Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

Thankfully DSK have the resources needed to get a fair hearing ...

The New York Times
May 21, 2011
Backing Her Man With Impressive Resources
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

PARIS — She was much more famous than her husband, and much wealthier, too.

Now she joins the unhappy club of wives standing by their man in the face of a crescendo of tales of sexual betrayal, spurred in her case by extraordinary and tawdry criminal charges of attempted rape of a hotel maid.

When Anne Sinclair married Dominique Strauss-Kahn in November 1991, she was a famous television journalist, her brown hair and steely blue eyes a fixture on the most popular interview show in the country, called “7/7.” She did over 500 interviews, including of presidents like François Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton as first lady, and stars like Yves Montand and even Madonna. The show attracted as many as 12 million viewers every Sunday.

The 1991 marriage was a love match — Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been married twice before and had four children, and she had been married once and had two children of her own. The New York-born child of a family who fled to America to escape the Nazis, and of a father who had the code-name “Sinclair” in the French Resistance, she insisted on a Jewish ceremony after the legal exchange of vows in a Paris city hall.

And as a measure of her beauty and fame, she was married in a room with a bust of Marianne — the symbol of freedom and republican pride in France — that was modeled on her. Her face was not only on most French televisions, but in every city hall.

The two met, predictably, on a television set in 1989. Michel Taubmann, who wrote a recent biography of Mr. Strauss-Kahn timed for a possible presidential campaign, said: “She was subjugated by his intelligence and charm.”

She quit her show after 13 years to avoid a conflict of interest when her husband became finance minister in 1997. She herself became deputy director of channel TF1 and later, director general of its Internet arm. “When you spend 13 years interviewing politicians,” she said then, “you aren’t fascinated by power anymore.”

Still, she was the driving force behind Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political ambitions, and her wealth, inherited from her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, enabled the couple to live lavishly and independently, with two extraordinary apartments in Paris, a $4 million house in Georgetown and a riad in Marrakesh.

She also helped finance a group of political advisers, press aides and Internet sites that were preparing the ground for what was soon supposed to be a triumphant return to France for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, to begin a race for the presidency many thought he would win.

“She always wanted to prove that, 75 years after Léon Blum, the French were capable of electing a Jew,” a friend told Le Monde. “In her eyes, that would be a formidable revenge on history.”

But her close friend of many years, Alain Duhamel, said in an interview that “she feared the campaign a lot — she knew it would be a great sacrifice in her way of life.” She and her husband considered their religion, he said, “a practical question for the campaign,” not some great cause.

Repeated efforts to contact Ms. Sinclair, through her friends and spokeswoman, both here and in New York, where she flew to see her husband, were unsuccessful.

THE same age as her husband, 62, she was born Anne-Élise Schwartz. Her father, Joseph-Robert Schwartz, legally took the name Sinclair a year later, in 1949; her mother, Micheline Nanette Rosenberg, was painted by Picasso, who called her “Michou.” From Mr. Rosenberg, one of Picasso’s early champions, the family inherited part of a collection of paintings worth many millions of dollars. Just one Matisse, “L’Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue,” was sold in 2007 at Christie’s for $33.6 million.

Ms. Sinclair is on the board of the Picasso Museum in Paris and is writing a book about her grandfather and his life. She graduated from the Institute for Political Studies in Paris and in law from the University of Paris, beginning her career as a radio journalist for Europe 1.

Elie Wiesel was a close friend of Ms. Sinclair and her first husband, the Hungarian-born journalist Ivan Levaï, whose mother brought him to France as a child and was then deported, killed by the Nazis. Mr. Levaï, who was hidden in the French countryside, once called her “too beautiful for me.” The couple’s second son, Elie, is named after Mr. Wiesel.

“She was charming, intelligent, famous in the best sense of the word,” Mr. Wiesel said. “She was a combination of Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters, very well read, very well prepared.”

But there is no way to prepare for the kind of purgatory Ms. Sinclair has entered since her husband’s arrest a week ago on charges of attempted rape. She was in Paris awaiting the birth of her first grandchild when, according to Paris Match, she got a call from her husband about 11 p.m., or 5 p.m. in New York, just after the police pulled him off an Air France plane about to leave the gate.

Her face turned pale. He reportedly told her there was “a serious problem.”

On Sunday she issued a statement unreservedly backing her husband and saying that she did not believe the charges against him, and then flew to Manhattan, where she has undertaken to pay Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s $1 million bail and the other costs associated with it — including an apartment, an electronic bracelet and armed guards provided by a company authorized by the court.

“I don’t believe for a single second the accusations of sexual assault by my husband,” she said. “I am certain his innocence will be proven.”

BUT she is already learning the hard price of intense media attention. Having taken two apartments in a building where rents can run to $14,000 a month, she was told that her husband was not welcome there. For now, he is staying in quarters provided by the company that is in charge of his security.

There is no doubt that Ms. Sinclair was aware of her husband’s skirt-chasing, but in public, at least, seemed not to care. Asked in 2006 by L’Express if she suffered from his reputation as a womanizer, she said: “No! I’m even proud of it. It’s important to seduce, for a politician. As long as he is still attracted to me, and I to him, it is sufficient.”

Mr. Duhamel said that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s behavior was talked about among her friends, but not with her. “This is something she didn’t want to hear,” he said. “Her choice has always been that of passionate solidarity with him.”

The largely unexamined history of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s relationships was highlighted in 2008, when he was investigated by the International Monetary Fund for abuse of power when he had an affair with a married Hungarian economist, Piroska Nagy. The bank concluded that the affair was consensual and rebuked him, but he kept his job. He hired a public-relations firm and issued a statement regretting the affair and apologizing to Ms. Sinclair.

She then wrote on her blog — “Two or three things seen from America” — that “everyone knows that those things happen in couples’ lives; this one-night adventure is behind us.”

In his letter of resignation from the I.M.F., written from jail, Mr. Strauss-Kahn said, “I think at this time first of my wife — whom I love more than anything — of my children, of my family, of my friends.”

Mr. Wiesel expressed sadness for Ms. Sinclair. “There is a Talmudic saying, ‘No one is the owner of his instincts,’ ” he said. “But controlling them, that is civilization.”

On April 30, Ms. Sinclair wrote about the wedding of Prince William. “I can understand those who didn’t miss a crumb. As if, quite simply, we were like children who, before going to sleep, want a tale, a story with a princess and a dream, because real life catches up with you soon enough. ...”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/world/europe/21sinclair.html

You are over-estimating the importance this man had--as you can see, the IMF is functioning without him. He had planned to leave the IMF in a few months in order to run for the presidency of France.

That's ridiculous. You cannot give a license to anyone to commit crimes, particularly serious felonies.

When he is no longer director of the IMF

ehbeth wrote:

do YOU have facts to bring to the discussion?

I have a damn sight more than those referring to assault rather than alleged assault. As far as I can tell only two people know the facts of what took place in the hotel room. I know nothing about that. What facts I do know are related to how people have responded to the story. And there are plenty of facts in that fevered bag of tricks.

According to several articles I read about her, she is described as being a feminist--which would highlight that much of what is being said about feminists in this thread is nonsense.

I'm just trying to capture the range of reporting.

is it usual for a man arrested under these circumstances to be allowed to phone his wife at the time of arrest or shortly afterwards?

(CNN) -- The United States is "disappointed" by the expulsion by Qatar of Eman al-Obeidy to Libya, a decision that it said is a "breach of humanitarian norms."
Al-Obeidy grabbed the world's attention this spring when she accused Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's security forces of gang-raping her.
"We've not spoken with Ms. al-Obeidy since she left Qatar, but we have been in contact with senior officials in the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, and we've made clear U.S. interests in her case," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in reference to the rebel government in control of eastern Libya. "I believe she is safe where she is at right now."
The U.S. criticism comes on the heels of reports that al-Obeidy was beaten in Qatar before being deported back to Libya.

HOW unseemly and downright reactionary it is to see feminists of all stripes at each other's throats over former head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

A disturbing and serious criminal charge of attempted rape and sexual assault levelled against a powerful Frenchman working in the US has become the platform on which the women's movement can once again attempt to self-destruct.

And this time the explosion of women-hating rage is mostly coming from the New York side of the Atlantic, where US feminists with their gender studies hang-ups and identity politics obsessions rule the politically correct roost.

The case has not gone to trial yet it has unleashed a cross-continental war of words in the women's movement rarely seen outside the academy.

Witness feminist demi-deity Katha Pollitt in The Nation, the media organ of the US Left scorning France, "pathetic" French women "rising in defence of their right to be pawed by their bosses" ("How out of it are French women?") and especially French feminism as a "small and conflicted" movement that pretty much condones rapists.



"Almost as repellent as the sexual entitlement of French men, with their insistence on their seigneurial right to heavy flirting, is the docility and feminine-mystique-isation of the French women who enable them. Well, maybe it's not entirely their fault: not only do they never get to eat a square meal (oh, so that's why French women don't get fat), masses of them are on tranquillisers - twice as many as French men, and one of the highest rates in the world (hmm, about that national health service)."

In her "Dear France, We're So Over" column remarkable mostly for its raging francophobia, Pollitt does her best neo-patriot "America rocks, Frogs suck" impersonation before sticking the jackboot into Gallic feminists' propensity to abhor symbols of oppression like the headscarf and niqab or burka.

Before Pollitt's diatribe The New York Times got the ball rolling with an online debate asking: "Are French women more tolerant?" With such an easy excuse for venting venal intellectual jealousies the forum quickly degenerated into a bizarre ramble about the slippery slope between flirtation and rape, confirming cliches that Americans are, after all, unrepentant puritans.

Suddenly internal disputes pitting prominent American feminist academics such as historian Joan Scott, author of The Politics of the Veil and a virulent opponent of France's ban on headscarfs and burkas, against French feminist doyennes had burst into the mainstream.

Scott, a gender studies guru, suggested feminism was widely considered a "foreign import" in France, with its "acceptance of the eroticised play of difference", its view that women's "role in the passionate economy was to civilise male brutality" and arguments that Muslims were unable to assimilate because they "did not understand that open erotic play was integral to Frenchness".

"How ironic, then, that the victim of Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault was a Muslim," Scott said with breathtaking sophistry.

Domna Stanton, professor of French at the City University of New York, also pummelled French women.

"I hope that despite the blatant and appalling persistence of sexism in their daily lives (and the abiding national ideology of myths of love and equality) French women will not this time around go into their reflexive, derisive view that Americans are yet again being puritanical - or even worse, being hysterical feminists who won't play the game a la francaise."

The semi-academic rants in the self-described newspaper of record got distinguished French sociologist Irene Thery outraged enough to write her second column in Le Monde defending feminism a la francaise against the "Anglo-Saxon" academic attacks on its stubborn universalism and refusal to engage in a "battle of the sexes".

Thery correctly identified the deliberate attempt by US feminists to instrumentalise the DSK case for their own ideological purposes.

Gender studies professors and die-hard postmodernists, particularly in US universities, have long engaged in a trench battle against second-wave feminism, and mainstream French feminism (and its often glamorous, sexy spokeswomen) in particular with its "passe" goals of sexual equality and its liberal rejection of separatism personified by the burka and the headscarf.

Unfortunately the brouhaha feeds into all the worst stereotypes of catfighting women.

The victim in this case, who has accused DSK of attempted rape and sexual assault, deserves respect and cannot be ignored as she was by some French politicians including Elisabeth Guigou and Segolene Royal.

But should US feminists use the case as an excuse to blame all French women and their French intellectual sisters for DSK's and French men's allegedly unrestrained and violent libidos?

This is not about one nation v another, it is about a poor woman who says she has been sexually assaulted by a powerful man.

Questions regarding media codes of silence and lax social mores having aided or enabled DSK are certainly important, but the hyperbole of some leading feminists railing against DSK and others is just anti-intellectual and counterproductive.

For feminists in France, the US and elsewhere to use the occasion to effectively convict a whole nation of women for what has (or has not) occurred is undignified and contrary to the cause of gender equality.

As French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde notes, there is very much a before DSK and an after DSK moment in France.

However, if charm and seduction were to disappear from male-female relations in France and elsewhere as a result of one wealthy and influential man's alleged criminal abuse of power it would be a sorry state of affairs.

Hopefully French feminism, and women, will stick with what Thery describes as "a certain way of living and not only thinking".

This means rejecting the "dead ends of political correctness", pushing for equal rights for the sexes and embracing "the asymmetrical pleasures of seduction, absolute respect for consent and the delicious surprise of stolen kisses".

What woman could say non to that ?

The French and the Americans are at odds thanks to the arrest of “The Great Seducer,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now-former head of the IMF. I feel required to mention Strauss-Kahn since I’m the SunBreak’s beleaguered correspondent in the Paris hot zone, but it’s not easy for me.

For one thing, typing the words “The Great Seducer” up there made me feel dirty and angry. For another thing, I usually write humor, and after examining this story from all angles, I’ve determined there is not a smidge of humor to be found in it.

Our French friends love to talk with us about the case, in particular, about how they think the U.S. sucks. Also, we are prudes. They’re upset their DSK was shown in handcuffs. They’re horrified cameras are allowed in American courtrooms. They are disgusted by our “perp walk” and the American penchant for crime spectacle. (That’s one thing, at least, on which we agree.)

My French teacher believes the DSK affair has been made a bigger deal than it really is because it happened in America, and Americans are uptight about sex. I said, Yes, it’s true we are more uptight about sex, but what we’re really uptight about is people raping people. The two are not the same. She then said rape isn’t as shocking to the French. I responded with, Why the hell not? Honestly, what the hell is wrong with you, woman? Not my most coldly logical argument but my incredulousness overruled my reason.

When I brought up allegations of DSK’s past sexual aggression, a friend of ours acknowledged perhaps he has “a weakness.” A weakness? A weakness? I don’t think “being rapey” can be considered a weakness–it’s more a sociopathic character trait that makes you a menace to civilized society. That same friend said, “So he loves women….” and let the sentence trail off with a shrug of the shoulders. Another friend’s mother-in-law said it couldn’t be rape because rape only happens when the “propositioning man” has a weapon. Then my head exploded.

If my husband mentions Strauss-Kahn at work, his co-workers fire back that our politicians aren’t perfectly behaved either–why, just look at Bill Clinton! It’s true powerful men the world over have tried to get away with things, but the relevance of the Bill Clinton argument eludes me. Monica was a willing participant. Monica liked cigars. If she had said, “I don’t want a cigar anywhere near me,” we would have had a whole different problem with what happened in the Oval Office. I think we, as Americans, make the distinction between extramarital dalliance and act of violence. I’m not sure the French do–in fact, I’m starting to wonder if they even know what rape is.

The majority of French people seem to believe Strauss-Kahn was set up. Others say the maid is lying for money. Most say there’s no way he would have done something so careless, and in the land of uptight prudes no less, right before a run for the presidency.

He is vigorously defended; the victim is persecuted. The victim’s full name has been printed in the French press. It was suggested early on we needed to see a picture of her, hinting that her attractiveness or lack thereof would be a clue to what happened. I’ve now stopped reading French press on the subject, for while there are many level-headed people out there calling for an examination of deep-rooted misogyny in French culture, there are just as many, if not more, stuck in their caves.

I understand the French don’t want the allegations to be true. Strauss-Kahn is a respected politician and their best hope to beat a hugely unpopular President in the next election. I understand they want him to emerge from this unscathed and come home to beat Sarkozy to a bloody pulp. Perhaps they’re willing to defend anything to make that happen. Who knows, maybe it will happen; maybe it will turn out to be a perfectly executed plot all along. All we can do is wait, and hope the trial brings the truth to light.

But regardless of the outcome of the trial, another truth has already been exposed, and it’s ugly. France is not the sexually open, sexually progressive society it would like you to believe. What it offers is sexual license for powerful men. Is it “open” of the French to excuse the extramarital affairs of their politicians and argue they don’t affect a person’s ability to govern? Perhaps. Is it “open” to excuse sexual assault, and obvious disrespect for half the population, and argue it doesn’t affect a person’s ability to govern? I say no, but I’m an American prude.

We’ve got a long way to go in our attitudes towards sexual assault and victim-blaming in the U.S, too, but compared to what I’ve seen here, we’re light years ahead of France’s fabled sophisticated sexuality. I’ve lived in both cultures now, and I much prefer the one where a rape victim at least has a chance of being heard

By Renaud Girard
LE FIGARO/ Worldcrunch
NEW YORK – The alleged sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the now former head of the International Monetary Fund, has been major worldwide news. But it has hit especially hard in New York's French-speaking African community, home to the Guinean woman employed as a maid at the Sofitel Hotel where she says the 62-year-old French politician sexually assaulted her.
In the heart of Harlem, a small grocery store offers a flavor of Africa. The plump 45-year-old woman owner, Ms. A, who gives her customers a warm welcome in impeccable French, wears a long traditional green-colored African dress, and a turban made out of the same fabric is wrapped round her hair. Born in Guinea, she is a Muslim woman who belongs to the Mandinka ethnic group. The alleged victim is from northern Guinea, and her ethnicity is Fulani.
Julien Baba Sylla, a telecommunications engineer who introduces himself to us as the leader of New York's Guinean community, which counts some 5000 people in total, gives us a lift in his Ford Expedition. He says the grocery owner had become like a big sister to the alleged victim. The two woman talked to each other in a mixture of Bambara and French.
Ms. A loses her composure when we enter, appearing like a lady who needs to think before telling what she knows. Maybe she acts in this way because she is a smart shopkeeper, and knows she is sitting on a pile of gold: someone will pay for her secrets. But she has already told some important information to Julien Sylla, which contradicts one point about the alleged victim: she is married, not a widow as has been widely reported. Her husband is still living in the U.S., but not with her, and may have had trouble with the law.
Journalists investigating this case come up against a wall of silence, imposed both by investigators and defense attorneys for DSK (as Strauss-Kahn is referred to in France), and followed by the Sofitel Hotel's management, and the victim’s attorney. Reporters have no other choice but to glean information from the accuser’s family and friends. Are these people speaking because truth is their sole concern, or because they want to show off in front of the television cameras? Because after all, not every day do journalists from around the world go poking around Harlem and the Bronx.
The African Restaurant 2115, located on the corner of 119th street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue in Harlem), is another place where the Sofitel maid often went to eat. The owner is a Senegalese man who belongs to the Fulani ethnic group. His name is Blake Diallo, a friend of the alleged victim and regular customer, who liked lamb stew and fried plantains. In Restaurant 2115, most of the customers are French-speaking Africans: from Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast or Mali. In this restaurant people don't drink alcohol and they don't swear. Soccer matches are aired on TV, world events are discussed. In the evening, many men get up and go out for about 10 minutes, to cross the boulevard and go to the Islamic center al Aqsa to pray. Al Aqsa is a mosque without a minaret run by people from northern Ivory Coast called the Dioula.
When we talked to Senegalese people who often go to Restaurant 2115, we learned that the alleged victim was a serious and hardworking young woman. In no way was she wild or provocative. “Her family is very pious, because it is Maraboutic, in other words, religion means everything to them and money nothing,” explains Amadou N'Diaye, the owner's childhood friend from Senegal. “You must understand that in the Fulani community, love is not to be treated lightly. Fulani people try to marry off their daughters very early, when they are still teenagers. For them, if someone from their family has sexual relations before marriage, it brings shame upon the whole family.”
Like many Fulani people, who could not occupy key positions during the reign of Sekou Toure, the first President of Guinea from 1958 to 1984, the accuser's family emigrated to Casamance, in southern Senegal. Then, the young woman went to Dakar to get a US visa. “Make no mistake, this affair brings shame upon her family. In Africa, the parties involved would have solved this problem in secret,” says N'Diaye. “From now on, two lives have been unnecessarily ruined, (the victim’s) life and DSK's life. DSK is a man who the French-speaking African community appreciates a lot.”
At Restaurant 2115, people show solidarity with the alleged victim, but nobody is eager to condemn DSK. Africans who live in New York think that the charges “will not hold up.” “How could a 62-year-old man, who is not athletic at all, have forced a 32-year-old woman, who is tall and muscular from her manual work, to have sexual relations with him?” one wondered.
Amadou imagines a scenario in which “three very different cultures clash.” The French culture of DSK, who made an extremely inappropriate move in suite 2806, but who called the hotel while heading for the airport, unaware that he had committed a crime. The culture of modesty of a pious Funali woman, who did not expose the crime and who did not confide her shame to the Sofitel Hotel's management, but was rather found sobbing by her coworkers, who then called the police. The “Prussian” culture of the American police in which things are either black or white, with no gray areas

One thing I have been wondering about though-- is it usual for a man arrested under these circumstances to be allowed to phone his wife at the time of arrest or shortly afterwards?

Everyone who is arrested is allowed at least one phone call. He may have used his to call his wife.

I think my first reaction would be to call the IMF headquarters if I was him as there was a great many plans for international meetings that needed to be change to say the least on short notice

If I was the new head of the IMF the first move I would made is moving the IMF headquarter off US soil to a country where my top people would not be walking around with targets on their backs.