Strauss-Kahn’s accuser appears to be quite a piece of work. She’s a serial liar and an operator, at least as far as her immigration story goes. She said she was gang-raped in Guinea, and apparently this was not the case. And in this country, she’s in tight with drug dealers.

We still don’t have any idea whether Strauss-Kahn raped her or not. But in her taped conversation with her prison-residing boyfriend, she told him a version of the rape story that was very similar to the one she told authorities—and the discussion was in their native Guinean tongue, which authorities translated from a “unique dialect of Fulani” into English. This points to at least some credibility on this score.

Now that this woman has been exposed as a habitual liar, it’s hard to evaluate the following for its veracity. But if true, it’s an ironic twist in the case:

…[I]f the woman’s application [to enter the US] was based on fraud, the Justice Department could seek to reopen the case and have her thrown out of the country. Her attorney Kenneth Thompson said she went to prosecutors to tell them the truth, and she had initially feared she’d be deported if she told them why she really left: because she was a victim of genital mutilation and she didn’t want her daughter, now 15, to be similarly affected, Thompson said.

Whether or not the accuser has been a victim of FGM (female genital mutilation, rampant in north Africa) would be an easy enough fact for the court to determine. But it is indeed likely that this women has been genitally mutilated, because the practice (according to this study of Guinea in 1998-1999) is so widespread there as to affect virtually all of the woman in the country: 99%. Guinea may actually have the highest rate of FGM (called the more neutral FCC, or “female genital cutting,” in the study) in the world.

What’s more, in 1998-1999, respondents reported that the cutting was occurring at a younger and younger age to girls there, often performed by the age of 9. The accuser’s daughter is reportedly 15 years old now, and the accuser’s application for political asylum to the United States was made in 2004, which would mean that her daughter would have been about eight at the time. That would be the age at which FGM was imminent, and it tends to support the accuser’s new story on the true motive for her emigration, which is at least as sympathetic as her original story of gang rape.

This woman represents a conundrum for feminists and the left. Originally she was the perfect victim: black, poor, and sexually abused by a man. She’s still black, but it seems she’s not so poor, since hundreds of thousands of dollars have been deposited in her bank account by the drug-dealing boyfriend and his confederates. As for abuse, if the accuser’s FGM tale is correct (and it is very very likely to be), she has most certainly been sexually abused, although paradoxically it would have been by women, who tend to perpetuate the practice, although the motivation is to be “pure” enough to be accepted in marriage by a man.

In 1969 the practice was made a crime in Guinea, but no one has ever been prosecuted there for it. There are varieties of FGM, some of which are more mild than others, but the milder forms are exceedingly uncommon in Guinea and elsewhere. I will be a bit graphic here: according to the 1998=1999 study, only 1% of women in Guinea (mostly members of a certain tribal group that is predominantly Christian) are unmutilated, and only 2% of women undergo a mild nicking of the clitoris. Eighteen per cent of Guinean women have had a partial clitoral removal, while 28% have had a total clitoral removal, and 50% a total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora as well (that is, the entire external genitalia of the woman and the significant organs of pleasure). At the time of the study, 80% of the girls there were operated on at age 9 or younger. In the Fulani group (to which the accuser seems to belong) the figures are 12% undergoing partial removal of the clitoris, 35% complete removal, and 50% complete removal of both clitoris and labia minora.

If FGM was indeed the woman’s motivation for immigration, and if she lied about that motive on her application, it would be ironic, because FGM itself is grounds for an asylum application. It is incredibly hard to know the truth about went on with this woman, but her lawyer says she was unaware that FGM would have sufficed as a reason for asylum, and was told by a friend to invent the gang-rape story to buttress her case.

Of course, none of this excuses anything she may have done or the lies she’s told. But a culture that does this to its women is even more inexcusable. I don’t care about the custom’s antiquity and its origins; it is a brutal and violent outrage.

[NOTE: I have previously written two posts on FGM, here and here.]

[NOTE II: And don’t come on this thread and compare FGM to male circumcision. There is absolutely no analogy, except to the mildest form of FGM that is very seldom practiced (1% in Guinea, and uncommon elsewhere). If you want an analogy, try comparing the process to removing all the external male genitalia. Fortunately, this is not a regular practice of any culture any earth—and if it were, that culture wouldn’t last long.]

[ADDENDUM: The plot—and the accusations against the accuser—thickens. Now an unnamed informant told the NY Post that she’s a hooker. If so, and if the NYPD didn’t find this out right away, I think they could be accused of negligence.

And then there’s this, reporting that DSK used other prostitutes in the past who complained about his roughness and aggressiveness and refused to see him again. Make of it what you will.

And am I the only one who thinks the mainstream press and the National Enquirer have recently merged?]