LAWYERS FOR Piroska Nagy, who had a brief affair with International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn while she was an economist at the organisation, have written to Mr Strauss-Kahn’s attorney challenging his portrayal of the relationship.
Ms Nagy’s lawyer wrote to William Taylor, an attorney for Mr Strauss-Kahn, warning that he should not repeat an incorrect “insinuation” that she in some way pursued Mr Strauss-Kahn, according to a friend of Ms Nagy.
The friend said the economist was unhappy about reported comments by Mr Taylor in which he said the IMF board’s investigation of the affair in 2008 had determined that it was “completely consensual”, and referred to the IMF’s review of “numerous e-mails she sent to him”.
Focus has returned to the 2008 affair as a result of Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York last weekend on sex charges.
Ms Nagy, who now works as an economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction in London, is understood to be annoyed by what she took as an attempt by his lawyer to present Mr Strauss-Kahn as a victim.
Ms Nagy has alleged to friends that Mr Strauss-Kahn pursued her repeatedly with e-mails and phone calls, sometimes using sexual language. In a letter to the lead investigator of the affair in October 2008, she suggested that the IMF managing director was “a man with a problem that may make him ‘ill-equipped’ to lead an institution where women work under his command”.
The 2008 investigation by Robert Smith at the law firm Morgan, Lewis Bockius concluded that the initial contact between the two had come from Mr Strauss-Kahn on official IMF matters.
But it also found that both he and Ms Nagy accepted they had subsequently conducted a two-week exchange of messages that had become increasingly personal in nature before a very brief affair in January 2008. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)