IMF former boss: a perverse route to sympathy

The chambermaid accusing Dominique Strauss Kahn of rape has had to beat back reports suggesting that she is HIV positive. The stories’ legs come from claims that she lives in an apartment complex in the Bronx, New York that is reserved for tenants who have HIV.

The media has been desperately trying to paint a picture of DSK’s accuser. From reports, we hear that she successfully won asylum in the USA, from the troubled West African country of Guinea. She is said to be thirty two year old, and mother of a fifteen year old daughter.

Following the usual practice for rape coverage in the US, UK and elsewhere, media outlets have exercised some amount of restraint in dealing with the complainant. Her name and image have been withheld, though not by aberrant operators in the French press. Tabloid preoccupation with obtaining more details about who she is, remains irrepressible. But the HIV angle in reporting goes a little further than just a search for sensational tid bits.

Of course, the matter of whether DSK’s accuser is HIV positive will not help to determine if rape actually took place. And who would worry about DSK, if he did rape her and as a consequence, was at risk of infection?

I am of the view that this HIV storyline reflects the media’s thrashing around, trying to establish a narrative about this woman that they reckon, would be recognisable to the public. The spectre of AIDS and hardship is easily connected with the chambermaid’s West African origin.

In a perverse way, placing the accuser within an Africa-equals- AIDS stereotype, makes her complaint against the ex-IMF chief seem particularly transgressive. Her charge appears far more monstrous, when viewed as a vicious rampage against a possibly infected African woman.

Dominique Strauss Kahn is indeed a monster, if the case against him is proven. But it’s a doggone shame that the media helps with the loss of the complainant’s dignity, by putting together a public profile of her that is based on facile associations between African women and HIV disease. For all the trauma that this must be, it goes everlastingly to her credit that she is prepared to attend at court and give evidence about what she says, happened to her.

Philip Dayle is a reseach fellow at the Runnymede Trust and a freelance writer