Dominique Strauss-Kahn is left with only 'French maids’ for company

Once Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a shoo-in for the next president of France - but those heady days are long gone.

Dominique Strauss-Khan's wife has decamped to Morocco, and demonstrators and the media follow his every move Photo: GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:30PM GMT 30 Nov 2011

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It’s no fun being Dominique Strauss-Kahn these days. His long-suffering wife, the millionaire art heiress Anne Sinclair, has decamped for the family ryad in Marrakesh, leaving him to face the daily revelations about prostitutes being flown to him in Washington. His Place des Vosges neighbours are up in arms as the quiet of their beautiful, 400-year-old Parisian square is disturbed by demonstrations against the “sexism” of the former head of the IMF. (A recent one involved a gaggle of Ukrainian feminists, bussed in from Kiev, wearing bikinis, “French maid” outfits, stilettos, stockings and garter belts.

His every move is followed by paparazzi. And even though the case that put his adventurous sex life in the open was dismissed by the New York courts, the hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo is suing him in a civil court, where she expects to win massive damages. Once he was a shoo-in for the next president of France; those heady days are long gone.

Now Edward Epstein has written an “investigative” piece for the New York Review of Books, which attempts to prove that the alleged rape was a set-up masterminded by Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the UMP. Using footage from the hotel’s security cameras and telephone records, presumably fed by DSK’s defenders, Epstein constructs a ripping story of entrapment.

He makes much of a supposed “victory dance” caught on CCTV by two low-level hotel employees after the police were brought in to hear Diallo on the day of the alleged assault, using it to suggest that Accor, the French chain managing the hotel, were involved in bringing Sarkozy’s most dangerous rival down. (The employees, however, have said they were discussing sport.)

Alas for DSK, even his closest friends and political supporters aren’t buying Epstein’s thesis. The latest one to dismiss it is Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a Socialist MP who was widely tipped be part of a 2012 DSK cabinet, and who once carried the can for DSK in a party financing scandal. But Paris is almost entirely unanimous on one point: that Epstein’s very readable piece is predicated on an assumption of competence by the UMP dirty tricks department that’s nothing short of fantastic. “That lot couldn’t conspire their way out of a paper bag” is the consensus.

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It’s not just the Right that’s disorganised. The team running the campaign for François Hollande, the Socialist presidential challenger, has had to assign a minder to his gaffe-prone partner, the former Paris Match reporter Valérie Trierweiler (nicknamed Valérie Rottweiler). Trierweiler, who covered Hollande and his then partner of 20 years, Ségolène Royal, for Match (even reporting from the post-delivery room after the birth of the last of the couple’s four children in 1992) says coyly that her “relationship with François changed in 2005”, a date that some dispute. She took to giving embarrassing interviews in which she said that Ségolène should “learn to step back”. Rottweiler is now being “advised” by one Nathalie Mercier, a PR hack from the very agency which conducted the campaign to clear DSK’s name with such alacrity. Oh for the days of Madame de Gaulle, who never said a word.

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Is sex compulsory in France? A man who “mostly’’ stopped having sexual relations with his wife of 21 years has just been fined 10,000 euros damages by an Aix-en-Provence court on appeal, confirming a similar 2009 ruling. Two sets of judges concurred in finding that the man’s wedding vows had not been followed, even though he “occasionally” still performed, and that his wife’s rights and expectations were not respected. The couple are now divorced in a ruling setting the fault 100 per cent on him. Can damages for unsatisfying performances be far behind?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Even the French won’t vote for Dominique Strauss-Kahn now

It’s not the sex, but the financial extravagance that has turned France against him.

Does a true Socialist live like he did? Photo: REUTERS

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:47PM BST 23 Aug 2011

85 Comments

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out of jail, but is he out of the woods? The leaders of the French Socialist party may profess “satisfaction that justice was finally served in New York”, and claim that Strauss-Kahn can still take up his career where he left it, before that unfortunate incident with the chambermaid and the rape accusation. But don’t believe a word of it.

True, many French people still buy the various conspiracy theories peddled on internet forums about DSK’s downfall. Sarkozy did it. No, Putin did. No, it was Wall Street, because as director-general of the International Monetary Fund, DSK wanted to regulate the banks. (The fact that nobody suspects his main rivals within his party, François Hollande and Martine Aubry, of being organised enough to arrange a foreign honeytrap may not bode well for their chances in 2012.)

The French can tolerate a lot from their politicians, as long as they remain discreet. Like old-style wives, the voters would rather be lied to than hear the blunt truth, because at least it shows that their leaders want to keep a vestige of the relationship alive.

What has hurt DSK – and the reason why 61 per cent of the public believe his career is over, against 35 per cent who have kept the faith – is not the sex, but the lifestyle. His lawyer’s version of the events in that Sofitel hotel might be tawdry: a 10-minute consensual encounter with a hotel chambermaid, sandwiched between a telephone call to his wife in Paris and a lunch date with his daughter in mid-town Manhattan. But what sticks in the craw of crisis-hit France are the revelations about his money.

DSK’s camp has long known this is his Achilles’ heel: they once sued a newspaper for reporting that he’d bought some £5,000 suits from a Washington tailor. But now the public has been regaled with tales of the vast wealth of the Socialist statesman’s TV-star, heiress wife; the elegant houses and apartments in five different cities; the £35,000-a-month townhouse rented for the duration of the New York court case; the $100 steaks delivered to his door during his enforced sojourn; the $600 pasta dinner (with truffle shavings) at Madonna’s favourite Italian bistro to celebrate the return of his bail cheque.

“A Socialist doesn’t live like this”, say the comments – indeed, Sarkozy earned himself the title of the “the bling-bling president” for far less. And Sarko’s much-derided love for yacht-owning friends and Rolex watches pales besides the Strauss-Kahns’ conspicuous consumption: “Next to Anne Sinclair” – aka Mrs DSK – “Carla is on benefits,” a gleeful president reportedly told his friends.

Of course, the sex issue has had an impact. It is significant that this week’s news that prosecutors have dropped the sexual assault charges was welcomed with relieved statements from male politicians on both sides of the spectrum, and criticism from their female counterparts. The defence minister, Gérard Longuet, said the whole affair had been “a terrible waste – such a brilliant man deserved better”. Jean-François Copé, the Gaullist party chief, expressed (a possibly disingenuous) “happiness for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was targeted by a harsh judicial procedure”. Meanwhile, the Communist MP Marie-Georges Buffet called the DA’s decision “bad news for justice and for women” – for once agreeing with her Gaullist colleague in the House, Françoise Hostalier.

DSK’s reputation has also taken a battering from the French press, as newspapers, perhaps ashamed of having ignored his personal life for so long, came up with a series of uncharacteristic revelations. Le Monde subscribers spluttered into their espressos in June when they read a full-page story that included the name of the swingers’ club where DSK was an habitué, or excerpts from a police report on his being caught with a prostitute in a parked car in the Bois de Boulogne in 2007. The French have a strong stomach, but this may have tested it too far.

DSK’s spinners have now switched to full attack mode, believing that this is their last chance to rebuild their man’s tattered reputation. Both Le Monde and Le Journal du Dimanche have come out with competing accounts (worthy of Sylvie Krin herself) of the torment endured over the past three months by DSK and his wife, cloistered in their luxury New York pad. It’s so ham-fisted and overblown that you’d think it was really sponsored by his Socialist rivals, cottoning on at last to the fact that his support in any capacity in the upcoming presidential race might come as the kiss of death. The spin doctors seem to think that dubbing Anne Sinclair “Mother Courage” and DSK “the homeless, harsh exile, treated like a pariah”, who “spent his prison days… solving complicated mathematical equations or playing chess on his iPad” will decisively tip public opinion in his favour once more. Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/dominique-strauss-kahn/8717995/Even-the-French-wont-vote-for-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-now.html

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

It's all smiles in Manhattan for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but in France sexual politics has changed for ever

For Dominique Strauss-Kahn, it was all smiles as he walked out of court. But back in France there has been a tectonic change in attitudes, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair leave the apartment where they are staying in New York Photo: AFP

by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris

8:58PM BST 02 Jul 2011

The photograph of Dominique Strauss-Kahn smiling with his glamorous wife, Anne Sinclair, as a free man in New York speaks volumes.

Everything about their appearance and demeanour telegraphs "victory", in this legal wrangle worthy of a television courtroom drama.

But, regardless of the outcome, the allegations that have emerged, both in court and in the media, about Mr Strauss-Kahn's escapades have caused a tectonic change in French politics, where habitual sexism and routine male straying were once seen as harmless.

French male politicians seemed slow on the uptake, but the women made up for it in spades. Seven of them, from the far Right to the far Left, and including two cabinet ministers, promptly denounced the chauvinism of their colleagues in scathing tones.

"I never wear a skirt when I come to the National Assembly for Wednesday's questions," disclosed Chantal Jouanno, the secretary of state for sports, and a former karate national champion, explaining thatSophie rude gestures, catcalls and jeers were so habitual among male MPs that they were never recorded or censured.

In a country where the most stringent privacy laws in the Western world are usually supported by public opinion and editors, suddenly the media were re-examining their choices. "Investigative reporting must stop at the bedroom door" had once been a mantra.

A couple of weeks ago, Le Monde, France's most austere broadsheet, where "all the news that's fit to print" had for half a century mostly meant arcane political and economics features written in high jargon, gave pride of place on most of its page three to a long piece on Strauss-Kahn's alleged escapades. This included the name and address of a swingers dining club where he was apparently known to habitués as "Le Ministre", and a police report on his having been surprised enjoying a prostitute's favours in a parked car in the Bois de Boulogne in 2007.

This was strong, indeed unprecedented, stuff.

A few days later, a Gaullist junior minister, Gorges Tron, who is also the mayor of his suburban town, got accused of sexual assault by two City Hall employees who alleged that he had abused them during reflexology foot massage seances he was, it was disclosed, in the habit of giving women in a specially appointed office. That this bizarre arrangement, on City time and presumably budget, was allowed to go on for years showed how much French politicians believed they could get away with.

Mr Tron, in time-honoured fashion, accused the women of political manoeuvring, and one of them of theft. But he was ordered by Nicolas Sarkozy to resign from the cabinet; and the National Assembly promptly voted to lift his MP's immunity, meaning he will have to fight charges in a criminal court in the coming months. The feeling in France was that this would never have happened before "L'Affaire DSK".

Now, however, if you are to believe the Socialist luminaries being interviewed all day on television after the latest developments in New York, everything is supposed to go back to square one.

Never mind that, as the alleged victim's lawyer said, "you can be a liar and still have been raped". "Dominique" was coming back: the white knight of the Socialist primaries. "It has all been a nightmare," as Jack Lang, the former culture minister said. The philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, a prominent proponent of DSK's innocence, expressed his "happiness".

It remains to be seen whether French women will cave in meekly. This, to put it mildly, is very unlikely.

"Are we supposed to go back to our baskets nicely like before?" the novelist and feminist Sophie Chauveau asked. "I think not. You can't put this toxic paste back into the tube now."

Mr Sarkozy, who remained silent throughout L'Affaire, is watching with interest. Soon to be a father again, his own wife's wealth a pittance next to Miss Sinclair's, he feels that the character and extravagant habits he has been excoriated for in the past are no longer the issue for him, but rather for his adversary.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: why French women put up with it

The culture that allows French men to see female colleagues as fair game is still alive and well, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris

Dominique Strauss-Kahn listens to proceedings in his case in New York state Supreme Court Photo: AP

8:00AM BST 22 May 2011

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You could tell something unscripted was happening on the set of Thursday night's prime-time discussion programme on Dominique Strauss-Kahn by the stony faces of the male guests. There were several top newspaper and news magazines editors, a former Justice Minister and president of the Supreme Court, and a couple of politicians. The lone woman on the set, Hélène Jouan, a senior current affairs chief at France Inter - The French answer to Radio Four - broke into the cosy excuses mouthed by everyone for Strauss-Kahn's predicament. Every woman journalist, she said, knew the pervasive atmosphere fostered by powerful men in France, in which females were at the very least importuned with impunity, and disregarded – not even disbelieved – when worse happened. This had created, she said, the culture in which someone like Strauss-Kahn could, and did, think he could get away with anything.

She herself, Jouan said, hadn't been the victim of over-the-red-line harassment, but the very atmosphere in which salacious propositioning texts or late-night knocks on her hotel room door by politicians on the campaign trail were a common occurrence. She said it "was so heavy sometimes that at the beginning of my career, I almost gave up journalism."

The lack of response from the hitherto voluble other guests was spectacular. Robert Badinter, the former Socialist Justice Minister, had just ranted against the evils of the American justice system, which, he said, "submitted Strauss-Kahn to a death by public pillorying when he ought to have been protected by the presumption of innocence." Falling back on that hardy French perennial, anti-Americanism, everyone had opined that a system in which elected judges took into account public sentiment, sometimes even from "the popular classes", was "the worst possible" and "allowed every excess."

Jouan's statements hit the French Zeitgeist at a key moment. Ever since the French were confronted with the unimaginable pictures of one of their rulers, a man widely expected to become President of the Republic, unshaven and in handcuffs in the dock of a Manhattan courthouse, reactions have been increasingly split between disbelieving shock and knowing outrage – and more and more, as one tin-eared Strauss-Kahn supporter after another dropped a toxic brick into the debate, along gender, and, to a lesser extent, class lines.

"Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help," said Jean-François Kahn, the crusading editor of the Left-wing Marianne weekly. Jack Lang, a law don famous for having been François Mitterrand's high-profile, graffiti-loving, diversity-fostering Culture Minister, dismissed it all rather infelicitously as an "overblown" affair: "Really, nobody died in that hotel room."

Meanwhile, women started talking. Memona Hintermann, a respected television correspondent, recalled telling a couple of years back about being nearly assaulted by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi when she went to Tripoli's Presidential palace to interview him, only to be met with flippant indifference upon her return. "Well, of course, he's a seducer," she was told with knowing smirks.

Everyone suddenly had stories to tell. The actress who was ordered in a very few rude words by the legendary actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault to perform a sex act on him before he would even deign to allow her to audition for him (she walked out). The radiojournalist who, some years back, kneeling on the carpet of the Mayor of Rouen and one-time presidential hopeful, Jean Lecanuet, to plug in her Nagra recorder, found him close behind her in an expectant pose. The women political correspondents who recalled L'Express's famous editor, Françoise Giroud, advising them on how to dress and to make up in order to "make politicians talk."

I have good reason to believe them. First, because I had heard the stories over the years – and because it is impossible not to notice how many women journalists are "linked" - and sometimes married - to French politicians. Second because I, too, remember all too well my junior reporting days for a French news-weekly, a couple of decades ago, when the late Gaullist MP Robert-André Vivien called me "my little honeyrabbit" one minute into our interview; or when the former Socialist Paris Senator Claude Estier offered to drive me home since I lived in his constituency, only to "mistake" my knee for the stick shift at every red light.

This, and other similar instances, was far from the circumstances of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged assault – although not getting the story for refusing to play the game with a vindictive interviewee, which was always possible, would have had me derided as a "sissy" by my French editor. Writing it up humorously was never an option in the obsequious world of French political journalism, at least at the time.

I never felt threatened, and was easily able to talk my way out of what was very obviously on offer – a valuable skill in France. But it always remains, like low-volume static, at the back of interactions between men in a situation of power and the women who have to work with them. Tristane Banon, the young writer who told of being violently assaulted by Strauss-Kahn back in 2002, when she was only 22, remarks tellingly that no secretary "under the age of 60 or not obese" ever wanted to work for him at the National Assembly.

Most of the time, Frenchwomen conform to expectations that they will be "sophisticated" and not take any of this "seriously", i.e. not complain. In the case of Strauss-Kahn, his womanising, with or without forceful persuasion, got far enough that his spin doctors, a four-person team with a manner to rival Alastair Campbell's, have had to threaten, bully and intimidate a number of his "conquests". Banon, for instance, saw her book bowdlerised, had job offers suddenly retracted and nasty unfounded rumours started on her alleged lifestyle. No wonder that she shies from lodging a formal lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn.

Two women have remained remarkably silent over the whole affair. One is Strauss-Kahn's long-suffering wife, the television personality and art heiress Anne Sinclair, who has supported him in über-Hillary Clinton style through this as in every previous episode. (If you look at previous French first ladies, from Anne-Aymone Giscard d'Estaing to Danielle Mitterrand to Bernadette Chirac, all in unflinching denial throughout well-charted "incidents" in their husbands' lives, you have to admit Sinclair had the genre nailed down.)

The other is France's leading feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, acknowledged as Simone de Beauvoir's intellectual successor, who is married to the former Socialist justice minister, Robert Badinter.

As it happens, the Badinters and the Strauss-Kahns, in addition to being political buddies, are close enough friends that they take holidays together and keep in regular touch. Breakfast conversation may remain strained for the foreseeable future chez les Badinter, after Robert's statements of the past week – but so far, the old, increasingly tattered French omertà still holds.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: A Frenchman sunk by a sex scandal?

If the allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn end the popular IMF chief's presidential candidacy, it would be a first for France, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn to appear in New York court over alleged sex attack on hotel maid Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 7:04AM BST 16 May 2011

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s likely candidacy – and probable victory – next year against Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential elections (he had been leading by double digits in every poll in recent months, even without declaring himself officially) should have ushered in a series of firsts for France’s political life. First French Socialist leader to have officially discounted Marxism; first Jew directly elected to the presidency; and first seriously rich president in a country where money, not sex, is a dirty word.

Instead, DSK, as he is known here, will go down in history as the first French politician whose career imploded because of a sex scandal, not a financial one. When the news broke in Paris early yesterday that France’s former finance minister had been arrested by the New York police for alleged sexual assault on a hotel housekeeper, reactions here were split between sheer disbelief, suspicions of entrapment and all-too-many knowing shrugs.

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn is well-known as a seducer,” his official biographer, Michel Taubmann, said. “I can’t believe he would force himself on an unwilling woman. That doesn’t make sense.”

Such a statement would come across as damning in most Western countries. In France, it is seen as a spirited defence. Until today, complicated sexual lives, multiple divorces and serial adultery never hampered political careers. François Mitterrand famously ran three parallel families while president. He appointed a former girlfriend of his, Edith Cresson (a married woman) as prime minister in 1991. His predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, used to borrow a Ferrari from his friend Roger Vadim, the film director and Brigitte Bardot’s first husband, when he went on the pull. (He once crashed it into a milk float early one morning on his way back to the Elysée.) Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy were known for eyeing up comely reporters and female junior ministers.

In that context, DSK’s notorious penchant (and more) for a legion of pretty women did him no harm at all. “If anything,” Taubmann recalls, “he was the one harassed, not the reverse — I’ve seen time and again women MPs, party workers, etc brazenly passing on notes, hoping he would notice them.”

Alleged assault, however, is another matter entirely. “If the whole situation isn’t exposed for being a political set-up in the next 24 to 48 hours,” French leading polling expert Stéphane Rozès warns, “Monsieur Strauss-Kahn’s political career is finished. He is, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty, but even suspicion of attempted rape will make it impossible for him to stand.”

It is well worth noting that it took the long arm of New York’s finest to make the Strauss-Kahn scandal incontrovertible even to the very cagey French press. With the help of the internet — the great difference with the Mitterrand years, where the average French voter was left ignorant of the president’s natural children, for instance, and stringent privacy laws were supplemented by thousands of illegal phone taps directly commandeered by his private office — all the stories about his womanising have filtered down for years.

What is more surprising is that DSK has also been accused in the past of assault along eerily similar lines, if not as brutal as what the NYPD spokesman has alleged. Journalist and novelist Tristane Banon, a god-daughter of DSK’s second wife Brigitte Guillemette, recalled in a 2007 book, then in a TV chat show that same year, going to interview Strauss-Kahn to an address “he gave me, neither his office nor his flat; an elegantly appointed studio, with a bed in an alcove”, in which, she said, he grabbed her, tore off her bra, and she only managed to escape after a serious scuffle. “I kicked him, I called him a rapist, he didn’t seem to care,” she said. (DSK’s name was bleeped out in the chat show.)

Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist local politician, confirmed the story yesterday to the respected website Le Post. Banon consulted a barrister, but finally decided not to sue, a decision her mother now regrets having encouraged her to do so. “She was just starting out in journalism,” says Mansouret. “I was afraid she’d be defined by this story.” She says her daughter will give a press conference “in the coming days”.

Other instances may well resurface. Aurélie Filipetti, a respected Socialist MP and Ségolène Royal supporter, said in 2008 that she had been groped by DSK and would “forever make sure” she was never “alone in a room with him”.

And yet nobody among DSK’s spin doctors and advisers seemed to think this would blow up in the face of their candidate. In recent weeks, as the probability of his candidacy looked certain, and politicians and the press made hay of his taking a ride in a Porsche owned by his main adviser, Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair sued France-Soir, a Paris newspaper, for disclosing the benign fact that he had bought three suits from a French bespoke tailor in Washington, who also dressed several US presidents, for a sum estimated “between $7,000 and $35,000 apiece”. Looking rich – he is in his own right and his wife, the granddaughter of one of France’s great art collectors, is even more wealthy – was seen as infinitely more toxic.

On the other side of the divide, Nicolas Sarkozy’s team were rubbing their hands at the prospect of their own man’s taste for bling, Rolex watches and expensive pens being negated by DSK’s own tastes for luxury.

“What are holidays in my wife’s family house on the Mediterranean next to a three million euro riyad in Marakesh?” Sarkozy himself was reported to have said to Cabinet members.

When he was appointed to the IMF in 2007 with the support of Nicolas Sarkozy — who saw a welcome opportunity of ridding himself of a dangerous opponent, at least for a time — most DSK-watchers warned that Dominique, for all his sophistication and razor-sharp intelligence, would do well as head of the world’s economic watchdog, but might not realise the cultural gap between life in Paris and Washington. Sure enough, barely a year later, DSK’s affair with an IMF economist, the Hungarian Piroska Nagy, made international headlines.

Amazingly, he survived that crisis. It probably helped that the disclosures occurred exactly three days after the beginning of the financial meltdown, on October 18, 2008. After an internal inquiry, the IMF published findings that Strauss-Kahn, universally seen as a safe pair of hands in difficult times, had neither favoured his mistress, nor harassed her. Bowing to American mores, DSK apologised publicly to his high-profile wife, something he had never bothered to do before in France, and Ms Nagy soon afterwards took the opportunity of a well-compensated redundancy when DSK decided to bring cost-cutting home to the IMF, and shed 600 top jobs.

In the following years, he burnished his credentials as a hard-working boss, criss-crossing the globe to help bail out failing financial institutions and defaulting countries, all the while avoiding criticism from the Right or the Left — he is one of the stars of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, for instance, in which he details the work done to keep the economic sphere from exploding, and calls for more regulation of financial institutions in moderate, convincing tones.

Unlike most of France’s political elite, but like Nicolas Sarkozy — and Marine Le Pen — Strauss-Kahn is not a civil servant and a graduate of the top government school, ENA. He found himself, as finance minister, constantly sneered at by his supercilious mandarins for what was seen as his “inferior” education, even though he has taught at Stanford and Harvard, and co-authored major economics books. When, between political mandates, he turned to the private sector to make a living, instead of sliding back effortlessly into a well-paid, guaranteed-for-life civil service job, he was derided for a supposed crass love of money. Helping to save the world economy and being constantly voted France’s most popular politician, on track for the presidency no less, was essential recognition at last.

But all this came to a crashing halt on Saturday, as DSK was walked out of the first-class cabin of Air France flight 23 sitting on the tarmac of JFK airport, to be arraigned at the Harlem Special Victims Unit of the NYPD, and subsequently charged with “attempted rape, [a] criminal sexual act, and unlawful imprisonment”.

The French presidential race is wide open again, as DSK’s closest contender in the Socialist primaries, the lacklustre François Hollande, and Nicolas Sarkozy refrain from commenting for fear of appearing too eager to take advantage of their rival’s meltdown.

The only untroubled beneficiary is the Front National’s Marine Le Pen. “I am utterly unsurprised,” she said yesterday. “He must be presumed innocent - but everyone in the Paris political village knew of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s pathological relations with women.”

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011