Stand By Your Man

I'm pleased to see that events have moved on since this previous post to the blog site about Dominic Strauss-Khan (DSK).

DSK's his former wife (Anne Sinclair) has now left him and abandoned the ridiculous strategy of standing by her man - while French prosecutors have also decided to charge DSK over his alleged involvement in organised prostitution. 

Stand By Your Man (12 March 2012)

The Sunday Times carried a rather nauseating interview with Anne Sinclair yesterday - the wife of Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK).

I couldn't bear to inflict the whole of this boring and entirely self-serving piece on A4ES readers - so here are just a few 'highlights' to explain why Anne insists on standing by her man.

"Hands off — he’s mine"

"The hugely rich wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is standing by her man, despite the messy end of his political dreams

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called "Carlton affair" has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man

Y ou would think that she might have a nervous tic, at least, or bags under her eyes, but Anne Sinclair, the wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, strolls into the lobby of a chic Paris hotel with the insouciance and bounce of a model in a shampoo advert.

Her eyes twinkle as she tosses back her raven mane with a dazzling smile. Beneath the black cape is a shiny black, leather tank top and tight, black trousers revealing a surprisingly svelte figure for a woman of 63.

Her critics — most of them women — are baffled by the fluffy, carefree demeanour and her decision not to leave “Le Perv”, as a New York tabloid called her husband. And that was before details emerged of hotel room parties with prostitutes.

Sinclair is furious about other women putting themselves “in my place” and ordering her to jump ship. “Nobody can tell me what to do,” she says in her first interview with a foreign publication since Strauss-Kahn was accused last year of trying to rape a hotel maid in New York. “Nobody”, she adds, over a cup of herbal tea, “should be giving me advice.”

To many commentators her wifely devotion to the man who might have been France’s next president has gone way beyond the call of duty. Sinclair, whose family fortune comes from her maternal grandfather — he discovered Picasso, Braque and Matisse — did not hesitate to stump up the £3.7m bail required to get her husband out of jail in New York.

He was eventually acquitted but his troubles have only grown since then: the statute of limitations has expired on an alleged assault in Paris in 2003 but now he is embroiled in another scandal over allegations that, in between running the world’s economy as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he cavorted with prostitutes in the company of friends who put the women on their company expenses.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer has offered the memorable defence that his client could not have known that the women were prostitutes because they were naked, and therefore indistinguishable from other women, when he met them. Neither this, though, nor any of the other lurid testimony being leaked to the press from the so-called “Carlton affair” has prevented Sinclair from following the advice of the famous Tammy Wynette song, Stand by Your Man.

A flicker of concern momentarily clouds her wrinkle-free features when the subject of her loyalty to DSK comes up over breakfast with The Sunday Times last Tuesday. Then the electric blue eyes twinkle again — this time with defiance.

“I don’t interfere in other people’s lives,” she says, huskily. “So I demand that people don’t interfere in mine. It concerns only me, my family and friends, if I want to talk to them about it.”

She is said to have once flung down her napkin and stormed out of a restaurant when a friend, fearing that she was in denial, confronted her with the dark side of what some DSK supporters have called his unconventional “lifestyle choice”; but she keeps her cool while verbally carving up “so-called feminists” in between sips of tisane.

“I’ve always fought for equality between men and women,” she says. “That’s the real battle. But telling other people how to live their lives in the name of feminism — that I don’t accept.”

Anne Sinclair has recently been appointed head of the Huffington Post in France France was transfixed and horrified by DSK’s downfall last May. One day he was the putative next president, the next he was in handcuffs in the US, an alleged sexual predator, a “rutting chimpanzee”, as one of his other alleged victims described him. How had it come to this?

The scandal challenged the tacit understanding between France’s rulers and their subjects that, in exchange for being looked after with lavish benefits, the people would let their politicians enjoy the spoils of power, and the press would not intrude on their often colourful private lives. It also threw a harsh light on French patriarchal society — in which “seduction” is often described as an “art” and sexual relations with servants have their own term, les amours ancillaires.

If DSK had had an encounter with a hotel maid in Paris instead of New York, the chances are that the world would have been none the wiser. Claims by Tristane Banon, the novelist, to have been assaulted by him in 2003 went largely ignored until Nafissatou Diallo, his target in New York, blew the whistle.

Now the French are putting themselves on the analyst’s couch, wondering if their belief in the gallantry of seduction has simply been a cover for sexual abuse by dirty old men.

The media seem determined not to miss any lurid detail in the unfolding drama. The papers have been filled with the testimony that young women have offered to police about their lucrative evenings with DSK in luxury hotels from Paris to Washington.

One account leaked to the press describes him forcing himself roughly on a prostitute in the lavatory of a Parisian nightclub when he was head of the IMF before going on to an expensive hotel suite where several couples frolicked naked by a swimming pool. Women were flown out to Washington for DSK’s pleasure, sometimes introduced to IMF staff as visiting Parisian secretaries. The trips were organised by French businessmen who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the man they hoped would be president. What better way to bond than at an orgy? We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public.

Henri Leclerc, one of his lawyers, claimed that DSK had no idea that he was with prostitutes as “in these parties, you’re not necessarily dressed. I defy you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a nude woman of quality.”

Sinclair says nothing about such grotesque antics but obviously hankers for the days when the press knew its place. “We’ve lost our bearings [in the French media],” she says. “We’ve crossed a line. We haven’t been able to re-establish boundaries between the private and public. I hope that they can be re-established.”

After giving up interviewing 15 years ago, Sinclair went into media management; and she recently became the head of the French branch of The Huffington Post. Despite her obvious reservations, she insists that the news website will not shy away from covering the story of her husband’s fall from grace.

The test will be particularly tough this month. After being grilled for two days in February by investigators in Lille, her husband will face legal proceedings on the other side of the Atlantic on Thursday. The criminal case in New York was dropped but his lawyers must appear before a judge to defend him against a civil lawsuit filed by Diallo. In it, she claims that DSK forced her to have oral sex

He is also expected to be brought before Lille’s investigating magistrates on March 28 on charges linked to prostitution and corruption. Could he end up in prison again?"

What troubles me is how an otherwise intelligent person can fail to see that the misuse of wealth and power to exploit women - is not a serious or feminist issue.

Even more so when a person occupies a public position - because public trust and confidence are being misused for someone's personal gratification.

The hypocrisy of the people involved is quite staggering - makes me wonder about the state of the French Soclialist Party these days.