 57% of the French believe DSK was the victim of a plot. DSK is a socialist politician and among socialist voters that percentage was 70%.
Socialists are required to believe a lot of things that aren't true. DSK sought to innoculate himself against sex crime charges in the lead-up to the French Presidential election he was expected to win. French journalist Antoine Guiral remembers DSK predicting one possible line of political attack against him being "a woman raped in a parking lot who has been promised five hundred thousand or a million euros to invent such a story."
Is it wrong to conclude, knowing what has been alleged in NYC, that DSK may have previously raped someone in a parking lot?
Rumors have swirled concerning Carmen Llera, a Spanish author whose poetry about a sadistic lover some have assumed to refer to DSK, but she denies it all:
After days of silence I am writing to you, it is a mistake to use my book Gaston, which is pure fiction, to illustrate a real event, Gaston has nothing to do with Dominique Strauss-Kahn who I have known for many years.
I have never been one of his victims as has been written, he is not a primitive, cruel, sadistic man, violence is not part of his culture, he likes sex (so what?) that is not a crime, sometimes bodies can express more than words.
But I do not wish to be literary at this moment because literature does not save anyone, it won't save him and it won't save me.
I have no idea what happened in the suite at the Sofitel, probably there was a consensual relationship, but I would exclude sexual violence, I would not want Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be a made a scapegoat for American, anti-European, or anti-French puritanism.
So no idea what happened but probably there was consent and certainly there was no violence. And what does she need to be saved from when she says "it won't save me". Association with a rapist wrecks havoc with one's self-image, whether you are a Spanish poetess or the French public.