LILLE, France, (Reuters) – Dominique Strauss-Kahn was acquitted of sex crime accusations by a French court yesterday, the final chapter in a transatlantic scandal that destroyed the political ambitions of a man once tipped to become his country’s president.
A court in the northern city of Lille dismissed charges that the former International Monetary Fund chief’s sexual escapades with prostitutes amounted to “aggravated pimping” — the charge on which French magistrates sent him to trial.
The verdict came four years after sex assault accusations by a New York hotel maid ended his political ambitions and forced him to step down as head of the Washington-based IMF and ends Strauss-Kahn’s legal battle on both sides of the Atlantic.
But local media said the damage to his reputation after four years of occasionally salacious revelations about his sexual practices almost certainly ruled out a political comeback.
Having settled financially with Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo after New York prosecutors abandoned criminal charges in 2011, the 66-year-old stood accused in France of instigating the organisation of orgies with prostitutes.
“He cannot be attributed the role of instigator,” judge Bernard Lemaire said when reading out a verdict in the presence of Strauss-Kahn and 13 others. “He just availed of the sexual services of a group.”
Strauss-Kahn and his lawyers had argued that he was a “libertine” with an appetite for rough sex but was unaware that women he frolicked with at parties and hotels in Paris, Lille and Washington, mostly while in the IMF post, were prostitutes.
Since returning to Paris after his IMF stint in Washington abruptly ended, Strauss-Kahn has sought to start a new life with a now-troubled venture in investment banking and a new female partner, after celebrity journalist wife Anne Sinclair left him.
