PARIS — Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, acknowledged Sunday that his sexual encounter with a New York hotel maid was a “moral failing” on his part but didn’t involve any violence.
In his first interview since his May 14 arrest over sexual- assault accusations, Strauss-Kahn told France’s TF1 television channel what happened between him and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, “did not involve violence, constraint or aggression.” Still, he acknowledged, it “was not only an inappropriate relationship, but more than that, it was an error.”
Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist who was a top contender in next year’s presidential race until the case broke, said, “It was a failing, a failing vis-u-vis my wife, my children and my friends but also a failing vis-u-vis the French people, who had vested their hopes for change in me.”
Strauss-Kahn suggested that financial motives might have been behind Diallo’s accusations. He also dismissed as “imaginary” separate claims by a French writer that he tried to rape her during a 2003 interview.
The Associated Press
