Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair leave the New York State Supreme court on July 1, 2011 in New York.
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The incredible story provided empirical evidence of DSK's weaknesses and raised questions about his suitability for the French presidency, for which he was thought before the scandal to be the strongest Socialist candidate to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy. Way too much of a penchant for pleasure and risk. An almost amoral confidence in his own good fortune. And finally, an entourage of facilitators ready to make excuses for him. Even if the American justice system drops all charges, for DSK this episode has meant getting a clinical examination that reveals the skeleton beneath the suit.
The way he related to women lies at the heart of all the suspicion surrounding him. In the Strauss-Kahn fan club, his insatiable need was not a taboo, in fact, it was viewed with amusement. In the 1990s, staffers at the Ministry of Finance would say "encore une" (another one) during DSK's absences from the office, while chief of staff Villeroy de Galhau preferred the explanation "he's gone out on an errand."
Even business leaders and high-level government officials talked about his relentless womanizing. As one of his oldest advisors put it: "He has as many affairs in a month as you or I would have in our whole lives". DSK himself somewhat defensively told a Libération reporter last April: "Yes, I love women...So what?"
Eyes Wide Shut
Yet nobody was surprised when they saw Anne Sinclair by his side at the doors of the New York court building — no one doubts that they love each other deeply. "They're a real couple", says Hélène Roques, who worked with DSK at the Ile-de-France regional council in the dark years after his resignation in 1999 from Lionel Jospin's government. To which someone else who knows them adds: "As Baudelaire would say, he chose a woman who loves and understands him." If they'd all too often seen Sinclair pretend not to notice the way he ogled or texted other women, they also saw the public declarations of love she and he sent each other at difficult times, in blogs or even IMF communiqués. Those loyal to him refused to see that there was anything atypical about the couple.
But the shock of seeing press photos of "their Dominique" in handcuffs had people going back and reviewing the past, checking for any signs that could have presaged something like this. "Let's face it, the erotic esthetic of Eyes Wide Shut is Dominique's preferred universe," says a former female colleague, referring to the Stanley Kubrick film. DSK advisor Nina Mitz remembers his enthusiasm for The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's best-selling novel: he loved the encrypted messages, the machinations, the occult rituals, and the liberties taken with Christian morality, she says.
A former colleague remembers an argument he had with DSK. He was incensed that his boss could pursue a libertine lifestyle yet envisage running for president. In 2003, Le Nouvel Observateur reported that a nameless "government minister" had been spotted at a swingers' soirée. Worried, he confronted DSK with this, pointing to the need for caution and advising him to tone it down. "You're just saying that because you're jealous," he reports DSK as having replied in an untroubled tone of voice. Strauss-Kahn would later tell the French newspaper La Libération: "For years, there have been rumors of giant orgies. But I've yet to see anything in the media about that..."
After the mention in the Nouvel Observateur, those working for DSK realized that he wasn't just simply a pleasure-seeker — he was a gambler. "Except he doesn't just play chess with his computer. He plays with fire," a family member said. There have already been two occasions in the past when DSK thought his career was over. In November 1999, implicated in the Mutuelle nationale des étudiants de France (MNEF) scandal with charges of falsifying invoices, he was forced to resign from his post as Minister of Finance. Then, in October 2008, his affair with a Hungarian economist, Piroska Nagy, who was his subordinate at the IMF, made world headlines. Both times, he was absolved. As DSK is so fond of saying: "With a little intelligence, you can get out of anything..."
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