Former IMF chief cleared of pimping
Print Edition
A FRENCH court yesterday acquitted former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of pimping charges, drawing a line under the latest in a series of legal woes over his sexual escapades.
The 66-year-old economist nodded his head at the verdict, the finale of a trial which dragged intimate details of his sex life into the public gaze.
His acquittal on the charge of “aggravated pimping” did not come as a surprise after the prosecutor called for him to be let off due to lack of evidence at the end of a three-week trial in February.
The trial was the latest in a long series of high-profile court cases in the past 15 years in which Strauss-Kahn has landed in the dock for corruption or sexual scandals.
Strauss-Kahn saw his career as head of the International Monetary Fund — and his French presidential prospects — implode when a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault in 2011.
Not long after the case settled in a civil suit, his name cropped up in an investigation into a prostitution ring in northern France, which provided sex workers for orgies he attended.
He was charged with aiding and abetting the prostitution of seven women — a charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The courtroom in the northern city of Lille heard lurid details of champagne-fueled orgies attended by Strauss-Kahn as his lawyers accused the court of putting his morals, and prostitution itself, on trial.
Strauss-Kahn said that while he was a libertine who enjoyed group sex, he was unaware any of the women had been paid to be there.
Former prostitutes testified to nights of “carnage,” saying Strauss-Kahn would have been “naive” to be unaware of their role and recounted scenes in which he sodomized them.
Their lawyers’ insistence on Strauss-Kahn’s preference for anal sex caused the otherwise unflappable man to lose his patience, saying he was not on trial for “deviant practices.”
“I must have a sexuality which, compared to average men, is more rough. Women have the right not to like that, whether they are prostitutes or not.”
He said the use of prostitutes “horrified” him and paying for sex would be too great a risk for a man at the head of the IMF, which was busy “saving the world” from the financial crisis that began in 2008.
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