French Media Discuss Strauss-Kahn Accuser's "Beautiful Buttocks"

In addition to naming her, French media outlets are now revealing a variety of personal details about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser — and evaluating her attractiveness.

Slate.fr published the accuser’s name yesterday, and co-founder Eric Leser defended the decision thus:

We have done this just [to stop] the conspiracy theory in France about this case and to stop the false accusation against the victim that she’s doing [this] for money or she’s a prostitute and things like that. The story that we have published is proving that all of [these] theories are false. That’s our main reason.

This is pretty unconvincing, but a number of other papers have followed suit — and some have gone further. Both Le Figaro and Paris Match have named her teenage daughter. A number of English and French-language websites are posting what they claim is a picture of the accuser, but in at least one case the photos appear to be taken from the Facebook account of a woman who is probably not her — this woman lists herself as being from Cameroon, not Guinea, and says she works as a real estate broker.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Paris Match quotes a number of sources evaluating her hotness. The paper claims that DSK’s lawyers have called her “very unattractive,” but that a source told Europe 1 she was “very pretty.” And a taxi driver allegedly says she has “big boobs and beautiful buttocks.”

Heather Horn of the Atlantic Wire has already pointed out how incongruous it is that French law bans photos of accused parties in handcuffs, but French papers cheerfully publish alleged victims’ names. Maybe some people buy Slate.fr’s argument that naming her was necessary to disprove conspiracy theories, but surely nobody could argue that discussion of her “buttocks” proves anything — except that plenty of people consider an alleged assault victim a fair subject for a game of hot-or-not.