Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, finally confesses all to a priest.
In the wake of the Strauss-Kahn affair, France, like Dedalus, is letting it all trickle out. Georges Tron has quit; and now Luc Ferry, a former education minister, accuses a former high official of child sex abuse.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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June 3rd, 2011 at 5:27AM
Hmmm. Maybe we should keep a cool head.
Luc Ferry accuses an unnamed former minister to have committed serious crimes (the kind of crimes that can lead to many years in prison, since France prosecutes its own citizens for sex with minor prostitutes abroad). He has not witnessed the events himself – he just repeats “hearsay” that he heard from “other ministers” including a former prime minister, but Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who was prime minister at the time Ferry was minister of education, doesn’t remember anything about such a case.
Essentially, this is hearsay about hearsay about unnamed individuals. This would not stand one second in a US court.
Now, some people are trying to guess who could be the unnamed minister, and they put some names forward, based on rumors or interpretations of things that some people wrote 35 years ago that could be interpreted as excusing pedophilia.
The thing is, France has had a few sex scandals where “networks” involving “powerful people” were alleged, people were named, some were imprisoned pending trial, and… during the inquiry or the trial, it was shown that the accusations were bogus (see the infamous “Outreau” case, or the “Allègre affair”, for instance).
We should exercise caution before repeating such allegations.
June 3rd, 2011 at 6:21AM
I repeat them because my reading of the French press suggests that they are rather credible. I do not repeat the name of the accused, though that also is widely known.
June 3rd, 2011 at 2:46PM
Margaret –
You consider Luc Ferry as credible? I have some reasons to believe he is not.
June 4th, 2011 at 7:17PM
Hmmm. Now Luc Ferry says these events did not occur when he was in government (2002-2004) but earlier. So it seems that what he is talking about is not something that the cabinet he was a member of had to deal with, but some rumors that circulated about earlier events.