Tag Archives: dominique

How Dominique Strauss-Kahn Could Salvage His Political Career

Can Dominique Strauss-Kahn salvage a future in French politics? Despite his legal problems in the U.S., observers say his most optimistic backers are keeping alive scenarios of their champion somehow extricating himself from the catastrophic turn in his once-brilliant career.

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Sex Scandals: Are U.S. Women Better Off than the French?

We Americans can’t help getting a jolt of tabloidy satisfaction every time the wealthy and well-connected French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn makes another humiliating court appearance in conjunction with charges that he tried to rape a New York City hotel housekeeper. After all, we love nothing better than seeing the powerful and formerly smug dragged across the front pages in ignominy

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Strauss-Kahn Pleads ‘Not Guilty’

In a packed courtroom on the 13th floor of 100 Centre Street, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, dressed in a black suit, stood before Judge Michael J. Orbus and calmly said “not guilty.” Although he didn’t say much else, the defense that the former director of the IMF and his lawyers — who proclaimed his plea a “powerful statement” of his innocence — will now most likely begin building is that his encounter with the Sofitel employee was consensual.

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Sex, Lies, Arrogance: What Makes Powerful Men Behave So Badly?

When her husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn was preparing to run for President of France five years ago, Anne Sinclair told a Paris newspaper that she was “rather proud” of his reputation as a ladies’ man, a chaud lapin nicknamed the Great Seducer. “It’s important,” she said, “for a man in politics to be able to seduce.” Maybe it was pride that inspired French politicians and International Monetary Fund officials to look the other way as the rumors about “DSK” piled up, from the young journalist who says Strauss-Kahn tried to rip off her clothes when she went to interview him, to the female lawmaker who describes being groped and pawed and vowed never to be in a room alone with him again, to the economist who argued in a letter to IMF investigators that “I fear that this man has a problem that, perhaps, made him unfit to lead an institution where women work under his command.” Maybe it was the moral laziness and social coziness that impel elites to protect their own

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Sarkozy vs. Strauss-Kahn: Sex as a Weapon?

Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Stauss-Kahn were never friends — one conservative, the other Socialist, their political ambitions setting them on a collision course. Yet, soon after Sarkozy’s 2007 election as President of France, he surprised most people by nominating Strauss-Kahn to be Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, a heartening reach across party lines

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After Strauss-Kahn: Who’s Next to Head the IMF?

Even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn announced from New York’s Riker’s Island prison on Wednesday that he was stepping down as head of the International Monetary Fund , world powers were already jostling over who could replace him. Indeed, since Strauss-Kahn’s arrest last Saturday on charges of attempted rape, European officials have been swift to argue that Europe should maintain the hold it has had on the IMF’s top job ever since the Washington D.C.-based organization was created in 1945

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