Outreau à l’outrance -- and Clinton

 American readers:   Before reading further -- what does “the Outreau affair” mean to you?

And:  What was the essence of Bill Clinton’s offense?

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Much of France has come to the conclusion that, whatever his faults otherwise, DSK was ensnared in a case that has been poisoned by the lies of a woman, and blown into outrage by the excesses of the American judicial system.

Whatever your opinion of this tarnished kettle, it turns out the pot has even darker such blotches of its own.

An op-ed piece by Sylvie Kauffmann in today’s NYTimes  sumarizes the matter  thus:

The infamous Outreau case involving false accusations of child abuse in France went much farther than the Strauss-Kahn affair. The prosecution did not reverse itself even when the main accuser, Myriam Badaoui, retracted her testimony. The accused were convicted, and were only exonerated on appeal.

Now, I did not know this.   I vaguely recalled some francophone case by that name, though I thought it had occurred in Belgium.   The sum-total impression was:  it was some kind of child sex thing, and the perps were guilty as sin.  -- And this, indeed, is the typical residue left by all such accusations, whatever the actual truth may have been.  (Remember those infamous lacrosse players from Duke, who kidnapped a black choir-girl and gang-raped her on an altar while reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards?  -- What, oh, you say it didn’t happen quite like that?)

Further:  The Outreau trial was held in huis clos -- entirely behind closed doors. Several people spent years behind bars; one died in prison, a possible suicide, before he could be exonerated.

For further details, consult the French account in Wikipedia;  the English is lacunary, and seems to have been clumsily translated from some French source (“Due to the ampler of his power abuses by pronouncing guilty 17 innocents to jail, Fabrice Burgaud is legitimately a Criminel d'État”).

8 Nov 2011 -- Update to the Outreau case:

Myriam Badaoui, “cette mère incestueuse  très corpulente  de quatre enfants  avait été condamnée pour les viols de sept enfants, pour des agressions sexuelles sur dix enfants, ainsi que pour proxénétisme sur ses quatre fils et corruption de onze enfants,” has been set free.

 

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Bye the bye… That op-ed piece perpetuates a falsehood -- and not a little one -- already retailed and retold tens of thousands of times.   Since I have never seen anyone refute this in print, I shall do so here.

Quoting again from the op-ed:

What got Bill Clinton in trouble was not his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, but that he lied when he insisted that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Perjury is a serious offense in the United States.

This is typical.    The rhetorical stance is (this being the New York Times): 

(1) We are all so broad-minded here, it wasn’t the sex, cough cough, no-o-o no …
[dbj: --  Bushwah.  What got him in trouble with the masses of Americans was precisely his relation with the intern, and everyone knows it.  (What got him in trouble with the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, as Hillary accurately described it,  which had been laying for him long before that, setting their traps, is another matter entirely.)]

(2) Uncontested fact, like two-plus-two:  Clinton committed perjury when he said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

(3)  Tut-TUT !  We tried to be broad-minded, sirrahhh, but in view of your perjury (vide (2)) -- your blatant, your bald-faced, your shaaameless perjury --  reahlly, this is too utterly too much, ahem ahem, -- Perjury is a serious offense -- seeahrious, mind you! -- heah in these United States.  It may not be a serious offense where you come from, m'wog, but here in these United States, b’golly b’dad.  You could’ve been locked up, y’know.  Lucky to have gotten off with just an impeachment, humph humph, pass the brandy.

(I pause briefly to vomit.)

Now:   

(1) and (3) are standard-issue hypocrite suckup balderdash;  ‘nuff said.   But (2), the crux of the whole rhetorical gambit, and the supposedly factual basis on which Clinton has been widely and piously condemned, requires a look.  (And this is the part that, to my knowledge, no-one has ever commented on.)

The definition of sexual relations (I set this in boldface, in the manner of headwords), in the standard Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (recognized as authoritative in many a courtroom), at the time of the Lewinsky affair (I don’t know how the definition may have been revised since, possibly indeed in reaction to the widespread misinterpretation of the phrase -- ignorant on the part of the public, wilful in the case of Clinton’s lawyerly detractors), was -- I quote in its entirety, omitting nothing -- :  sexual intercourse.   The phrase “sexual intercourse” was set in small-caps, which is used (I know this, I once worked there) for a “synonymous cross-reference”.  That is to say, the two phrases, headword and gloss, mean the same.  The small-caps x-ref does not merely approximate the meaning of the definiendum, as most definitions do;  the two phrases  are, rather, synonyms.

Now, neither sexual relations nor sexual intercourse are nonce collocations of adjective and noun, whose sense directly reflects the component lexemes.  Rather, they are set phrases -- “lexicalized”, as we say in the trade;  which is why they, unlike (say) sexual dissatisfaction or parent-teacher relations, are entered as headwords in dictionaries.   These terms, then, do not denote just any relations between the genders, nor just any “intercourse” (in the original sense of the term, which originally just meant ‘relations’).  They both equally mean:  copulation; doing it; going all the way.   And this, indeed, Clinton and Lewinsky never did; nor has anyone ever contested that.  In other words, when Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, he spoke the literal truth.   A fortiori, he did not lie (I say “a fortiori” because, for something to quality as a lie, more than mere falsehood is required).  And in particular, he did not thus commit perjury (again, to qualify as perjury, something more than telling a lie is required).

I mailed this analysis to the White House at the time.  They did not avail themselves of this reasoning;  perhaps surmising -- probably correctly -- that the puritans/feminists/right-wingers  had by that point worked themselves up into such a lather, that any defence along these blandly factual lines  would lead merely to further foaming among the Boeotians.