Several members of the Socialist Party began to distance themselves from Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former Director of the IMF, expected to return to France in the next days. Strauss-Kahn was the favorite in the polls for presidential elections in 2012 before being accused of sexual assault in New York.
The announcement on August 23 on the giving up the criminal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn by the American justice was welcomed by socialists.
The party president, Martine Aubry, has expressed “great relief”. She asked that “word of Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be respected, allowing him to do what he wants most, live normally and express himself when decides to do so”.
But the tone began to change after the summer school of the party last weekend when the campaign for primary elections, which will designate the socialist presidential candidate, was officially launched.
Aubry clearly distanced himself on Tuesday, for the first time, from his former ally, saying that she agrees with “many women regarding the attitude” of former director of the IMF toward them.
“I always said the same thing: firstly, the presumption of innocence, secondly, I think the same way as many women on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s attitude toward women”, she said to the television channel Canal Plus.
“I was the first to say on the first day that we have to defend the presumption of innocence, the victim and her word”, Aubry added, referring to Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid from a New York hotel that filed a complaint for sexual assault against Strauss-Kahn.
Former premier and respected personality of the Socialist Party, Michel Rocard was more categorical, saying Monday that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is touched by a “mental illness” that prevents him from “mastering his impulses”.
For his former collaborators of the IMF in Washington, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Monday that he committed an “error” in May in New York.
Following allegations of rape, he admitted that he had sex with the maid and his lawyers said, after closing the case, that their client has paid dearly for a “temporary error of judgment which had nothing criminal in itself”.