Strauss-Kahn scandal: ‘Never again, he promised. I am naive. I believed him’

When the telephone rings at 2am, "it is always the sign of a catastrophe", Anne Sinclair writes in her memoir, Passé composé (Perfect Tense), published this week by Grasset in Paris.

On the night of May 14th, 2011, Sinclair was in Paris, awaiting the arrival of her then husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was director of the International Monetary Fund. Her stepdaughter Camille rang in the middle of the night to say that Strauss-Kahn, known by his initials DSK, had been arrested on suspicion of having sexually assaulted a chambermaid at the Sofitel in Manhattan.

“At the time, I could not imagine for one second that the accusation was true,” Sinclair writes. “The only explanation that seems plausible to me is that of consensual sex.”

Sinclair remained silent for 10 years after the scandal. This week, she appeared on the covers of Elle and Paris-Match magazines, and gave numerous radio and television interviews. She says a Netflix film and DSK's announcement that he will give his own version of events prompted her to speak out. "I could no longer let others speak in my place." She has not told everything, she says, but everything she has said is true.

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The book recounts Sinclair's life, from her birth in New York to a wealthy Jewish family who had fled the Nazi occupation of France, to what she describes as her happy and serene present, one month before her 73rd birthday. She knew when she wrote it that most readers would turn immediately to Chapter 13, titled "The Impossible Chapter", her version of the Sofitel scandal and the collapse of her 20-year marriage to Strauss-Kahn.

Two misconceptions

Sinclair says she wanted to dispel two misconceptions: that she knew about her husband’s sex addiction, and that he and she were devoured by ambition to become president and first lady of France. When the scandal broke in May 2011, DSK was about to announce his candidacy for the 2012 presidential election.

As Sinclair prepared to travel to New York to support her errant husband, her hands shook so hard that she could not button her own clothing. For months, she could not bring herself to watch the video of the famous “perp walk” where DSK was paraded in handcuffs in front of the press.

When she lands in New York, Sinclair learns that Strauss-Kahn is imprisoned at Riker’s Island, “the most sordid prison in the US”, and that he risks a 30-year prison sentence. “I am overwhelmed. It is hard to believe this is not a movie, that my husband of 20 years is accused of the heinous crime of rape. I can only stand by him. My heart is in shreds and my head is in a vice.”

Sinclair refers to the scandal as “the cataclysm” and “the earthquake that devastated my life”. She dismisses rumours that she enabled her husband’s sex addiction and even participated in his orgies. “All of that was completely foreign to me, like the affairs that I discovered afterwards,” she told Paris Match.

As a journalist herself, Sinclair understands the explosive social dimension of the scandal, which appeared on the front pages of 150,000 newspapers throughout the world. She summarises it as “a rich, powerful, white man is accused by a poor, black, immigrant woman”.

I could not risk displeasing him. I was afraid of discord, of his anger

In retrospect, Sinclair says she cannot believe her own blindness. “Dominique never confessed. If I had suspicions, he calmed them, or made me feel ridiculous and embarrassed. When he switched his phone off suddenly, or changed the page on his computer, or came home late from a meeting, he always had a good reason.”

When it was revealed in 2008 that Strauss-Kahn had an affair with a Hungarian economist at the IMF, “he swore to God that it was his first infidelity in 18 years of marriage. Never again, he promised. I am naive. I believed him. Or I wanted to believe him.”

Before she married Strauss-Kahn in 1991, Sinclair was one of France's best-known radio and television journalists, famed for her intelligence and beauty. In 1989, the mayors of France had chosen her to embody "Marianne", the symbol of the republic whose effigy appears on postage stamps and busts in every town hall. Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve were her predecessors. "For the little Jewish girl that I am, it was an immense source of pride," she says.

Heiress

Sinclair was an art heiress and famous journalist when Strauss-Kahn was still a little-known economics professor. Yet she was hungry for his approval. “No matter what I did, he wasn’t impressed. He was stingy with compliments,” she writes. She was hurt that he didn’t seem to watch her prime-time television talk show. When he was appointed a cabinet minister, he thought it “natural and painless” for her to give up her television programme to avoid the perception of conflict of interest.

It was the SMS messages in which Strauss-Kahn referred to call girls hired for him as `equipment' and `presents' that convinced Sinclair to end the marriage

Sinclair says her relationship with Strauss-Kahn was one of emprise, meaning hold, influence or control. “Everyone thought I was strong, free and independent. I interviewed heads of state from all over the world. I ran the family budget. I took decisions alone.” But she unconsciously reproduced the relationship she had had with her mother with her husband. “I could not risk displeasing him. I was afraid of discord, of his anger. L’emprise can be sexual or intellectual. For me it was emotional.”

Sinclair posted $6 million in bail for Strauss-Kahn and rented a $50,000 a month townhouse in Tribeca, where they lived for several months behind closed curtains. He later repaid her most of the money. He has since married his fourth wife, the Moroccan businesswoman Miriam L’Aouffir.

Undisclosed sum

DSK and Sinclair never talked through what happened. They made an out of court settlement for an undisclosed sum with Nafissatou Diallo, the chambermaid, and returned to Paris. Strauss-Kahn soon warns Sinclair that "another story is going to come out in the press, nothing at all, really". Sinclair reads in Le Monde about the so-called Carlton scandal, in which businessmen who wanted to curry favour with the man they expected to become the next president of France organised 15 orgies for his benefit, in Lille, Paris and Washington DC. In June 2015, Strauss-Kahn would be cleared of "aggravating pimping" in the Carlton scandal.

It was the SMS messages in which Strauss-Kahn referred to call girls hired for him as “equipment” and “presents” that convinced Sinclair to end the marriage. “My astonishment at this new episode was as total as it had been in New York,” she writes. “People have reproached me, not without reason, for staying with him. I could have, should have left him.”

Sinclair is a survivor. Since the divorce, she has written four books, two of them about the second World War experiences of her Jewish grandfathers, one about the 2017 presidential election campaign, and now her memoir. She has presented political and cultural radio and television programmes, and founded a French version of the online newspaper Huffington Post.

Most of all, Sinclair attributes her "renaissance" to the love affair she started in 2012 with Pierre Nora, a highly respected historian and member of the Académie française. They had not seen one another for more than 20 years. Nora's wife had recently died. "It was a miracle that two wounded people, aged 64 and 80, found enough strength and desire to create a new existence, with youthful joy," she writes. " I still feel like a young fiancée, even if I know that time is limited."