The Fall of Two Walls

If the arrest on May 14 of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then IMF chief, from aboard an Air France flight about to take off from New York was dramatic, the crumbling of the case against him even before the trial has started is no less dramatic. Both of them revolve around the issue of credibility.

Every day, hundreds of men are arrested in different parts of the world for sexual assault of different degrees. It is, unfortunately, as common as petty theft. When DSK was arrested, however, a global gasp went up. A large number of people who had no access to any evidence other than what was reported in newspapers and on news channels felt that we should accept DSK’s claim about innocence because a rich and powerful man like him, who can get whatever service he wants, would not force himself on a housekeeper in a hotel. The New York police shouldn’t have arrested a man of his eminence on the basis of the testimony of an immigrant worker.

The assumption underlying these sentiments is that rich and powerful people are credible while poor and undereducated people are not. There is a thick wall of credibility shielding the rich and the powerful from serious scrutiny. This apparently is one of the perks of high office or of ‘noble’ birth.

That wall around DSK crumbled on May 14 because the New York police had enough forensic evidence, gathered from the Sofitel hotel room, to take the housekeeper’s allegation of forced sex seriously. Otherwise they wouldn’t have arrested the high-profile accused.

Was the encounter consensual or forced? No one knows apart from DSK and the housekeeper. I will not rush to judge, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, Guilty?

What is interesting for me is the way the wall around the housekeeper is crumbling now. That was a wall of evidence. It is the strength of evidence that gave her the shield of credibility.

That wall is now crumbling not because of any flaw in the original evidence collected by the New York police but because of revelations about the housekeeper. She had lied to the immigration authorities to get asylum in the US. A man jailed in the US had put $100,000 into her bank account during the last couple of years. She was also caught speaking to that man, still in jail, a couple of days after DSK’s arrest about possible financial gains from the case.

It is no longer the stereotype of a poor immigrant woman having no credibility but an accuser who may not be trusted to tell the truth. Of course that some of her actions are questionable does not entitle anyone to force himself on her. But it will be difficult to prove, with hard evidence, whether the encounter she had with DSK in the Sofitel hotel room was consensual or forced.

While even the thickest wall of credibility will crumble against hard evidence, as Rajat Gupta of McKinsey and Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group discovered recently, in all other contexts it acts as a wonderful platform for staging persuasion acts. This credibility should ideally be something that we build and strengthen over a lifetime rather than something that the position we occupy in an organisation bestows on us.