Bonjour, Dominique Strauss-Kahn defenders and attackers. Here we go again, with those who think he’s just one unlucky, hugely wealthy Frenchman, and the rest of us who think he’s a serial sexual predator who deserves nothing more luxe than a dank prison cell, no view, with a few crumbs of a week-old baguette and a paper cup of tap water once a day for the next ten years. Cruel and unusual? No such thing under the French penal code.
Well, let’s get down to the news, shall we? According to the Daily Telegraph, the old “rutting chimpanzee,” to quote Trsitane Banon, the woman he’s confessed to “grabbing,” is now under investigation by French police for being involved in a call-girl operation centered in Lille, France’s northernmost major city:
Investigators in Lille believe they have uncovered a well-connected ring that brought women over the frontier from Belgium to have sex with wealthy clients in hotels in the border city, including the four-star Carlton.
Five men – including the director and the public relations chief of the Carlton – have been arrested in France and charged with providing women, while Belgian police are also investigating on their side of the frontier.
Three Lille hotels have been shut down by authorities for three months each while the case is investigated.
The case has caused a scandal in Lille, where respected local figures and even senior police officers are reportedly involved, but Sunday’s reports were the first sign that figures outside the city may be implicated.
The weekly Journal du Dimanche cited sources close to the investigation saying Strauss-Kahn, now living in Paris, could be questioned.
According to the report, investigators suspect the ring may have dispatched call girls to the United States to entertain him and that he might have taken part in sex parties organised in Paris by one of the Lille suspects.
As an American, I must say I’m dismayed that in a magnificently endowed country such as ours, Monsieur Strauss-Kahn found it necessary to go after a West African-born chambermaid in one of our hotels and to have seen the need to import call girls from Lille. The ladies of Washington and New York weren’t up to his standards?
Lucky for them.
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