© Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP
IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in hot water with American authorities.
IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in hot water with American authorities.
A top French politician nicknamed "the great seducer" was dragged off a flight at Kennedy Airport Saturday after he was accused of sodomizing a Manhattan hotel maid, sources said.
Port Authority cops grabbed Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a presidential hopeful in France, moments before his Air France plane took off about 4:45 p.m.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, allegedly crept up behind a maid after she entered his room and forced her to perform oral sex on him, sources said.
The woman broke free and ran out of the room. Strauss-Khan quickly headed for the airport, sources said.
Charges against Strauss-Kahn, who is married to well-known French TV journalist Anne Sinclair, were pending Saturday night, sources said.
Hours before Strauss-Kahn was pulled from the flight, a close Socialist Party ally claimed he was the target of a smear campaign by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"There is now a totally structured and orchestrated campaign, which has already been announced by Mr. Sarkozy and his closest allies, to attack the character of Strauss-Kahn," Socialist politician Jean-Marie Le Guen told Europe 1 radio.
This is not the first time Strauss-Kahn has been embroiled in a sex scandal.
Three years ago, the former French finance minister was accused of having a fling with a former underling at the Davos international forum.
He must have thought she'd be too embarrassed or cowed to raise an alarm and complain to the police. He figured wrong, for once, and his career is in shreds. I hope the NY courts deny him bail as an obvious flight risk and stick him in jail at Rikers Island until trial, in a few months.
His allies are claiming he's the target of smear campaign by Sarkozy, which might be true. However, Strauss-Kahn just trumped that effort, all by himself. Unless he will that claim Sarkozy planted the hotel maid in a nondescript corporate hotel in Manhattan, just waiting for him, and she made up that entire story. Good luck with that conspiracy theory.