Dominique Strauss-Kahn indicted on 7 counts of sexual assault

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, is arraigned Monday, May 16, 2011, in Manhattan …Officials on Thursday formally indicted banker and diplomat Dominique Strauss-Kahn on seven counts of sexual assault on a hotel maid. (You can read the indictment here.) Bail was set at $1 million, and he will be "confined to a New York City residence, where he will be monitored round the clock by a private security firm and an electronic bracelet," ABC News reported. He had been in isolation and on suicide watch at New York's Riker's Island jail.

"We can't think of conditions more restrictive," said his lawyer, William Taylor.

When the reports came in earlier this week, it sounded like a dramatic episode of "Mad Men"-or maybe "Law and Order: SVU." A maid arrives to clean a luxury hotel suite, thinking that it's unoccupied, and the guest-the powerful head of a global financial giant-emerges from the bathroom naked. His nickname is "The Great Seducer," based on his decades-long reputation with women. He chases her through the suite, pulling her into a bedroom. She resists. There's a struggle, and she breaks free. He chases her, catches her, and drags her into a bathroom, where he forces her to perform oral sex on him and tries to remove her underwear. She manages to escape. He checks out of the hotel in a hurry, leaving his cell phone behind.

But this is real life, not a TV drama. On Saturday, French-born Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a possible presidential candidate for France's Socialist party, was pulled off of a Paris-bound plane minutes before takeoff and charged with criminal sexual contact, unlawful imprisonment, and attempted rape, the Associated Press reported. The victim: A 32-year-old maid, who had arrived to clean his $3,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square in New York. She picked him out of a police lineup before going to a hospital for a "forensic examination" requested by the prosecutors of the case; Strauss-Kahn was denied bail and will remain in jail at least until his next hearing, according to NPR.

On Wednesday, Strauss-Kahn resigned as the managing director of the International Monetary fund, saying that he needed to focus on clearing his name, the Associated Press reported. Supporters have suggested that Saturday's incident was a set-up, but New York Assistant District Attorney John "Artie" McConnell said that a grand jury had enough evidence for an indictment. "The proof against him is substantial," McConnell said Thursday. "It is continuing to grow every day as the investigation continues."
This isn't the first time the married father of four, whose nickname really is "The Great Seducer," has been accused of sexual assault. "Yes, I love women ... so what?" he said in an interview with the French publication Liberation, explaining that the three issues that could come up if he ran for president would probably be "The money, women and my Jewishness."

One lawmaker alleged that Strauss-Kahn has been involved with several other maids during past stays at the same New York hotel, though no evidence was offered. In 2008, he was under investigation for abuse of power when his affair with a subordinate at the IMF came to light; the affair was found to have been consensual, but admitted that he had made "an error in judgment on my part, for which I take full responsibility" and his wife Anne Sinclair, a French journalist, called the affair "a one-night stand." Today 31-year-old novelist Tristane Banon said that she was sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn nine years ago, but was urged to keep quiet by her mother, who is an official the Strauss-Kahn's political party. Her lawyer says that she is coming forward after all this time because "she knows she'll be heard and she knows she'll be taken seriously."

But whether she'll be taken seriously is up for debate. At a time where women are challenging society's idea of the feminine ideal, organizing "SlutWalks" and standing up against rape and sexual harassment, Hollywood is wooing men by harkening back to less complicated, less-empowered times.

Hitching a ride on the success of AMC's "Mad Men," which highlights the misogyny in 1960s corporate culture, NBC is set to launch "The Playboy Club," set in Chicago in the '60s. "In one scene, naked bunnies cavort in the pool with 'men watching them as if at Sea World, only much, much better'," Maureen Dowd writes in The New York Times. ABC has "Pan Am," also set in the 1960s, when sleeping with a pilot was the fast track to first class, and stewardesses had to meet weight requirements, wear tight-fitting outfits, and quit if they got married or turned 32. And E! still has "The Girls Next Door," a behind-the-scenes look at life for Hugh Hefner's live-in bunnies, though there's something distinctly uncomfortable about watching blonde 20-somethings wiggle around for an octogenarian wearing silk pajamas.

Of course, none of the shows glorify sexual harassment, per se. What they glorify is the idea that power and sex go hand-in-hand-and degrading women is one way to satisfy both desires.

"It's a hot fudge sundae for men: a time when women were not allowed to get uppity or make demands," one Hollywood producer told Dowd. "If the woman got pregnant, she had to drive to a back-alley abortionist in New Jersey. If you got tired of women, they had to go away. Women today don't go away."

If we look longingly at a time when sexual harassment was simply par for the course, is it any wonder that powerful person would assume he had a right to make a maid do whatever he wanted?

Strauss-Kahn's lawyers say that he has an alibi: He checked out half an hour before the attack allegedly took place, they said, and was having lunch with his daughter, a graduate student at Columbia University. But a spokesman for the New York Police Department says that the attacks took place earlier than they initially thought, putting Strauss-Kahn squarely at the scene of the crime. And he really did leave his cell phone behind. "It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," police spokesman Paul J. Browne told reporters.





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• 5 things Brett Favre should know about sexual harassment
• Sexual violence on college campuses: Vice President Biden weighs in
• "Mad Men" women: Two kinds of office power, neither respected