A new account of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been pieced together and appears to support suggestions he was the victim of a conspiracy.Shockwaves reverberated through France and the financial world five months ago when the former head of the International Monetary Fund was arrested at New York’s JFK airport and accused of rape.
The investigation, due to be published in full in the New York Review of Books, indicates Mr Strauss-Kahn probably thought little of his brief sexual encounter with a chambermaid in the presidential suite of a Manhattan hotel.
Indeed, immediately after it was over, the 62-year-old, universally known as DSK, picked up his briefcase and headed straight to a nearby seafood restaurant to meet his daughter and her new boyfriend for lunch.
Though he would later successfully argue that he had consensual sex with Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old Guinean woman, his reputation, along with his hopes of becoming the next French president, lay in tatters.
The new account does little to alter the perception of Mr Strauss-Kahn as a man unable, or unwilling, to control his sexual cravings and prepared to take extraordinary risks.But it also claims Mr Strauss-Kahn was tipped off that his BlackBerry might have been hacked by his political opponents and that a friend warned him that an effort would be made to derail his presidential campaign with a scandal.
Staff at the Sofitel New York hotel are also said to have been filmed doing a ‘dance of celebration’ and ‘high-fiving’ as they waited for police to arrive after the incident.
Yesterday the investigation, by the American journalist Edward Epstein, was dismissed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party as ‘an obvious manipulation’. Read More
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