Strauss-Kahn’s friends to maid’s family: How much cash will it take to shut that impoverished little mouth of hers?

Allegedly.

“They already talked with her family,” a French businesswoman with close ties to Strauss-Kahn and his family told The Post. “For sure, it’s going to end up on a quiet note.”…

“He’ll get out of it and will fly back to France. He won’t spend time in jail. The woman will get a lot of money,” said the source, adding that a seven-figure sum has been bandied about.

While the DA’s office has sequestered the maid — and is even monitoring her phone calls — her extended family lives in a village [in Guinea] that lacks paved roads, electricity and phone lines.

The average monthly income is $45, which is near-starvation, and some of her family members can’t even afford shoes…

The DA’s office has warned local family members not to accept calls from associates of Strauss-Kahn. Even without the maid’s testimony, however, prosecutors claim they have plenty of damning evidence to prosecute Strauss-Kahn, including her videotaped statement, grand-jury testimony, statements from fellow hotel employees and semen samples found on the hotel room carpet.

In other words, his cronies want to transform an accusation of rape into prostitution after the fact by using the victim’s own grinding poverty against her. Actually, no, even worse — essentially, they’re trying to turn a crime of alleged sexual assault into some sort of strict liability tort where your decision as to whether to injure another party depends mainly on your ability to pay the requisite damages. If you’ve got money to burn and your victim (or victims?) has a family that’s desperately in need of basic necessities, why not go ahead and, er, “seduce” her and then work out a settlement afterward? The poorer party gets some financial comfort and the richer party gets to maintain his droit de seigneur. I’m kicking myself for not guessing that this would happen in yesterday’s post, in fact. It’s the logical filthy outcome of the filthy power dynamics of this case.

But then, according to open-shirted philosophe Bernard-Henri Levy, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

I maintain that those who are surprised that one doesn’t take the side of the “poor, immigrant woman” as a matter of principle against the “rich and arrogant white man” who supposedly has raped her are reinventing a kind of class justice in reverse. It’s no longer, as before, “poor bastards, the rich are always right” but “rich bastards, the word of the poor is sacred.” This prejudice is as disgusting, no more, no less, than the precedent, and this reversal recalls—at least in France—the notorious affair of Bruay-en-Artois of the early ‘70s, when, because he was a bourgeois, a notary was decreed guilty of a crime, one which, it was later determined, once the winds of hysteria had died down and his existence was already a shambles, he had not, in reality, committed. And thinking about it makes a shiver go down one’s spine.

Really? This is just prejudice against the rich, even though (a) sources are telling the Post that DSK’s associates are throwing millions at the victim to buy her silence and (b) the goddaughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife has since come forward to accuse him of attempted rape too? Isn’t it strange how “reverse class justice” seems to focus specifically on this one guy?

Exit question one: Levy’s already written his “Dominique Strauss-Kahn was wrongly convicted!” column in anticipation of the trial, hasn’t he? Exit question two, for litigators specifically: How likely is a conviction if the Manhattan D.A. can’t get the victim to testify — or, worse, if the victim ends up testifying for DSK after some sort of payoff? Granted, they’ve got her original statement on video plus testimony from the hotel staff about her state of mind in the aftermath, but realistically, if she gets up on the stand and says it was consensual, there’s no way to get to “beyond a reasonable doubt,” right?

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