Loading ...He ran the IMF from WASHINGTON !
Former IMF Chief …..
(Bloomberg) — Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on his first day of testimony at a French pimping trial, was put on the defensive as he had to respond to comments from a prostitute who said she was hired to have sex with him in a Paris hotel.
The woman, Mounia Rabou, who took the stand just before Strauss-Kahn, said that there was no mention of money or payment in front of Strauss-Kahn the night at the Hotel Murano in Paris in 2010. Rather she was only paid by another defendant, in a taxi afterward.
“It was pretty clear,” nonetheless that she and “the other women there that evening were there for sexual relations,” she said at the court in the of Lille Tuesday. “I was just there to prostitute myself.”
The former French finance minister has begun three days of testimony to try to prove his innocence and — at least partially — revive his battered reputation. He told the judge the frequency of the parties has been grossly exaggerated in the press.
“When one reads about this, one gets the impression that this was frenetic activities, the dates are so mixed up,” he said. “It was four times a year for three years, nothing more.”
DSK, as he’s known across France, resigned as chief of the International Monetary Fund in 2011 after he was arrested in New York, accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Those U.S. charges were dropped later that year only for him to be charged with “aggravated pimping” by French prosecutors investigating the so-called Carlton Affair — named for the Lille hotel where some of the parties took place — in 2012.
Exaggerated Reports
Strauss-Kahn, who was running the IMF from Washington at the time of the Murano episode, said he would come to Paris every two or three months, sometimes for work, but also to visit his children.
When pressed by the judge about his recollection of the night at the Murano, Strauss-Kahn said, “I never had reason to believe those women were paid to be there.”
While prostitution is legal in France, procuring women for others is a crime.
Rabou said she cried at one point during her sexual encounter with Strauss-Kahn, but that it was consensual sex as she needed the money. “It was only for the money,” she said.