WHAT THE PAPERS SAY: Affaires of state and business

The man who only a few months back was telling Panama how to handle its business affairs, is now in the spotlight  about affaires of his own.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, another much feted prominent visitor, who arrived in Panama with his latest  young conquest on his arm is also facing trial by the courts and public opinion for alleged sexual pecadillos.

Andrew Cockburn, an experienced English journalist living in California wields his acerbic pen to comment in the First Post  on the future of the man who once headed the IMF, hobnobbed with presidents, and while staying in a $3,000 a night hotel suite was planning a run to become the “socialist” party candidate for president of France.

Cockburn writes:

Did a man ever look jauntier than Dominique Strauss-Kahn a month ago, any woman more effervescent than the loyal wife at his side, Anne Sinclair?

The rape charges that had doomed his prospective run for the French presidency were in tatters, shot down by a brutal story in the New York Times, in which two anonymous law enforcement officials said the alleged victim, housekeeper Naufissato Diallo, was a demonstrable liar and that phone taps to a drug dealer friend of hers in prison showed she was chasing a big money settlement.

Hot on the heels of this came a story in the New York Post claiming, on the basis of another anonymous source, that Diallo was a seasoned hooker.

From the office of District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr trickled predictions that soon the charges against DSK would melt away, reduced at most to a misdemeanor. From France came tidings that a renewed DSK presidential challenge might not be far off, once the New York case had been tidied away.

But here we are a month later and, if such a thing were possible, DSK looks even worse than at the moment he was dragged off by the New York cops to Riker's Island, charged with rape.

First, the French writer Tristane Banon reaffirmed her accusations that eight years ago he'd locked the door and jumped her in the course of an interview, that she'd barely fought off a frightening physical assault and that he was like "a rutting chimp".

A brisk war of similes soon followed, when Tristane's mother, Anne Mansouret, was quoted as saying to French police that in 2000, in a voluntary but "clearly brutal" physical engagement with DSK in an OECD office, he'd comported himself like a filthy pig, heedless of all needs but his own, among which the need to "dominate" was paramount.

This was a Wendi Deng-style right hook to DSK's defenders who had claimed the former IMF director couldn't keep his pants zipped but that he wasn't the violent type.

The overall impression that DSK might merit an entry in any update of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis was heightened by news stories saying that Diallo was his third sexual engagement – his lawyers claim the sex with Diallo was "consensual" – in the hours before he quit the New York Sofitel.

Now Diallo has given interviews to Newsweek and ABC, giving what Newsweek's experienced Paris bureau chief Chris Dickey has described on ABC as a "convincing" account of going into DSK's suite, being attacked by a naked man with white hair coming out of the shower, forced to her knees with his penis shoved into her mouth, then spitting out the ejaculate on the carpet where it was later collected along with her saliva by the cops establishing the DNA traces.

I've always thought Diallo's lawyers had done her no favours by keeping her under wraps. Diallo is a homely looking, vigorous 32-year old West African woman with an ample bust, which is probably what caught DSK's eye. If they'd introduced her to the public back at the start of the case, it would have been harder to trash her in the New York Times interview.

It now turns out that certain charges during the demolition job on Diallo were entirely false. Perhaps most damaging was the accusation in the New York Times that seconds after the traumatic experience of assault by DSK she went back to cleaning another room on the same floor. Not so. It seems Diallo's room key was hooked to a computer record which showed that she returned to the other room only to retrieve her cart, which she'd left while trying to establish whether DSK had checked out and his suite was ready to clean.

The charges by Murdoch's New York Post about Diallo being a hooker seem equally tendentious, doled out by DSK's defence team, with zero substantiating evidence.

DA Vance is now in a tricky position. Propelled into his post by big liberal money, he raced to throw the book at the alleged rapist DSK, imposing savage demands for bail conditions. Then, when Diallo was caught telling a few fibs to US asylum officials, to boost her chances of legal status in the US, one of two things happened.

Either Vance panicked and gave the green light for the leaks to the New York Times, or – perhaps more likely – enemies in his office or in the New York police decided to cut the ground from under him and leaked a highly prejudicial story against Diallo to the Times.

Diallo was left to sink into obscurity as a liar and potential blackmailer. The only hand left for her lawyers to play was to go public, and thus far the strategy has been devastating to DSK. Now it's all up to Vance. If he allows DSK to escape with a misdemeanor charge, he'll forever be discredited among not only the big liberal backers who paid for his run to be DA, but also popular constituencies in New York who will be important for his future political career, whether as DA or beyond.

On the other hand, if he presses a full-down attempted rape case against DSK he'll go into the courtroom with a witness whose record of truth-telling is – however understandably – less than 100 per cent.

DSK's wife, the enormously rich Anne Sinclair, drew a parallel between her husband's travails and the Dreyfus affair – DSK is Jewish – which is silly. Is a case that convulsed France for years really to be compared to DSK's case? Are there intimations of anti-semitism? The answer is no, but the case is still alive – and there's no reason to suppose that a New York jury – assuming Vance goes that route – would have any compunction in handing down a guilty verdict to DSK.

The next hearing is three weeks away, on August 23. Then we'll see what sort of steel is in Vance's spine.