Neither party filed a complaint
"At the end of August 20031, Dominique was on the return after the events that led him to resign from the Jospin government in 19992," says Ramzi Khiroun in Taubmann's book. "That was when I learned that six months earlier he had agreed to a lengthy interview with one of his daughter's friends, Tristane Banon." Khiroun said he obtained the text of the interview destined for publication in Banon's book. "We'd gone to great pains for the cases in which he'd been wrongly accused , like the Mnef, were forgotten." Khiroun [asset|aid=70483|format=250_pixels|formatter=imagecache|title=DSK+spin+chief+Ramzi+Khiroun.|align=right|href=]boasted how he and his team had even managed to remove all images of that "dark period" from public circulation, bar one. "And then Dominique, to please a friend of his daughter's, goes and revives all those stories. I asked the publisher, in a letter, to remove the interview with Dominique and to change the book jacket on which his face appeared. She gave me her word and that's what happened."
There then followed, he claimed, a sharp exchange of words between him and Banon during which she promised "to revenge" herself, and contacted journalists just a few weeks later. Khiroun's account is that the alleged sexual assault upon her never happened.
In a recent communiqué, issued following the re-surfacing of the allegations, Banon's publisher Anne Carriere has denied Khiroun's version of events. "Among the series of discussions she had with different people for her book, Erreurs Avouées, Tristane Banon met with Dominique Strauss-Kahn," it read. "The behavior of the latter, according to the author, led her to cut short the interview."
"After a discussion between the author and her then-publisher, Alain Carrière, it was decided by common agreement not to include this discussion, the text adding nothing to the book," it concluded.
[asset|aid=70485|format=image|formatter=asset|title=Banon+book+cover.|align=left|href=]"Tristan Banon did not want to meet me," said Taubmann, "but she replied on Facebook. Dominique Strauss-Kahn told me that there had been no second rendezvous, and that he did not have a bachelor's pad. It is for her to say where she saw him. In this affair, there's Tristan Banon's word, which should be taken into account, that of DSK, and that of Ramzi Khiroun. I note one thing, which is that she did not file a complaint."
But it should also be noted that Strauss-Kahn never lodged a suit for calumny against Banon, following her public denunciation of him. Lending credibility to Banon's sincerity is the fact that several people have confirmed that they were informed the alleged events shortly after they were said by her to have taken place. These include not only her mother and her then-lawyer, but also several senior figures in Strauss-Kahn's Socialist Party.
"Dominique Strauss-Kahn a rapist? That is a terrible calumny," commented Taubmann. "A out-and-out seducer? That's an obvious thing about which he never displayed any precaution of covering up."
Two other books had mentioned the Banon case before it hit headlines in France and around the world last month; Sexus Politicus, by journalists Christophe Dubois and Christophe Deloire, published in 2006, and DSK les secrets d'un présidentiable, (‘DSK, the secrets of a potential president'), written under the pseudonym of Cassandre, and published in 2010.
[asset|aid=70486|format=image|formatter=asset|title=Target+of+pressure:+Sexus+Politicus.|align=right|href=]In Sexus Politicus, Dubois and Deloire did not name Banon in the passage about the allegations which, when it was published five years ago, had never been made public. They met with her mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist Party regional councilor in Normandy,who confirmed the attack happened. During their research, they were contacted by Ramzi Khiroun.
"I remember the phone call from Ramzi Khiroun, who at the time I didn't know," recalled Dubois. "He told me that he knew we were investigating DSK. We didn't hide ourselves, and we wanted to confront the person concerned [Strauss-Kahn] about the events. But we met with Ramzi Khiroun, not Dominique Strauss-Kahn."
Dubois and Deloire wrote that Khiroun "demanded to know what journalists knew about his "boss" (sic), whether they had or not obtained police documents, as he had heard mentioned". It was at that point that the pair understood that their investigation was under surveillance, for they had by then accessed a confidential report from the interior ministry that spoke of Strauss-Kahn's visits to a swingers' club in Paris. The report, an informal note on un-headed paper, described as a note blanche (white note), is rumoured to have been written by the so-called ‘cabaret' group of the Paris police brigade that targets pimping offences.
Sexus Politicus also includes an anecdote about the publication in 2003 by weekly news magazine Le Nouvel observateur of a lengthy article on swinging activities. The piece included a side box mentioning the presence at one orgy of an un-named ‘ministerial' figure who, according to a comment by one of those present, had presidential ambitions. The account, written by a journalist apparently present at the evening party, describes the politician's sexual encounters. Dubois and Deloire report in their book that the Parisian chattering classes identified the man as Strauss-Kahn, and that he allegedly phoned Le Nouvel observateur to complain about the piece.
But concerning the very grave allegations of the Banon case, Dubois and Deloire comment that it had "already caused a great stir in the alcoves of political power". Dubois and Deloire described her as a young journalist who had met Strauss-Kahn for a discussion that was cut short. "The former Minister of the Economy is said to have shown himself to be forwarding, even improper," they wrote. They reported that the young woman "considered filing a complaint", adding that then-Socialist Party leader François Hollande and another party bigwig, former prime minister Laurent Fabius, were both informed of the alleged assault, and that Hollande tried to console her in a phone call, events which Mediapart reported in detail in May.
"That chapter led to phone calls to the publisher," recalled Dubois. Sources within the publishing house Albin Michel, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Mediapart: "Jean Weil, DSK's lawyer, and Ramzi Khiroun got in touch with both the CEO Richard Ducousset and the publishing editor Alexandre Wickam, and with the authors themselves." Although under French invasion of privacy laws the passages relating to the sexual activities of Strauss-Kahn could easily have allowed a complaint to be filed, none was. If a legal challenge had been mounted, the case of Tristane Banon would undoubtedly have been detailed in public.
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1: Banon's account is that she was assaulted in 2002.
2: Strauss-Kahn resigned as Minister of Finance and Economy in 1999 after being investigated for (though not charged with) corruption, for which he was later cleared.
Spin team's 'smothering mechanism'
But Strauss-Kahn's communications and legal teams showed less reticence with the publication in 2010 of DSK les secrets d'un présidentiable, (‘DSK, the secrets of a potential president'). Just who is behind the writer's pseudonym Cassandre has been kept secret. Cassandre's self-promoted explanation is that she is a woman and former aide to Strauss-Kahn. Other suggestions are that the name hides a pair of journalists. "Cassandre presented themselves as a former collaborator of Strauss-Kahn's, I'm sure that's false," commented Michel Taubmann. Therefore it is a book founded on a lie."
[asset|aid=70182|format=250_pixels|formatter=imagecache|title=|align=right|href=]
The book (cover pictured right) contained few major new revelations about Strauss-Kahn, although it did mention the Tristane Banon case and another involving him in an alleged scene with a hotel chambermaid in Mexico.
Strauss-Kahn's communications team are all from Euro RSCG, the world's fifth-largest marketing and communications agency, and for which Ramzi Khiroun works as a consultant. "We saw Cassandre coming," commented a source within the company. "We saw straight away that the book was false. We distributed a note of several pages to the press about all the errors it contained. We said just what we thought. It was a book written anonymously, and which presented us as a "gang". We're not a gang [...] for us, an unacceptable limit had been crossed [sic]."
The "gang" in question were Strauss-Kahn's four high-flying Euro-RSCG spin doctors - Stéphane Fouks, Euro RSCG Executive co-Chairman, Ramzy Khiroun, Gilles Finkelstein and Anne Hommel. They filed a complaint against Cassandre and the book's publishers, Plon.
"They essentially complain about the use of the word describing them as a "gang", commented Plon's lawyer Christophe Bigot. "But they also asked the examining magistrate [Editor's note: a judge in charge of investigating the complaint] to identify the author of the book. The police therefore questioned the director of the publishing house, Olivier Orban, and tried to obtain a copy of the contracts. He told them that he intended to preserve the anonymity of the author and to assume his responsibility as publisher."
The lawyer for the four plaintiffs, Dominique de Leusse, defended the police mission. "Gang is a contemptuous and invective term, my clients are thus qualified as gangsters throughout the book," he said. "And because the author is hidden behind a pseudonym, the judge knew no more than that, he had the publisher questioned."
Cassandre has given just one interview, to the weekly celebrity and gossip magazine Voici, in its edition published May 8th 2010. "What I recount about DSK's presidential [election] strategy bothers his communications team," Cassandre said. "I say that in reality he is a candidate made to measure to fit with what the French public want. This team obviously want to discredit the book[...] to scupper a book, it suffices to insinuate that it's a load of crap, stuffed with incoherencies, that slanders the whole world. Then you add that there will be a trial."
Plon's lawyer Christophe Bigot acknowledged that the Euro RSCG team had largely succeeded in their campaign against the book. "It's interesting to see how Strauss-Kahn's communications people imposed a black-out on the book," he said. "The note distributed to journalists was widely picked up on, and that produced a smothering mechanism."
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See related op-ed by Antoine Perraud: Libido dominandi.
English version: Graham Tearse