ANALYSIS:French journalism has been questioning itself over its handling of the IMF chief's lifestyle, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
IN 2007, as Dominique Strauss-Kahn was lobbying for support for the post of managing director at the International Monetary Fund, a journalist from the daily Libérationquietly broke a taboo of French journalism in a blog entry on the former finance minister.
“Strauss-Kahn’s only real problem is his relationship to women,” Jean Quatremer noted in an otherwise flattering profile. “Too insistent, it often borders on harassment. [It’s] a foible known to the media, but which nobody talks about.”
Within hours of posting the piece, Quatremer recounted yesterday, he received a call from Ramzi Khiroun, a close Strauss-Kahn adviser, asking him to take it down. Quatremer refused and told Khiroun that if his boss thought the piece was libellous, he could sue. The journalist heard nothing else from DSK’s entourage.
In Sexus Politicus, a book published a year earlier, Christophe Deloire and Christophe Dubois had dedicated a chapter to "L'Affaire DSK". They wrote about his tendency towards "seduction to the point of obsession", and mentioned female journalists who had been irritated by his gestures. The subject was so sensitive, Deloire said yesterday, that "intense pressure" was brought to bear on the authors and their publisher.
Since Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of sexual assault at the weekend, French journalism has been assailed by criticism and consumed by self-interrogation over its handling of the prominent socialist’s lifestyle over the past two decades. While the allegations he faces in New York are considerably more serious than the rumours that circulated about le grand séducteur in Paris for years, it was an open secret that Strauss-Kahn was a serial womaniser. Some, like Quatremer, felt he skirted the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, but in a culture where the private lives of politicians are deemed off limits for journalists, the topic was generally avoided.
French media have long withheld, or chosen not to investigate, information on the private lives of their leaders. Jacques Chirac’s infidelity, although widely suspected in Paris, was never reported until his wife Bernadette broke the silence in an interview. Another president, François Mitterrand, managed to hide from the public for 20 years the existence of his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine Pingeot.
More recently, in 2007, journalists did not reveal that the most high-profile couple in French politics – socialist party leader François Hollande and the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal – had separated by the time she ran for president against Nicolas Sarkozy.
“In Paris, at the bar of the Hotel Lutetia, frequented by many socialist party chiefs, [Strauss-Kahn] was noticed being too insistent with young women,” Le Monde reported yesterday. It didn’t say as much at the time, but Strauss-Kahn and his advisers knew his reputation as a libertine was seen as an Achilles’ heel. In a meeting with Libération journalists in Paris last month, the head of the IMF said three points would be used against him by political opponents in next year’s presidential campaign: “Money, women and my Jewishness.”
“Yes, I like women . . .” he said. “So what? . . . For years there’s been talk of photos, massive orgies, but nothing has ever come out . . . So, let them show them,” he reportedly said.
The French public is tolerant of the infidelity of public figures, and few believed extra-marital affairs in themselves would harm Strauss-Kahn’s career. When he was subject to an inquiry in 2008 over a consensual relationship with one of his subordinates at the IMF, the story had little impact on his popularity at home.
But claims of womanising are one thing; allegations of sexual assault quite another. Widening the debate yesterday, Edwy Plenel, a former editor of Le Mondeand founder of the website Mediapart, criticised France's "sacralisation of power" and a tendency to minimise violence against women.
“In the US, sex scandals are taken very seriously,” his old paper explained in a headline about the proceedings against Strauss-Kahn.
Despite strict privacy laws, recent years have seen a gradual peeling away of the layers of secrecy that have long shrouded the private lives of French public figures. Changing attitudes, the anarchy of the internet, a competitive glossy magazine market and politicians’ increasing use of their lifestyle as an electoral tool have all played their part. Strauss-Kahn’s fall may well accelerate the trend.