A Literary Woman Scorned: More Misery for DSK

A new tell-all book on the former IMF chief is surely the final nail in the coffin of DSK's public reputation

Just when you thought that the reputation of the man who would be president couldn’t fall any lower, out comes a book (extracts serialised by the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur) by writer/journalist Marcela Iacub that goes into crude detail about her affair with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“A two-faceted being; half-man, half-pig.” It’s in these unequivocal terms that Marcela Iacub – columnist at left-wing newspaper Libération – describes the former IMF president Dominique Strauss-Kahn in her book entitled “Mon Histoire avec DSK”. DSK is a man with whom Iacub had an affair that lasted seven months after the now-notorious Sofitel incident in New York.

“You were old, fat, small and ugly. You were chauvinistic and vulgar… uncultured… You behaved like a nasty pig, you weren’t the victim of society but my executioner,” she writes. She evokes details of a sexual relationship (ad-libbed, she now says in the Nouvel Observateur), gives her version of the New York incident that was the downfall of DSK (“The poor girl came back into the room without you having left her any sort of tip. The chamber maid was horribly offended but not raped”), and describes with contempt (“these poor devils who try to keep you content) the friends of the ex-future-president of the French Republic.

She also has it in for DSK’s long-suffering wife Anne Sinclair: “She had this dream of being the wife of a president. And when she met you, she said to herself: ‘This one is my horse. Here he is at last.’ If she hadn’t wanted it so badly, you would have abandoned politics altogether.”

In short, it’s a very public literary execution of DSK and of his entourage.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his estranged wife have both reacted strongly to the publication of the book and of its serialisation in what is a well-regarded left-wing weekly paper. In a letter addressed to Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Observateur and published in the Le Figaro, the disgraced former IMF boss is furious in his indignation:

“I am doubly disgusted,” he writes. “First, there is the disgust provoked by the behaviour of a woman who seduces in order to write a book… It’s a contemptible attack on my private life and on human dignity.” The other source of disgust, says DSK, is that of the Nouvel Observateur “humiliating itself in a turgid commercial publication that one would have expected to be the reserve of the gutter press. The former ‘great newspaper of the conscience of the Left’ has sunken into a nauseating operation.”

Strauss-Kahn also indicates that he has asked his lawyers to “explore all legal avenues to fight against this abomination.”

Anne Sinclair also reacted in a lively manner, describing Marcela Iacub as a “perverse and dishonest woman, driven by an obsession with sensation and the lure of gain.” She also opines that “to give her such a soap box in what was this newspaper is repugnant and reduces it to no more than a scandal weekly.” Ms Sinclair also announced possible legal pursuit of the matter.