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In a compiled photo, ex-IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, left, is shown in a 2011 picture and French writer Tristane Banon, who accuses Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape, is shown in 2004.
In a compiled photo, ex-IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, left, is shown in a 2011 picture and French writer Tristane Banon, who accuses Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape, is shown in 2004.
The parade of women accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual brutality has just taken another twist. A very bizarre twist.
It started in 2007 with allegations by Tristane Banon, a French journalist, that Strauss-Kahn had grappled "violently" with her and tried to undo her jeans and bra during a private interview. A year later, Piroska Nagy, a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, told IMF investigators that Strauss-Kahn had pressured her into a sexual relationship when she worked for him. The investigators confirmed the relationship but said there was "no evidence" that Strauss-Kahn had "threatened [her] in any way to induce her to engage in the affair." Other women accused him of making crude passes, and in May, he was indicted for allegedly assaulting a maid at a New York hotel. That case has crumbled because the accuser, according to prosecutors, lied to them about a previous rape. But the bruises in her vagina and the semen on her shirt, which reportedly matches Strauss-Kahn's DNA, leave him with a lot to explain.
Two weeks ago, Banon, Strauss-Kahn's initial accuser, filed a complaint accusing him of attempted rape. And another woman is now claiming to have endured sexual aggression at his hands: Banon's mother, Anne Mansouret.
