France questions itself over Dominique Strauss-Kahn's 'open secret'

Media taboo shielding political elite had kept IMF chief's record in realms of gossip until the alleged sex assault in New York

• Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 May 2011 20.47 BST

French newspapers after sex assault charges were levelled against presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Photograph: Caroline Blumberg/EPA
Less than three weeks ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn sat down in a Paris restaurant for an off-the-record lunch with two journalists from the daily Libération. The IMF chief outlined the three biggest personal hurdles in his relentless campaign to become president of France: "Money, women and being a Jew." He started with women. "Yes I like women, so what?" he asked. "For years, there's been talk of photos of a giant orgy, but I've never seen them come out," he added, challenging his opponents to produce long-rumoured pictures of a night at a posh swingers' club dating back decades. He said he had warned President Nicolas Sarkozy (while they stood side by side at the urinals of the gents during a recent international summit) to stop smearing him over his private life. Strauss-Kahn then volunteered to the journalists a hypothetical example of something that could bring him down: "A woman raped in a parking lot who is promised half a million euros to make up her story." Before Strauss-Kahn's opponents began throwing what one socialist described as "stink bombs" at him, he was keen to present himself as the victim of a potentially ruthless campaign. Everyone in French political and media circles knew Strauss-Kahn's achilles heel was his attitude to women. Even his closest political allies admitted he was an inveterate seducer, an unashamed libertine. But what makes the scandal new and unprecedented in a presidential race is the crossing of the line to sexual violence, attempted rape and brutal assault. Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his allies call him a seducer without the "profile of a rapist". But if, as the extreme-right Marine Le Pen affirms, all of Paris had long been abuzz with talk of his "rather pathological relationship" with women, why wasn't Strauss-Kahn pulled up on it before in France? He had already been chastised by the IMF over one affair with a junior in 2008. It raises the uncomfortable question in the French media and politics of two parallel worlds: what is printed, and what is behind it, gossip, and what must officially remain "unsaid". Consensual extramarital sex is a non-story in France, part of the right to a private life protected by fearsome libel and privacy laws. Having a mistress, philandering, even routinely propositioning journalists have been brushed aside for countless political figures. "How many senior male French politicians aren't either a groper, a cheater, a charmer or a serial seducer? And it goes right to the top of the political class," sighed one news editor. "France is still a kind of monarchy that kept the aristocratic morals of the 18th century. The lord of the manor has a right to the women; the king has his mistresses." If more allegations against Strauss-Kahn come to light and lead to criminal charges, it will call into question a taboo in France about speaking out. Tristane Banon, the novelist and journalist is, according to her lawyer, preparing to go to police alleging Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her in 2002. Her mother, Anne Mansouret, a senior Socialist figure, said that she advised her daughter not to file a lawsuit at the time because Strauss-Kahn was a politician with a bright future, as well as a friend of the family. But she said that even the fact that her daughter later spoke out publicly about the attack on TV had left her "traumatised" by the subsequent "harassment" in her professional life over having dared to speak out.    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/16/dominique-strauss-khan-arrest-france?CMP=twt_fd