The thickening plot of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

by John Rapley

Poor Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and heir apparent to the French presidency, now a recluse in his Paris home. Every time he seems to get a break, yet another self-inflicted wound is opened.

No sooner were rape charges dismissed against him in New York than a separate rape investigation opened in France. Then that case was closed, too much time having elapsed - a tepid acquittal, but an acquittal nonetheless. Hardly had he walked out the magistrate's door than yet another case opened. This one was said to involve prostitutes in a Belgian-managed network that serviced him in France and New York. Ouch!

But then, at last, a lucky break: Late last month, an article by Jacob Epstein in the New York Review of Books raised the possibility that maybe, after all, a conspiracy to frame Strauss-Kahn had been engineered by his political opponents. Within days of the article's appearance, a French writer put out a book of his own, purporting to be the account of the New York case from Mr Strauss-Kahn's perspective, and which also intimated that his accuser there may have been in on some kind of plot. No doubt, holed up in his gilded cage, Mr Strauss-Kahn finally pulled that bottle of bubbly he'd stashed in the freezer.

Gradually ostracised

But the expected pop came out a fizzle. Within hours of the Epstein publication, France's esteemed Le Monde newspaper published an excruciatingly detailed report on Strauss-Kahn's alleged involvement in the prostitution ring. Even if Epstein is vindicated, it will hardly make a difference to Strauss-Kahn. His only hope now is that the charges in the current French case do not get prosecuted. Even then, with old friends regarding him as toxic, and even his wife leaving him alone in Paris to retreat to their holiday home in Morocco, he finds himself a very isolated individual.

The case, centred on the northern French city of Lille, is more serious than all the others, because it has all the makings of a great movie: sex, power, corruption, criminals and a shadowy underworld. The sex alone is enough to outrage even the famously tolerant French, involving, as it does behaviours, that - well, let's just say that they lie outside the statistical norm of an average distribution, if you get my drift. But that is just the start of it.

The real heart of the matter is that the prostitutes may have been provided by a network that trafficked in underage prostitutes. Elaborate soirées were put on for Mr Strauss-Kahn, involving an abundance that would have made Silvio Berlusconi wonder if he was losing it.

It is believed, further, that these soirées were paid for (these kinds of women don't do that sort of thing for free, after all) by powerful businessmen who had reason to believe Strauss-Kahn was 'their man'. They may even have roped in local police, persuading them to turn a blind eye to possibly criminal activities, with the promise that they would be rewarded by the future president.

Reputation irredeemable

How much of this turns out to be true will become apparent with time. But even if they are unaware of the Jamaican proverb 'If it no go so, it near so', Strauss-Kahn's former allies are practising that sort of caution. The very best scenario, for Mr Strauss-Kahn, would be a legal redemption that nonetheless leaves him looking like a pretty dodgy creep. The 'ick' factor of his now-publicised private life, and it's kind of difficult to keep it private when that many people have the goods on you, remains stuck in French minds.

His political career is finished. He may one day resume his voice as a dynamic intellectual of the French left. But his dreams of so much more seem to have been undone by the hubris that afflicts so many powerful men: that they can do what they want, and someone will always cover for them.

But, as Charlie Sheen could tell him, that game only works when you're winning.

John Rapley is a research associate at the International Growth Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and rapley.john@gmail.com.