Is there anything Anne Sinclair won't put up with?

Anne Sinclair: Feminist role model?

When I first read that Anne Sinclair was standing by her husband, former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently released after a charge of attempted rape was dropped, a question leapt to mind. What does she see in the hefty 62-year-old philandering millionaire?

But that cynical thought was undermined when I discovered that she was not only a millionaire heiress, but had also had a successful career as a television journalist. She has certainly never relied on DSK for access to the finer things in life. But then the question simply posed itself anew, this time seriously: What does she see in him, then?

DSK: Struggling to overcome his 'weakness',
the poor oppressed man.

For even if he is indeed innocent of the brutal sex crimes he was accused of (morbid details here), this does not seem to rest on a lack of evidence that some serious sexual activity went on in that hotel room. Strauss-Kahn’s defence was always that the liaison was consensual, not that it didn’t happen at all. After all, he is apparently irresistible to women, the great French séducteur, a nickname he won the first time his cheating was publicly exposed. How many times have his antics remained private? Who knows? Perhaps ‘seducing’ hotel maids is simply part of the jet-setting champagne socialist’s daily routine. Well, hotel maids, IMF subordinates and, allegedly, economist and writer Tristane Banon, who has also now accused him of attempted rape. DSK denies this latest accusation and intends to sue for defamation. I haven’t quite worked out yet whether he is denying the incident took place or merely that it wasn’t consensual.

Through all this, Anne Sinclair has been Strauss-Kahn’s loyal supporter, far more steadfast than his own Socialist party in France, if the Guardian’s report is anything to go by. Why? Is it simply the power of her love overcoming what one Frenchman (quoted in the Observer profile of Anne Sinclair) unfortunately reinforced the national stereotype by describing as a ‘weakness’?

I prefer to entertain the fancy that DSK and his wife have an ultra-liberal, non-monogamous relationship, and positively delight in each other’s sexual conquests. Sadly, the secret swinging parties hosted by the stars of the French centre-left political élite obstinately refuse to be discovered by the media, and I am forced to concede that this is probably just my imagination running away with me. Of course, if this did turn out to be the truth, I would have no objection to it at all. But if on the other hand she is supporting her unfaithful husband out of sheer devotion, then that I find kind of tragic from a former feminist role model.