Member of French Legislature Declined Invitation to Meet Alone with DSK

An elected member of the lower house of the French legislature, l’Assemblée Nationale, Socialist Party member Aurélie Filippetti, who represents Moselle, revealed in emails leaked by Paris police investigating the lawsuit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought by Tristane Banon, 32, that he invited her to the same apartment where he is alleged to have raped Banon, the daughter of one of his former lovers, Anne Mansouret, also a member of the French Socialist Party.  Filippetti declined his invitation, thanks to the insistence of friends, and did not meet one-on-one with the man known among Parisian political elites as the Satyr. Would that other women were that wise and that fortunate in their choice of friends.

The police leaked to the Paris daily, Le Figaro, an exchange of emails from eight years ago— at the time of Banon’s alleged rape— between Banon’s mother, Mansouret, and Filippetti. According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph,

“I wanted to tell you my youngest daughter, aged 24…is about to file a legal complaint against a man in his fifties unfortunately with a PS (Socialist Party) label,” wrote Miss Mansouret, herself a local Socialist politician.”For my part, I was invited for a cafe for a chat at the same notorious address.” “I spoke about it to a friend, who warned me against it, practically forbidding me from going…But perhaps other girls have been victim of the same practices and perhaps they will speak,” she wrote, according to French press reports.

“The little I’ve seen has shown me to what extent the character is dangerous for women,” she wrote. “You can count on my support.” In another email, she said that a legal complaint would be “beneficial for other women who could possibly be victims of the satyr”. Pressing charges, she added, was important as “it will transfer the guilt onto him and no longer onto [Miss Banon]”.

A May 17, 2011 article profiling DSK in The New York Times included this sentence: “Aurélie Filipetti, a respected Socialist parliamentarian in France, said in 2008 that she had been groped by Mr. Strauss-Kahn and would ‘forever make sure’ she was never ‘alone in a room with him.’ ”

Interesting, n’est-ce pas?, that the French women targeted by DSK were all members of his own political party.  He may have been relying on their party loyalty to trump their desire to report him to the police.  That was but one of his many alleged mistakes.