The problem I have with the NYT article "Questions Raised About a Code of Silence" is the same as some of the French people quoted in the article: the article itself confuses consensual sexual affairs on the one hand with sexist violence and sexual harassment on the other.
According to one NYT story, Kahn was previously accused of sexual harassment (which the IMF board apparently all but ignored - from the agreed upon facts how could there not have been an egregious power dynamic at work?).
And according to another story in the Times today, Kahn attempted to rape a journalist who was urged to keep quiet out of party loyalty and her parents' concern for her reputation.
The NYT story frames the issue with this tangled paragraph:
Now, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is once again challenging the assumption that the private lives of the rich, famous and powerful are off limits to public scrutiny. That the most serious accusation against Mr. Strauss-Kahn is attempted rape, and not just an indiscretion involving a consensual sexual relationship, only adds to a sense on the part of some people in France that the curtain of privacy needs to be lifted.
The first sentence in that 'graph confuses the issue in exactly the way I'm complaining about. The second sentence sounds like it's going to clearly distinguish between consensual sex and rape, only to curl back around to describe the issue as one about privacy, and then the article provides examples that don't involve any alleged sexist violence at all. For example:
He [French journalist Pierre Haski] also chided himself and the French media for keeping secret that the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal and François Hollande, her longtime partner, father of her four children and head of the Socialist Party, were no longer a couple while she was running for president in 2007.
That example is purely about the consensual romantic lives of politicians, and has nothing to do with the allegation that the media covered up information about Kahn's alleged previous sexist violence. What's it doing in this story?
The article does raise another issue, that of a politician's purportedly consensual sexual relationship with a family member of a prominent politician in another country, and the potential conflicts of interest that arise in that situation if there isn't transparency about it. But again, that's a separate issue for a different story.
The issue here should be, were the French and other media aware of Kahn's alleged sexist violence before? Did journalists have strong enough evidence to go to press with that information but suppress it out of concerns that it was a private matter? Sexual harassment shouldn't be classified as a private matter. Men's violence against women shouldn't be covered up by a male-dominated media in order to hide the abuses of power of male politicians.
To frame the issue in terms of a concern for privacy about sexual issues, even if that's the way some parts of the French media are obscuring it, clouds the real issue: men's violence against women and the importance of confronting and ending it.