The chambermaid who accused a powerful French politician of attempted rape in a New York hotel last May turns out to be a liar. As her credibility crumbles, so does the legal case against the man, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. His supporters are already dismissing the whole affair as a witch hunt and hinting that he could still run for president of France.

What is the lesson here? Did the district attorney act too hastily? Probably, yes. But the maid told a compelling story reinforced by forensic evidence and officials were under enormous time pressure, seizing Strauss-Kahn only minutes before he flew back to Paris.

The more important point is this: Women should be encouraged, not discouraged, by this whole sordid story. The judicial system responded to the complaint of a poor immigrant woman when she charged a wealthy, influential man with sexual assault. And the result has emboldened other women to end their silence and speak out -- against DSK (as Strauss-Kahn is known) and men like him who treat women as disposable playthings.

Sylvie Kauffmann, the first female editor of the Paris daily Le Monde, told The New York Times that this “DSK moment” will have a lasting effect on French politics and culture. Helen Perivier, a French academic who studies gender issues, agreed that the episode “raised questions that went well beyond his particular case and that of his guilt. People have started raising questions about the relations between men and women in France, and those questions won’t go away.”

They won’t go away in this country, either. Not after Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Edwards both admitted fathering children with female subordinates -- a family nanny and a campaign aide. Not after a governor, Eliot Spitzer of New York, and a U.S. senator, John Ensign of Nevada, were forced to resign after their lurid sex lives came to light. Not after another governor, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, served out his term ignominiously after his affair went public.

These cases are all different but one thread runs through them: men treating women badly, their wives or girlfriends or both. And many of those women have had enough. Take Tristane Banon, a young writer who interviewed DSK eight years ago. His former wife is her godmother; his daughter is her close friend. Yet, she alleges, DSK started ripping off her clothes and wrestling her to the floor. “When I realized that he really wanted to rape me, I started kicking him with my boots,” she told the French weekly L’Express. “I was terrified.”