"He wasn’t a womanizer—he was sick"

According to the stories, he grabbed women in elevators, he cornered them in gardens, and if they resisted he liked to pursue, with phone calls and text messages. Everyone knew, the dinner guests said. For instance, the hostess recalled, there was the time at one of Strauss-Kahn’s homes when he seemed as if he didn’t care who saw him make his moves. Even his wife had to have seen, the hostess said. Surely not, the host said.

Through the windows, the spring evening dimmed to black, and the party moved to the dining room, where the stories continued. Earlier that day at the Café de Flore, Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher, had remarked of Strauss-Kahn, “He wasn’t a womanizer—he was sick.” Everyone at the dinner party agreed, and they, too, spoke of Strauss-Kahn in the past tense…

To Pascal Bruckner, the photos showed “the face of a libertine” and “a bulldozer.” Strauss-Kahn had never actually declared his candidacy, and in the past he had been such a lacklustre campaigner that Bruckner suspected that he did not actually want to run. “I think his passion was sex, much more than power,” Bruckner said. “I have many women friends in the Socialist Party who have told me stuff about him. It’s dreadful.” He thought Strauss-Kahn’s friends should have encouraged him to seek psychiatric treatment instead of the Presidency.