Accuser labels Kahn a ‘rutting chimpanzee’
Novelist Tristane Banon claims the 62-year-old International Monetary Fund head and French presidency hopeful attacked her while she was a trainee journalist during an interview in an empty apartment in 2002.
She actually made reference to the attack in a 2007 interview on French television though she did not name him instead referring to her attacker as a well-known politician.
During the broadcast she referred to her alleged attacker as “a rutting chimpanzee” who “no attractive women want to work for”.
“It (the interview) ended very, very violently because I told him clearly... Truly, we did fight,” she said in the interview.
“We didn’t merely slap each other, we gave — well I gave — kicks, and he undid my bra, he tried to undo my jeans.”
She said she went as far as going to a lawyer and having a case drawn up.
“But I didn’t dare go through with it. I didn’t want to be, until the end of my days, the girl that had had a problem with a politician.”
Now however, the 31-year-old’s Parisian lawyer David Koubbi says that while she did not act earlier, she has decided to come forward in light of events of the last few days because “she knows she’ll be heard and she knows she’ll be taken seriously”.
Ms Banon’s mother Anne Mansouret, a regional Socialist official in Normandy, told the media she had advised her daughter against taking action against Strauss-Kahn in 2002 because she believed it was a temporary moment in which he “lost his way” and that a lawsuit could forever stain Ms Banon’s career.
Under French law, sexual assault charges must be filed within three years but attempted rape charges can be brought up to 10 years after the alleged attack.
Reuters news agency said it had received a text from Ms Banon’s lawyer David Koubbi saying his client could file a complaint over the alleged incident.
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