A FRENCH writer and journalist is considering filing a legal complaint over an alleged sexual incident involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2002, her lawyer said yesterday.
Tristane Banon (31) daughter of a Socialist Party councillor, has alleged that the incident occurred when she went to interview Mr Strauss-Kahn in a Paris apartment for a book she was writing.
Ms Banon first made the allegations, without naming any individuals, on French television in 2007, but they resurfaced yesterday when French newspapers published detailed accounts of her claims. “We are considering filing a complaint,” said the woman’s lawyer, David Koubbi.
Ms Banon, who was 22 at the time of the incident, said in the TV interview that she had asked to talk to Mr Strauss-Kahn for a book of interviews with leading French figures about the “biggest mistake you ever made”.
She told how he had insisted on holding her hand during the interview and then made advances to her. There was no independent confirmation of her version of events.
“It ended really badly. We ended up fighting. It finished really violently,” the television clip shows her saying. “We fought on the floor. It wasn’t a case of a couple of slaps. I kicked him, he unhooked my bra, he tried to open my jeans,” she said.
The politician acted, she said, like a “rutting chimpanzee”.
Ms Banon did not file charges at the time of the alleged assault after her mother Anne Mansouret, a local Socialist Party councillor and a friend of Mr Strauss-Kahn, persuaded her against bringing proceedings. She says she now regrets that decision.
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s sexual appetite, the object of rumours in political circles in Paris for many years, was considered one of his potential vulnerabilities in running for the French presidency.
Yesterday, Libérationpublished comments it said the IMF chief made in late April when he said the three issues on which his opponents would seek to undermine him would be "money, women and my Jewishness".
“Yes, I like women . . . So what? . . . For years there’s been talk of photos of massive orgies, but nothing has ever come out . . . So, let them show them,” the paper quoted him as saying.
However, before the grave allegations levelled against him this week, few believed Mr Strauss-Kahn’s womanising would hurt him politically at home.
In 2008, Mr Strauss-Kahn publicly apologised for “an error of judgment” after having a brief affair with a subordinate at the IMF and denied he had abused his position (the agency’s executive board cleared him after an inquiry). His wife Anne Sinclair, a former television presenter, publicly forgave him, while the episode attracted relatively little attention in France and had no effect on his popularity.
France has always been tolerant of its leaders’ extra-marital affairs, while the media has traditionally been reluctant to intrude on politicians’ private lives. Jacques Chirac’s infidelity, although widely suspected in Paris, was never reported until his wife Bernadette broke the silence in an interview.
Another president, François Mitterrand, managed to hide from the public for 20 years the existence of his illegitimate daughter Mazarine Pingeot.
Mr Strauss-Kahn himself benefited from such reticence. On his blog, the Libérationjournalist Jean Quatremer wrote yesterday that French journalists and politicians knew for a long time of DSK's "irrepressible sexual appetite" and his "inappropriate" behaviour towards women.