French Brooklyn still hasn't quite made sense of D.S.K.
Bar Tabac, Smith Street, Brooklyn. Photo by beigeinside via flickr.
8:23 am Jun. 7, 2011
Yesterday, while ex-International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was pleading not guilty to charges he sexually assaulted a Sofitel hotel employee, French expats in New York's most Frenchified neighborhood—a swath of bucolic streets that make up Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens known to some of its residents, semi-seriously, as Little Paris—were calling l'affaire D.S.K. infuriating, sad and even "comique."
A pair of French mothers dropping off their children at P.S. 58's French immersion program were somewhat philosophical about the incident.
"The American press judged immediately," said Magali Selosse, a 34-year-old producer, who stood in front of her children's school by her dark grey Mini Cooper and mused about the morning proceedings. "But D.S.K. has been a pervert for years. And unfortunately for him he did what he did in the U.S., where the police don't kid about this stuff. It's a very serious matter here when a woman starts making sexual accusations."
"In a perfect world there is a balance," said her friend and compatriot Natasha Aubier-Hatch, a set designer and mother of two. "The French are much more open about sex than Americans. We're more comfortable with our bodies. We are more liberated. Then something like this happens. And the discussion in France is: Did he get treated unfairly?"
Deeply entrenched in the culture of their mother country, but choosing to raise their children here, these French Brooklynites say the arrest and trial has been an eye-opening opportunity to watch France's laissez-faire sexual mores brush up against an American legal system that is harsher to the accused and more protective of the rights of alleged victims of sex crimes.
"France is a macho world run by a very bourgeois elite that tends to romanticize things that are not romantic at all," said Selosse, before getting in her car and heading off to work.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest was a seismic news event for French New Yorkers, and it remains at the forefront of the conversation in this pocket of Brooklyn. Recently, the French consulate estimated that along with Park Slope and the Gowanus area, there were more than 3,000 French expats residing in this area of the borough, where a disproportionate number of French cafés, bakeries, restaurants, bars, day-care centers and schools with French immersion programs have set up shop.
Yesterday morning, while serving up crêpes and café-au-lait, Leslie Bernat said the scandal had taken its toll on her Smith Street restaurant Provence en Boite, which is decorated with provincial tablecloths, Haribo candy and bottles of cider, pastis and flavored sodas.
"The first week, oh my god, it was so embarrassing," she said. "It's a bad image, this image of a rapist. People tend to generalize."
Bernat said last weekend's slow-down was probably due to Memorial Day. But she couldn't help but worry that perhaps it was actually the D.S.K. scandal keeping customers away.
Whether she was imagining the impact or not, she said she was disturbed by the way the D.S.K. trial was playing out in the New York press.
"In France, it's innocent until proven guilty," she said. "Here's, it's guilty until proven innocent."
Down the street, at Marquet Patisserie, a small, often crowded bakery on Court Street where pains-au-chocolat and homemade cherry tarts are the big sellers, manager Laurent Sorel, a Lyon native, was more resolved, mostly about what didn't happen. Why, he wondered, would a man who was regularly serviced by prostitutes stoop this low?
"He himself can pay for whatever he wants," Sorel said. "I don't think he'd rape a maid. He's a power man. He's not a criminal. He's got the money to pay for these things."
The American obsession with sex scandals, Sorel said, is puritanical and nonsensical.
"The story about Bill Clinton, we were laughing about it," he said. "If he had been caught in France, you would have heard nothing about it."
Until recently, the French have maintained a very limited interest in the private lives of their political leaders. At the end of his presidency, it was discovered that former President François Mitterand had led a double life for years, fathering and raising a daughter whom he had kept with her mother in a Paris apartment which the government had paid for. There was little public outcry.
The Strauss-Kahn case has proven more vexing, though, because what he is alleged to have done is not a victimless crime.
Selosse and Aubier-Hatch, the P.S. 58 mothers, said that knowing a politician paid for sex was of little concern to them, and that in fact it seemed like a fair, honest exchange. But that was one reason why the D.S.K. scandal has so worried them.
"Everyone knows D.S.K. is into sex," said Selosse. "He has fun doing whatever he does behind closed doors and no one cares. But this is different. And we have had a long conversation among our friends about the victim. [Apparently] all she was saying was: ‘I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to lose my job.' Obviously, he didn't care."
Selosse was deeply critical of what she says happens to most alleged victims of sex crimes in France. "Immediately, the questions are: ‘Was she wearing a mini skirt? What did she do? It makes you realize how small women can be in France."
On this note, Selosse and others say the D.S.K. incident has exposed the country's frequent inability to differentiate between the workings of a charming "friend of women"—which is how esteemed French philosopher Henri Bernard Levy recently referred to his long-time buddy Strauss Kahn—and actual sexual harassment and assault.
Monday, as the day wore on and TV coverage of the short D.S.K. court proceeding yielded to local news, a waitress and a manager at Bar Tabac, another French-owned eatery in Cobble Hill, smiled wryly when asked about the scandal.
"If you lie, eventually you get caught," said the manager, Carole Rencoit, who is from the south of France. "It's comic. For me, it's like he's the typical French guy. He's used to doing this and then he gets caught."
Rencoit said whatever happened, she believes it was entirely possible Strauss-Kahn was set up by his political foes, even someone here in the United States.
Still, she and others say, from a political perspective, the incident has ramifications that go far beyond Strauss-Kahn's battered image.
"He had a great chance to beat Sarkozy," said Jean François Fraysse, the owner of the Court Street restaurant Quercy. "So, I'm really not happy about this."
