MANAGING DIRECTOR of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn was denied bail in a Manhattan court yesterday, two days after he is alleged to have sexually assaulted an African immigrant cleaning woman in a luxury hotel.
Prosecutors told the supervising judge of Manhattan Criminal Court, Melissa Jackson, that Mr Strauss-Kahn (62), represented a flight risk and that they are investigating a complaint from a second woman outside the US.
She is Tristane Banon (31), a French novelist who says she was assaulted by Mr Strauss-Kahn when she went to interview him in an empty apartment nine years ago.
Judge Jackson charged Mr Strauss-Kahn with two counts of a criminal sexual act in the first degree, one count of attempted rape in the first degree, one count of sexual abuse in the first degree, one count of unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, one count of forcible touching, and one count of sexual abuse in the third degree.
If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison. He is scheduled to appear in court again on Thursday.
In just two days, Mr Strauss-Kahn went from being one of the world’s most powerful men to being treated as a common criminal.
His arraignment was postponed until yesterday so that his body could be searched for evidence of a struggle, such as scratches. Scrapings were taken from under his fingernails to look for his alleged victim’s DNA.
The criminal complaint filed against Mr Strauss-Kahn says he grabbed the victim’s breasts and crotch, attempted to pull down her tights and forced her to perform oral sex.
The 32-year-old hotel maid from Guinea, a mother of two, earlier went to the Harlem police station where Mr Strauss-Kahn was held the first night to identify him in a police line-up.
She left with a blanket covering her head. Accor, her employer for the past three years, said the cleaning woman was “completely satisfactory in terms of her work and behaviour”.
The New York police department did not spare Mr Strauss-Kahn the humiliating “perp walk”, where celebrity defendants are paraded before photographers and cameramen.
Police gave reporters several minutes warning before Mr Strauss-Kahn was brought out in handcuffs on Sunday night, wearing black trousers, a pale blue shirt and a black raincoat. Mr Strauss-Kahn appeared to be wearing the same clothes in court yesterday. He was unshaven, had bags under his eyes and his hair was dishevelled. Mr Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman said that his wife, Anne Sinclair, who arrived in New York yesterday, would post $1 million bail for her husband.
When the judge refused bail, the attorney said his client would wear an electronic ankle bracelet if he could be freed.
US media have picked up excerpts from a premonitory interview with Mr Strauss-Kahn, quoted yesterday by Libération newspaper in Paris.
“Money, women and my Jewishness,” were three obstacles to his becoming president of France, Mr Strauss-Kahn had said. “Yes, I love women, so what?” He predicted his political enemies might use a woman to destroy him. “A woman that he would have raped in a parking lot and to whom half a million or a million euros would be promised to make up such a story.”