IMF head held in sex assault

last updated 8 January 2015

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, was being held under a suicide watch in New York this week after being charged with sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid. The maid, a devout Muslim from Guinea who lives in the Bronx with her 15-year-old daughter, said she entered the Sofitel luxury suite around noon to clean it when Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom and attacked her. She said he locked her in the room, forced her to perform oral sex on him, and tried to rape her before she escaped and immediately reported the attack. Strauss-Kahn, 62, a prominent Socialist who had been expected to run for French president next year, was arrested on an Air France plane and identified in a lineup. Deemed a flight risk, he was initially denied bail.

Strauss-Kahn has been accused of assault before, said Lukas I. Alpert in the New York Daily News. French journalist Tristane Banon said on a French talk show in 2007 that Strauss-Kahn had tried to rape her during a 2002 interview. Banon said he acted like a “rutting chimpanzee,” tearing at her clothes as she kicked him. And in 2008, the IMF head was investigated for an affair he had with Piroska Nagy, an underling of his at the time. Nagy told the IMF board that Strauss-Kahn had pressured her into sex, and called him “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.”

The IMF has some “soul-searching” to do, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Despite all it knew of Strauss-Kahn’s inappropriate behavior, it “let him off with a wrist slap.” But then, the IMF’s board is “dominated by Europeans” who make excuses for their own. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn’s French defenders “are throwing around nutty conspiracy theories,” said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. More than half the French initially believed that the alleged attack was a setup engineered by President Nicolas Sarkozy to discredit his rival. Still, there’s one “inspiring” element here: In America, “even a maid can have dignity and be listened to when she accuses one of the most powerful men in the world of being a predator.”