None of this, however, has anything to do with whether he attempted rape and forcibly imprisoned a 32-year-old chambermaid. Nor, of course, does his distinguished stewardship of the International Monetary Fund. The talent of Strauss-Kahn, 62, is not the issue.

Yet his French cohorts — men just as charming and smart as Strauss-Kahn — have made it their business to say, in essence, that he could not have done what he is accused of doing because he is one of us. He is, in effect, innocent by association. They include Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean Daniel and Jack Lang.

Perhaps Lévy’s defense was the most extraordinary, for its cavalier dismissal of the African woman at the heart of the drama when African victims have been a focus of his various campaigns, but even more so for its language on Strauss-Kahn: “Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally; but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.”

I’ll let the Paris deconstructionist school do the brunt of the work on that sentence, but will observe that absurdity is no defense, “obviously” reeks of too much protest, and “a friend to women” is a super-freighted phrase in this context.

As David Rieff has observed, Strauss-Kahn’s proclivities were so well known that a French comedian had a skit years ago about him coming to a radio station for an interview and all women being ordered into a safe room. Jean Quatremer of the French daily Libération noted in 2007 that “The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn is his attitude to women. He is too insistent. ... The I.M.F. is an international institution with Anglo-Saxon morals. One inappropriate gesture, one unfortunate comment, and there will be a media hue and cry.”

And here we are. There are plenty of facts, incidents and complaints — never fully investigated by the French press — to suggest that the serious charges against Strauss-Kahn are not “absurd” and that a young African woman’s voice raised against violent abuse by the powerful should have its day in court.