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When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator

SO what’s the moral of this Manhattan immorality tale?

That the French are always right, even when their hauteur is irritating?

They were right about Iraq and America’s rush to war. And they may be right about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and America’s rush to judgment.

In both cases, French credibility was undermined, so we resisted seeing things from their point of view.

France tried to block W.’s spun-up attack on Iraq, but we knew that the French government had a history of making special oil deals with Saddam Hussein, and of favoring expediency over principle.

France refused to believe that DSK could force himself on a Sofitel maid, but we knew that French society had a history of shielding powerful and talented men accused of scandalous behavior with young women.

W. created a fake deadline and casus belli on Iraq, but New York prosecutors had a real deadline before Strauss-Kahn flew away to France, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

Seven weeks after DSK, then the chief of the International Monetary Fund, was struck by a coup de théâtre — getting hauled off an Air France plane by the police, who charged him with raping a 32-year-old maid — he basked in a more pleasant coup de théâtre, getting released on his own recognizance. As he left the downtown courtroom, he gave his first public smile and put his arm around Anne Sinclair, his attractive wife, who has financed the high-powered legal team and high-priced TriBeCa detention.

In an exquisitely embarrassing moment for Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, the prosecutors wilted upon learning that their victim had victimized them — repeatedly lying to the government.

To get political asylum in America, the woman, an African immigrant, lied that her husband had died by torture at the hands of police officers and soldiers in Guinea. She told investigators, falsely, that she had been gang-raped there. To get a bigger break on her taxes, she claimed a friend’s child as her own. To impress the grand jury, she said that after the attack by DSK, she had waited in a hall for him to get an elevator before reporting it to her supervisor.

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Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

But as the red-faced apologia filed by the D.A.’s office on Thursday revealed: “The complainant has since admitted that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident to her supervisor.”

She was involved with a drug dealer jailed for possessing 400 pounds of pot; she talked to him about whether she could profit from pursuing charges against DSK, noting that he had a lot of money. Prosecutors say she may have links to people also involved in money laundering.

Law enforcement officials say privately that they still think DSK sexually assaulted the maid. But the case relied on her credibility, and that’s gone.

They say it is roughly analogous — not in terms of the maid’s sexual history but her record of veracity — to a case in which a prostitute is raped. It’s hard to prosecute, and the perp can often get away with it.

The upright-looking Vance is not like the scoundrel prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case. He did not ignore evidence that was contrary to the case prosecutors were trying to build. It just took several weeks, after they tried to deny DSK bail and after they indicted him, to do a thorough investigation.

In France, his Socialist colleagues — and rivals to run for president — defended him. Ségolène Royal howled about how the American justice system had thrown the Socialists’ star to the wolves. Royal’s former partner, François Hollande, said that, once cleared, DSK could still run in the party primary — although he would have to explain his lascivious manner toward the help and his lavish home-arrest lifestyle.

In New York, Kenneth Thompson, the accuser’s lawyer, howled about how the justice system had thrown the maid to the wolves. He said the young Muslim woman was “traumatized” and would speak out on the case.

Her evidence, he said, includes stockings with holes ripped in them, a torn shoulder ligament, a hospital picture of a bruise on her vagina, and the DSK DNA in the room — all, she claims, from the violent attack.

“Until today, it was white versus black, rich versus poor, man versus woman, Jew versus Muslim,” said Elaine Sciolino, a Times correspondent in France and the author of “La Seduction,” assessing the French reaction and the fraying of the Gallic Anita Hill moment. “Now it’s going to be this man who would have been president taken down by this nogoodnik who has a druggie boyfriend in prison and who lied from the moment she tried to get into the United States.”

When a habitual predator faces off against a habitual liar, the liar will most likely lose, even if it is the rare case when she is telling the truth.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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