Ironically, his luck began to change that happy day two weeks
ago in Paris when Dominique Strauss-Kahn took the wheel of a
$135,000, V-8, 500-horsepower Porsche Panamera. Before he could
even test its acceleration (0 to 60 in 4.2 seconds), a guy with a
cell phone snapped a photo of him. And as people do these days, he
sold it to a Paris newspaper. No matter that the car actually
belonged to a friend of his. When you’re a prominent member of the
French Socialist Party, indeed, the front-runner in pre-election
polls and its strongest bet in years to beat Nicolas Sarkozy for
the presidency in 2012, you’re supposed to be helping the laboring
masses, not tooling around in luxury automobiles with a smug smile
on your face. The distant rumbling of an uproar could be heard in
the chattering class.
The rumble grew and the luck curve continued down a few
days later. Published stories reported that 62-year-old DSK, as he
is known here, wore decidedly non-working class clothing: $35,000
(sic) suits from a fancy tailor in Washington, where as managing
director of the International Monetary Fund he plays Master of the
Universe bailing out nations in financial trouble. Not so, he
countered furiously, but few believed him, it was so in
character.
Some began toting up the signs of his un-Socialist
lifestyle: two apartments in fashionable Paris neighborhoods, a
vacation home in Marrakech, and, since he joined the IMF in 2007, a
red brick mansion in Georgetown with a BMW SUV in the driveway. His
tax-free salary at the IMF is reportedly
$420,930, plus an annual
“scale of living” allowance of $75,350. His
wife Anne Sinclair, an American-born French TV journalist,
inherited paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Degas from her art
merchant father. How bad could it be?
Well, how about a 48-hour descent into the netherworld of
New York City’s criminal justice system? Complete with police
lineup, forensic medical exam, complete body-cavity search, and
perp walk in handcuffs under popping flash bulbs and leering TV
cameras?
Strauss-Kahn’s personal Götterdämmerung on Saturday came
with stunning swiftness. On Friday he had checked into
the upscale Sofitel in the Times Square area, staying in a
$3,000 a night suite with
foyer, conference room, living room, marble bathroom and
bedroom. It was a lavish
layout for a personal trip whose purpose is still unclear; an
embarrassed IMF stated firmly that he was not on official
business.
He was due in Berlin on Sunday to meet Chancellor Angela
Merkel, followed by two days of meetings in Brussels to work on
Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. He could easily have taken a flight
from Washington’s Dulles airport without going through New York.
Oddly, when police pulled him off an Air France flight Saturday
afternoon just two minutes before it left the gate, the plane was
headed not to Berlin, but to Paris.
The police arrested DSK in response to allegations by a
hotel housekeeper that he had violently sexually assaulted her
around noon after trying to lock her in the room. They booked him
on charges of a criminal sex act, attempted rape and unlawful
imprisonment (or as the official complaint nicely puts it, “oral
sexual conduct and anal sexual conduct with another person by
forcible compulsion”). At his arraignment the judge agreed with the
Manhattan district attorney’s argument that Strauss-Kahn was a
flight risk and ordered him held without bail — Sinclair wired $1
million to him overnight, just in case — pending his appearance
before a grand jury on Friday. He is now in an 11 by 13-foot cell
along with several thousand other inmates at the tough Rikers
Island prison complex. If found guilty on all four felony counts
and three misdemeanor counts, he won’t board another flight to
Paris for 25 years.
French media and politicians can’t decide whether DSK’s
spectacular downfall is an earthquake or soap opera. “Shock.
Political Bomb. Thunderclap,” headlined one newspaper. “KO,” ran
another, next to a full-page photo of a dazed, unshaven
Strauss-Kahn. “It’s an episode from the TV serial Dallas,
and DSK is JR,” said a lawmaker in Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party.
“Totally hallucinating,” said another. (Sarkozy himself, hitting
new lows every week in the polls, has carefully said nothing,
though he must be all smiles behind Elysée Palace doors.)
Conspiracy theories are rife, but several politicos recognized it
was humiliating for France. As one put it frankly, “Now everyone
will point at us and say, ‘Look how the French act.’” For
sure.
Strauss-Kahn secured top legal talent with the sure touch
and speed of someone who would seem to have been through something
like this before. In a matter of hours he hired the celebrity New
York attorney Benjamin Brafman, whose past criminal cases include
the likes of Michael Jackson and the rapper Jay-Z. DSK also quickly
retained the services of William Taylor, a top Washington lawyer
who reportedly advised him in 2008 in the case of his scandalous
affair with an IMF staff member. He was immediately visited in his
cell by the French consul general in New York, who assured him that
“The French embassy and consulate are mobilized” whatever that
means.
THE FACT IS, DSK has been through something like
this before, only without the grave legal consequences that he may
now face. His extramarital affairs have long been the stuff of
Paris gossip and newsroom banter, where he was dubbed “the great
seducer.” In broad-minded France where politicians’ private lives
are off-limits to reporters (think François Mitterrand’s love child
hidden for years in broad daylight and financed with public
monies), a dash of expected promiscuity only adds to a public
figure’s luster. This after all is the country where the medieval
tradition of cuissage gave nobles the inalienable right to
sleep with a peasant’s bride on her wedding night. Thus few
eyebrows were raised when DSK gave an interview to a Paris paper
two weeks ago in which he addressed his womanizing. “Yes, I like
women,” he declared with all due chutzpah. “So what?”
Sometimes he went too far. Like three years ago, early in
his stint as IMF chief, when a furious Argentine economist publicly
blamed DSK for seducing his Hungarian wife, who was then an IMF
employee, at the Davos international business forum. Both admitted
the affair (she has since left for another job). The IMF glossed
over the case, contenting itself with noting that he had not
actually used his hierarchical position to abuse an underling.
Strauss-Kahn issued an apology, saying, “I accept that this
incident represents a serious error of judgment. I am committed,
going forward, to uphold the high standards” expected of an IMF
managing director. Case closed. But it is clear now that the IMF
was seriously remiss in not dismissing him at the time, however
embarrassing that would have been.
As France goes through a period of soul-searching in the
light of DSK’s arrest, other skeletons may well emerge. Assistant
District Attorney John A. McConnell, the prosecutor, told the judge
Monday that New York crime officials are investigating at least one
other case of “conduct similar to the conduct alleged” in the
present case. He did not elaborate.
In Paris this week, a young journalist named Tristane
Banon spoke up to say she had been sexually assaulted by
Strauss-Kahn in 2002 when she interviewed him. He attacked her like
“a rutting chimp,” she says, describing how he wrestled her to the
floor, undoing her bra and trying to pull her blue jeans off before
she managed to flee. Her mother dissuaded her from filing suit at
the time, because there had not been an actual rape and public
opinion would have sided with the great man. But her lawyer says
she is likely to sue now because “she knows she will be heard and
be taken seriously.”
A few French opinion leaders are beginning to speak out
publicly. One of the first was the National Front’s president,
Marine Le Pen. “The truth, and everyone knows it, is that Paris has
buzzed for months if not years in political and journalistic
circles about the pathological relationship M. Strauss-Kahn has
with women. This week’s news is not exactly surprising.”
Another was the lawmaker Bernard Debré, a well-known
member of Sarkozy’s UMP party and son of one of the authors of the
Constitution of the Fifth Republic. He told a news magazine that
DSK had engaged in this sort of behavior several times at the
Sofitel in New York, where he has stayed five times over the last
year, and that hotel employees knew about it. “Enough is enough,
you have humiliated France,” he said. “You have ridiculed and
soiled your country. Your best hope now is to seek the help
available for sexual delinquents.”
To be sure, every man is innocent until proven guilty,
even people like this. No one can be certain what may come to light
as this murky affaire goes forward. But at least one
fortunate consequence is now clear: contrary to predictions of just
a week ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn will not be the next president
of France.
