Dominique Strauss-Kahn faced a potential new sexual assault investigation Monday after a young French writer said she would formally accuse him of trying to rape her during a 2002 book interview – a dizzying turn of events just as the former IMF chief’s fortunes seemed to be growing brighter.
With France debating his possible return to presidential politics, Strauss-Kahn swiftly hit back at author Tristane Banon’s plans to take him to court over the attempted rape accusations, labeling her account “imaginary” and countering with his own plans to file a criminal complaint of slander.
The sordid exchange may have deep ramifications for the 2012 presidential race in France, where the surprise weakening of the sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn in New York last week sparked a fierce debate about whether he should return to politics if the American case against him collapses completely.
Strauss-Kahn has been living under house arrest in a $50,000 (euro34,500)-a-month town house in the trendy TriBeCa neighborhood. Once released, Strauss-Kahn had dinner at a pricey Manhattan restaurant.
“To see Strauss-Kahn freed then straight away eat in a luxury restaurant with friends, that makes me sick,” Banon told the magazine L’Express in an account published Monday. “I only want one thing, that he comes back to France, with his presumption of innocence, so that we can go before a court.”
Banon, 31, said on a 2007 television show that she had been attacked five years earlier by a politician she had interviewed for a book in his apartment. She later identified the man as Strauss-Kahn.
“It finished very violently,” she said on the television show. “I kicked him. He opened my bra. He tried to undo my jeans. It finished very badly.”
Lawyer David Koubbi said Banon had been dissuaded from filing charges by her mother, a regional councilor in Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist party. Her mother, Anne Mansouret, admitted in a French television interview in May that she had urged her daughter not to file a complaint after the incident.
Banon came forward again after Strauss-Kahn’s May 14 arrest in New York, but Koubbi said his client had no intention of pressing charges while the American prosecution was going on because the two cases should be kept separate.
Banon is now moving forward, Koubbi told The Associated Press. He denied that decision was connected to the weakening of the U.S. case.
“It is all the same to me what happens in the hours and days to come in the United States,” he said.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said that Strauss-Kahn “has always said that the incident described by Ms Banon since 2007 is imaginary.”
“He notes that this complaint comes quite conveniently right at the moment when there is no longer the slightest doubt about the false nature of the accusations against him in the United States,” attorneys Henri Leclerc and Frederique Baulieu said in a joint statement.
SMH… We hope being accused by this pretty little French girl will shut down this perv’s dreams of French presidency down once and for all.
