PARIS (AP) — A 31-year-old novelist is likely to file a criminal complaint accusing International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her nine years ago, her lawyer said Monday.
A political rival said Mr. Strauss-Kahn had engaged in a long-term pattern of sexual misconduct. Without providing proof, conservative lawmaker Michel Debre alleged that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a potential French Socialist presidential candidate, had victimized several maids at the luxury Sofitel hotel near Times Square, where he is accused of assaulting a maid over the weekend.
The unproven allegations, and images of the handcuffed, grim-faced Mr. Strauss-Kahn being escorted by detectives outside a police station, were causing deep shock and dismay inside France, where Mr. Strauss-Kahn had topped the polls as a possible candidate in presidential elections next year.
Defenders of the former finance minister said they suspected he was the victim of a smear campaign. Others were re-examining whether Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a womanizer had an ugly, coercive side.
Novelist Tristane Banon’s attorney said that after the 2002 attack she was dissuaded from filing charges by her mother, a regional councilor in Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist Party.
Lawyer David Koubbi told French radio RTL on Monday that Ms. Banon did not file suit earlier because of “pressures” she face over the alleged 2002 sexual assault, and would now because “she knows she’ll be taken seriously.”
Anne Mansouret, a regional Socialist official in Normandy and Ms. Banon’s mother, said she had advised her daughter against filing suit against Mr. Strauss-Kahn years ago. She said she believed it was a temporary moment in which he had “lost his way” — and that a lawsuit could forever stain Ms. Banon’s career.
Speaking on BFM TV, Ms. Mansouret recalled telling her daughter then: “Listen, you know, if he had raped you, I wouldn’t have any hesitation, but that wasn’t the case — he sexually assaulted you, there wasn’t any rape per se … so until the end of your life, you’re going to have on your resume, you know, Tristane Banon is the girl who … ’”
The newspaper Le Monde, citing people close to Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said he had reserved the $3,000-a-night suite for one night during a quick trip to have lunch with his daughter, who is studying in New York. It was not immediately clear who paid for Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s personal travel, but he and his wife, an heiress to a renowned art dealer, have extensive personal wealth.
He was flying back to Paris for meetings about the French presidential election run-up before heading to a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, the paper said.
Le Monde reported that Mr. Strauss-Kahn had lunch with his daughter in a restaurant after leaving the hotel, then took a car to the airport, where he checked in for a flight that he had reserved a ticket for long before the weekend incident.
According to one of her confidantes, Le Monde said, Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair, spoke to her husband after the lunch and then on his way to the airport. A confidante told the paper Mr. Strauss-Kahn had mentioned a “serious problem” but didn’t make any reference to the hotel attack.
Without offering proof of his claims or the source of his information, Mr. Debre said the 32-year-old maid was not the only one the IMF chief had assaulted at the hotel.
“It’s not the first time that DSK is involved in this kind of actions at the Sofitel,” said Mr. Debre, an outspoken lawmaker from French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party — a rival to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s Socialists.
“That’s where he always stayed. It happened several times and for several years. Everyone knew it in the hotel,” Mr. Debre was quoted Monday as saying on the website of the French weekly L’Express.
The hotel declined to respond to his comments.
French viewers were stunned by the images of the handcuffed Mr. Strauss-Kahn ducking stone-faced into a police car. In France, public figures usually are shielded from view in such circumstances.
Fellow Socialists increasingly defended Mr. Strauss-Kahn, citing contradictions in the investigation, and pledged to stick to the campaign calendar.
A friend of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s, fellow Socialist politician Jean Christophe Cambadelis, said, “In the file, there are a lot of contradictions beginning with the escape, which was acknowledged today that it didn’t happen.”
“His close friends cannot believe that he is guilty, and he will soon be with us. And finally, we are hoping that the trauma, in one form or another, with Dominique Strauss-Kahn we hope, will be surmounted.”
Party official Harlem Desir called it a “terrible personal ordeal for Dominique Strauss-Kahn.”
“The Socialist Party has within its ranks men and women who have the ability to manage the state. There will be primaries that will allow us to choose that candidate, or the candidates that will carry the hopes for change in 2012,” he said.
The chief of Mr. Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, Jean-Francois Cope, said he told the president that he had asked fellow party members to “proceed with caution and restraint” in their comments, and Mr. Sarkozy had supported the idea.
“I was, like all Frenchmen, very disturbed by the news, very disturbed by the images that I saw,” including of Mr. Strauss-Kahn handcuffed in New York.
“I contacted a certain number of my UMP friends and asked them to be cautious if not silent in their comments regarding this affair because … there is the principle of presumed innocent,” he said.
The multilingual Mr. Strauss-Kahn is a forceful orator capable of holding up his end of a debate while checking his smartphone at the same time. He holds degrees in law, business administration, political studies and statistics, plus a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris.
He had a successful stint as industry minister in 1991-93 and an even higher-profile stint as finance minister in 1997-99. When he got that job, his wife, arguably the more famous of the two, quit a powerful television career to avoid a conflict of interest.
He was linked to a couple of corruption cases but never convicted.
A Socialist Party member since 1976, he has been seen in recent years as too market-friendly by some party purists, but that made him more palatable to the IMF. He and his wife sometimes come under criticism for representing the “champagne left,” Socialists who defend the working and underclasses but live in luxury themselves.
According to the 2000 biography “Les Vies Cachees de DSK” by Vincent Giret and Veronique Le Billon, Mrs. Sinclair was one of France’s highest-paid journalists before she gave up her job. The biography says Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wife is also a wealthy heiress, whose grandfather Paul Rosenberg was a prominent modern art dealer before World War II.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn himself makes an annual tax-free salary as head of the IMF of $420,930, plus an annual “scale of living” allowance of $75,350, according to a 2007 IMF press release. French newspapers have inventoried the couple’s real estate holdings, which reportedly include a six-room apartment in Paris’ chic 16th Arrondisement; a 240-square-meter apartment on the luxurious Place des Vosges; a home in Marrakech, Morocco; and a house in Washington.
Associated Press writers Jeffrey Schaeffer and Angela Charlton contributed to this article.
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