Everyone’s favorite Gallic charmer is back in jail:
Former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn is being questioned by French police as a suspect in a prostitution ring inquiry, a prosecutor says.
Mr Strauss-Kahn, once a front-runner for the French presidency, is being held in custody at a police station in Lille, northern France.
To be honest, I was surprised that being mixed up in a prostitution ring is a crime in France. But apparently, while consorting with ladies of the evening is legal, pimping them to your pals and charging them as a business expense is not. I wonder if DSK’s chum Bernard-Henri Lévy will once again get his knickers in a twist and insist that “the Strauss-Kahn I know” bears no resemblance to “this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast” now that it’s the local gendarmerie rather than those ghastly vulgar NYPD flatfeet who’ve tossed him in the clink.
One thing I rather like about M. Strauss-Kahn is the way his defense never varies. In New York, he denied rape on the grounds that he and the Sofitel maid were enjoying consensual sex, as who doesn’t during a 23rd-floor room-cleaning shift. Back on home turf, he’s now denying sex-ring charges on the same basis:
Police have questioned a number of prostitutes who have admitted having sex with Mr Strauss-Kahn.
He insists he did not know that the women were prostitutes.
“I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman,” his lawyer Henri Leclerc has told French television.
For an unprepossessing leering toad, DSK seems to have a splendid confidence in his magnetic irresistibility to the fairer sex. To modify Kathryn: Where aren’t the women?