Strauss-Kahn Affair: 'Perhaps I was naive'

I don't know how interesting a whole book would be on DSK's downfall, but if this article, and the tales of skulduggery that we know already are anything to go by, pretty interesting I would have thought.

There is an embedded video in the original article, you may want to view that prior to reading the thing. But in the meantime, a taster.

If the name Cyrus Vance rings a bell, it is, obviously, Cyrus Vance Jr.

Strauss-Kahn affair: 'Perhaps I was naive. I didn't believe they'd go that far'

Ex-IMF chief tells investigative author Edward Jay Epstein that he thinks furore over sex attack case was created by opponents
Edward Jay Epstein
27 April 2012

The Pavillon de la Reine is a luxury hotel in the heart of the Marais in Paris. It carries an air of a 19th-century establishment, with its crisp and elegant decor designed to attract globetrotters in their quest for a quiet and discreet place of rest.

It is here, on Friday 13 April, that I arranged to meet Dominique Strauss-Kahn for his first major newspaper interview since his downfall. For a man who has spent years operating at the highest levels of French and global politics, he clearly retains an ingrained habit of punctuality, arriving precisely at the appointed time – 11am – walking over and shaking hands with a firm grip. "Thank you so much for your interest in this case," he says.

Strauss-Kahn is much smaller than I had expected, about 1.7 metres (5ft 7in). Impeccably dressed, he was wearing a dark suit and loafers, and an open-necked blue shirt that showed off a deep tan set against white hair and deep set eyes. Though I'd never met him before, he was instantly recognisable. We sit in sofas in a corner of the hotel lobby, and for the next two and a half hours, over double espressos, we discuss what amounts to one of the most public and extreme falls from grace of any major public figure in recent times.

Eleven months earlier, on 13 May 2011, Strauss-Kahn had stepped out of a yellow New York cab in front of the Sofitel, another high-end hotel, in midtown Manhattan. CCTV footage that I have obtained and studied in the course of writing a book on the Sofitel scandal, Three Days in May, shows him entering the hotel, sporting a rain coat and pulling a black suitcase behind him.

At that moment, he was a man at the very top of his game. He was one of the most powerful and respected politicians and economists in the world. A former French economics minister, he was presiding over the 178-nation International Monetary Fund. The next day he would be departing New York on his way to Berlin to see the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to try and enlist her support for a plan he had devised, codenamed "Comprehensive", to head off the impending disaster of a Greek default on its sovereign debt default. "If Germany backed it, the other European governments would follow," he explains in our interview. Otherwise, the crises "would quickly spiral out of control and spread to Spain, Italy and other Eurozone countries."

He was also poised to announce his candidacy for the French presidency. "I planned to make my formal announcement on 15 June and I had no doubt I would be the candidate of the Socialist party," he says. Nor were there any doubts in his mind about his chances of winning the election, as he obtained his key card for the Sofitel's aptly named presidential suite. (He had not solicited the upgrade to the $3,000-a-night suite but it was the sort of royal treatment he had received from the hotel before and to which he had become accustomed, entitled even, paying only the $525 rate for an ordinary room.) Polls at the time suggested he was nearly 20 points ahead of the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and he had more than a fighting chance to replace him as occupant of the Elysée Palace. more

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