Here's the latest rumor on Strauss-Kahn's planned defense. Note it is completely unsourced. An opposition leak? Le Monde reports Sarkozy allies tried to get them to publish damaging stories about DSK's womanizing three times in recent months. It refused.
I don't think the defense will choose a final strategy until its investigation is complete. The DNA may establish contact between the two, but it may shed no light on whether there was a forcible encounter. The defense will go where the evidence leads them, or with reasonable doubt the encounter was forcible. If there's no evidence of a set-up by an opposition group that co-opted the maid, and nothing in her background to suggest she'd engage in sex for money on her own, I doubt the defense will raise that.
Remember William Kennedy Smith? It took the jury one hour to acquit him.
Smith testified that the sex was consensual. He said he "felt sorry" for his accuser and acknowledged it was "foolish and irresponsible" for him to have unprotected sex with a woman he barely knew, but said she was equally foolish. Jurors took about an hour to acquit him.
As his attorney, Roy Black said yesterday:
"That's always the classic claim, that you're blaming the victim, but that's said by people who don't understand," Smith's lawyer, Roy Black, said in an interview Tuesday. "The victim may not be on trial, but her testimony, her accusation, is on trial."
One thing Dominique Strauss-Kahn needs to do is let his lawyers take the rein. When Michael Jackson and his team tried to take control of the strategy in his child molestation case, Mark Geragos and Ben Brafman withdrew. While Jackson was later acquitted -- Tom Mesereau tried the case -- there's still a misperception that when a prominent lawyer withdraws from a high profile case, it has something to do with the weakness of the defense case.
