As Dominique Strauss-Kahn cools his heels in the Big Apple and his lawyers try to get his sexual assault charges completely dropped, French prosecutors are starting an inquiry into allegations that he tried to rape a French journalist in 2003. An unnamed Paris official told the NY Times the investigation "might take time in order to try to reach the truth." Translation: We don't want to look stupid like the Manhattan DA's office.
In 2002, writer Tristane Banon claims that while interviewing Strauss-Kahn, a leading French Socialist politician and one-time head of the IMF, "opened my bra, tried to open my jeans. ... It finished very badly." Banon was convinced not to press charges by her mother, Anne Mansouret, a Socialist Party official. Mansouret recently said she basically told her daughter, "Listen, you know, if he had raped you, I wouldn’t have any hesitation, but that wasn’t the case. He sexually assaulted you, there wasn’t any rape per se; so until the end of your life, you’re going to have on your résumé, you know, Tristane Banon is the girl who ... '" But now Mansouret regrets her suggestion and supports her daughter's decision to come forward.
According to the Times, Banon's lawyer David Koubbi said in an interview in the magazine L’Express this week that "he and Ms. Banon had agreed in mid-June to file a criminal complaint." He added, however, that they had "taken the necessary time because we didn’t want to become an instrument of American justice." Ms. Banon that it had taken her eight years to file a complaint because 'for every woman who finds herself in this case, it is very hard,'" but she couldn't stand hearing herself described as a liar because she hadn't filed one. The statute of limitations for rape in France is 15 years.
Strauss-Kahn told his French lawyers to file a countersuit of slander against Banon and told them that Banon's account is "a figment of her imagination."
