More on Twists in Strauss-Kahn Story: New York Tabloid Calls DSK Accuser a Hooker

Later the same day: I've just now seen this posting by Lauren Kelly at the Alternet site, about an article in New York Post smearing the maid at Sofitel Hotel who reported that Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to assault her.  The Post is evidently carrying a headline calling Strauss-Kahn's accuser a hooker.

I have no idea how this he-said, she-said saga involving an extremely powerful man and a relatively powerless woman of color is going to turn out in the end.  I haven't really been interested in following it, for a variety of reasons.  Perhaps chief among those is the fact that I grew up in a society in which white men felt perfectly entitled to rape black women just about anytime they wanted to do so, with sickening impunity.  I don't need reminders of that ugly part of my own American history.

And I keep an open mind regarding the he-said, she-said allegations, and the possibility that the woman making these accusations may, in fact, not be telling the truth.  I have nothing at all invested in proving him right and her wrong, or vice versa.

Still.  As I said in response to a comment at my posting earlier today, it's long since time for male structures of power and authority to stop automatically attacking any woman who accuses any man of rape--but especially a woman of little power who makes such accusations against a powerful man--of lying.  

And of being a whore.  And of having wanted to be raped.  And of being out for money.

These male-entitled patriarchal power games discounting and slandering any woman who dares to speak out against sexual abuse play into the Catholic clerical abuse crisis, insofar as that crisis also involves stories told by women about their abuse by Catholic clerics.  

It's time for this to stop.  It's time for the reflex, fist-in-the-woman's-eye response of the boys' clubs to stop.  Especially in the old boys' club of Catholic clerical life, where it's unseemly in the extreme.

The graphic is blogger jerm IX's  response at the Ulamonge blog site to a series of violent attacks in Vancouver last year, which were attributed to racist and homophobic motives.