Some thoughts on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal

Say you are a 32-year old maid working at a swank hotel in New York city, the kind where suites cost $3000 a night. It's just an ordinary day and you knock on a suite sometime around noon for cleaning. You wait but no one responds. Naturally you use your master key to enter.

Let us pose a few scenarios to try to guess what happens next:

A) The guest is out having lunch at a fancy place. You clean up and move to other rooms.
B) The guest is in the balcony enjoying the sights and sounds. You murmur a soft apology for barging in, but the guest heartily tells you it's OK. You clean up and move to other rooms.
C) The guest rushes toward you in his birthday suit from the bathroom and manhandles you. You bravely fight his aggressive overtures and overcome the shock of seeing his 62-year body in the birthday suit and report him.

If you answered C) you deserve a Klondike bar. This is, mas o menos, what happened with international banker and potential French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn yesterday, according to the hotel maid (whose identity has not been disclosed, wisely).

Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is commonly known, is was the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global monetary institute that sort of helps out developing countries with loans and stuff.

According to the official version of the events, DSK fled the upscale hotel in haste and boarded an Air France flight from JFK to Paris. Meanwhile, the maid complained about the sexual assault and New York's  finest got to work. Since the airport is under the jurisdiction of an entity called the New Jersey and New York Port Authority, they were notified about the incident by the Special Victims Unit (yeah, the one whose exploits have been all over the Law and Order TV show).  

By this time DSK was sitting in first class waiting for the jet to depart. Port Authority badasses boarded the plane and took him away for questioning. TEN MINUTES before it was scheduled to take off. Within four hours of the alleged incident happening, DSK was chillin' in a Manhattan holding cell, awaiting a police lineup (where he was subsequently identified by his accuser), a string of medical tests, and eventual arraignment in court.

DSK on the walk of shame. Note the dude in the back smirking [nytimes.com]

As of this writing, he was denied bail by the judge. He has been charged with rape and other serious crimes. His lawyer is some hotshot who represented noted gun idiot Plaxico Burress and P. Diddy. CNN tells me he has also represented mafiosos Vincent "The Chin" Chingate and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. Yeah, a character straight outta John Grisham novels, this one.