The hotel's atmosphere and cleaning practices likely would not have prohibited the French politician from entrapping a maid within his room
Rob Young/flickr
I'm not sure whether the coincidence of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape allegations with the tabloid tale of Arnold Schwarzenegger's out-of-wedlock child was good luck or bad for Schwarzenegger. His decade-old escapade could either be eclipsed or exaggerated by the serious criminal charges against another reputed womanizer. But it wouldn't be hard to confuse the harassment allegations leveled against Schwarzenegger in the run up to his 2003 gubernatorial election with the rumors now surfacing about Strauss-Kahn's history with women. I don't take any of the rumors or formal and informal accusations at face value, but the confluence of these stories does indicate the thin line between evading a criminal sexual assault charge and incurring one. It's apt to be crossed when the alleged victim has little or nothing to lose by going public with an accusation.
Oddly enough, this means that a professional woman, embarking on or engaged in a high-status career, may be less likely to report an alleged assault by a powerful male than a woman with few professional opportunities or aspirations. Ambitious women sometimes refrain from reporting harassment by a persistent male superior for the same reasons that they sometimes give in to it. The young journalist who now claims she was assaulted by Strauss-Kahn in 2002 explains that she didn't air her accusation initially partly for fear of being professionally stigmatized by it.