Following the arrest in New York on sex assault charges of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of the attempted rape of a hotel chambermaid on May 15th, allegations surfaced in France of his involvement in previous incidents of sexual abuse.
Strauss-Kahn's arrest overnight destroyed his expected candidature in next year's French presidential elections, The former French finance minister and leading Socialist Party heavyweight was regularly tipped by opinion polls as being on course for a landslide victory over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.
Hours after his arrest, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist Party general and regional councilor in Normandy1, last Sunday revealed in several media interviews how she had persuaded her daughter, the writer Tristane Banon, now aged 31, not to lodge a formal complaint against Strauss-Kahn for an alleged sexual assault he made upon her in 2002. Banon claimed the attack, in which she said the two struggled on the floor as he tried to undress her against her will, happened in a Paris apartment to which she was invited by Strauss-Kahn after interviewing him for abook she was then preparing.
In an exclusive interview with Mediapart published here, Mansouret further reveals that she had at the time informed Socialist Party leaders about the attack on her daughter. One of them was the then party leader, François Hollande, now a leading contender to become the party's candidate for next year's elections, who earlier this week, he said the assault as described the charges against Strauss-Kahn "does not resemble the man I know". She said another was former French prime minister Laurent Fabius, who told her "I don't want to know".
The allegations come amid growing controversy over Strauss-Kahn's behaviour towards women, dismissed by many within his party as that of a lady's man, but which others have suggested should have alerted attention and action.
Banon's lawyer announced earlier this week that she would be filing a complaint for the alleged sexual assault by Strauss-Kahn nine years ago. French news website Rue 89 on Sunday re-published a television interview she gave in 2007 in which she recounted the assault by politician whose name was concealed during the broadcast by an audio ‘bleep', and which she said occurred in 2002.
In the TV chat-show programme, '93, faubourg Saint-Honoré', Banon recounted how she had been given an appointment by Strauss-Kahn in an apartment empty save for "a video-recorder, a TV, a bed beyond, and bare woodenbeams". She told the progamme that "to reply, he wanted me to hold his hand, then his arm" and said the situation then degenerated. "We finished up in a fight, we fought on the ground, I gave out kicks, he undid my bra, he tried to take off my jeans. When we fought, I mentioned the word ‘rape' to scare him. It didn't frighten him."
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1: Anne Mansouret is an elected councillor from the Eure département (equivalent to a county), sitting on councils for the broader Upper Normandy (Haute-Normandie) region of north France.
'Everyone knew'
Enlargement : Illustration 4
Last Sunday, Banon's mother Anne Mansouret told regional daily Paris Normandie:"Today I regret having dissuaded my daughter from filing a complaint against DSK," she told Paris-Normandie. "I have a heavy responsibility. After the events, we discussed [things], talked lots. And finally she decided, we decided, not to launch [legal] proceedings. You know, my daughter was in bad shape, but Tristane is the goddaughter of Dominque's second wife. It was difficult for family and amicable reasons."
Speaking to Mediapart, Mansouret's said Strauss-Kahn first met her daughter Tristane at the French parliament, when the young women was preparing her book entitled ‘Erreurs avouées... au masculine' (Confessed mistakes...of the masculine kind'), eventually published as a series of interviews with French celebrities from the world of fashion, literature and politics about the mistakes they regretted making. Mansouret said that was when he proposed they met again, leading to the alleged attack in the apartment.
Anne Mansouret told Mediapart that in 2002, shortly after the alleged events, she informed the then-Socialist Party First Secretary François Hollande. "He was fantastic, kind," she recalled. "He personally phoned Tristane, he was superb. "
Hollande's principal aide, Stéphane Le Foll, now a Euro-MP, confirmed that the meeting took place. "I didn't have direct involvement in managing this affair, but I know it was raised," he told Mediapart. "François tried to deal with it in a very respectful manner. He called Tristane Banon, he didn't attempt to impose anything at all, he listened to her and tried to reassure her. It was he who looked after it directly.
Mansouret said she also informed another senior Socialist Party heavyweight, former French prime minister Laurent Fabius, a major figure in the north-west regional party structure, but received a quite different reaction. "He said ‘I don't want to know, I don't want to be told'," she recounted.
"When he [Strauss-Kahn] left for the United States, I told [Fabius supporters] in the region ‘he's taking a mighty risk joining the IMF because there, they don't excuse sexual incidents' [...] Dominique, who has a tendency to jump people in the lifts, if he simply told a girl that she had a pretty arse he'd be arrested coming out of the lift."
"I was able to ascertain that everyone knew, in Paris and here [Normandy], during congresses, conventions, that he was someone who we called a ‘coinceur'1. Meaning he was sexually obsessed. Which is all the same a problem."
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1: From the French verb coincer, in this sense taken from its meaning 'to corner' or 'to get hold of'.
No word from Socialist Party HQ
Mansouret's account raises the question of why did the Socialist Party remain silent about the problem, to the point of making Strauss-Kahn their favourite for the presidential elections. At party headquarters, very few agreed to respond to the question, most of those contacted explaining that they feared making his current situation worse still.
Socialist Party national secretary for environmental issues, Laurence Rossignol, who was based at party headquarters when Mansouret raised the allegations that Strauss-Kahn attacked her daughter, said she had talked to Tristane's mother about the accusations, but that: "I never spoke to anyone at all about my private conversations with others." Asked whether that appropriate concerning serious accusations over potentially criminal acts, she replied: "It was a private conversation, it still is."
Gaëlle Lenfant, the party's national secretary for women's rights, was not one of the circle of those informed at the time of the alleged events, although she said she "knew about the story of Tristane Banon and her mother."
"But there was no internal action taken to my knowledge," Lenfant added."If it's true it is horrible [...] The question then would be about the auto-censorship in society. Society is always ill at ease about these cases of violence against women."
Contacted by Mediapart, neither François Hollande nor Laurent Fabius answered our requests for an interview. Similarly, we received no response from Guillaume Bachelay, who sits on the same Normandy regional council as Anne Mansouret.
Mansouret said that since since talking publicly about the affair last Sunday she had received messages of support from party militants, all women, but had received no official contact from Socialist Party headquarters. She said that the local federal secretary for the party in her Eure département (county) in Normandy, Yves Léonard, told her "to shut your mouth". Léonard denies this, adding that he had sent an email to all party activists in the region in which he spoke of the lack of discretion shown by "a Eure councilor". He told Mediapart: "Many of our comrades were shocked by the simultaneous nature [with Strauss-Kahn's arrest] of her statements."
Léonard became the party's local federal secretary only in 2008, but said he was aware of the accusations Tristane Banon leveled against Strauss-Kahn before last Sunday. "I had been told about them, but it has been quite some time that Anne stopped talking about them," he said. "It was difficult for us to be completely sure about the accusations. There was a sort of incredulity. And also, she seemed to have found a solution to the affair. There was also the book by her daughter, in which she spoke of very difficult relations with her mother. All of that appeared a bit confused. Anne talks a lot. What was the part of truth? It was a subject that lay around in the background, but it had left our thoughts."
'She warned of revenge'
Mansouret said she met Strauss-Kahn "two or three weeks" after the alleged attack on her daughter, in a bar in the central 7th arrondissement of Paris. Although not socially close to him, Mansouret was a friend of Strauss-Kahn's second wife who was also Tristane's godmother.
She her meeting with Strauss-Kahn lasted about one hour. "He appeared sincerely sorry," she said. She recalled Strauss Kahn as saying: ‘I don't know what came over me, I lost it. I invited her because I had the impression she was in agreement, after that I lost it.'
Mansouret said she believes still that Strauss-Kahn was sincere during his meeting with her, and that he "did not understand the consequences of his actions".
However, Strauss-Kahn's communications advisor, Ramzi Khiroun, has previously refuted the allegations and has said they were leveled in an attempt at revenge. In journalist Michel Taubmann's book about the former IMF chief, le Roman vrai de Dominique Strauss-Kahn (‘The true novel about Dominique Strauss-Kahn), Khiroun claims he managed to convince Tristane Banon's publisher, Alain Carrière, to remove the chapter in her book that was dedicated to Strauss-Kahn. He said that Banon, during a conversation at the time, warned him ‘I will have my revenge on Dominique Strauss-Kahn.'
Since Banon's lawyer David Koubbi on Monday announced that she would be filing an official complaint in justice against Strauss-Kahn over the attack, no action has yet been taken. Under French law, a complaint for a sexual assault filed more than three years after the alleged events cannot be considered. However, in the case of attempted rape, the delay for filing a complaint is ten years.
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