Epress.am News from Armenia
A French writer is set to launch legal action for attempted rape against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, just days after he was released from house arrest in New York on sexual assault charges, AFP reports.
Tristane Banon, 32, indicated she would send “a complaint for attempted rape” against Strauss-Kahn to prosecutors, likely on Tuesday, her lawyer David Koubbi told the news magazine L’Express on its website.
Koubbi told AFPTV that Banon “took that decision because she endured what she accuses Dominique Strauss-Kahn of and in France as elsewhere when you are a victim of an attempted rape, you must file a complaint.”
The French writer and journalist herself told the L’Express website that “seeing Strauss-Kahn freed (from house arrest) then afterward dining in a fancy restaurant with friends, that makes me sick.”
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers hit back by threatening Banon, who once branded the former IMF chief a “rutting chimpanzee”, with a defamation suit.
Strauss-Kahn, who resigned from his IMF post after being charged with sexual assault in New York, dismissed Banon’s claims as “imaginary”, his lawyers Henri Leclerc and Frederique Baulieu told AFP in a statement.
They said they “were in the process of compiling a libel complaint against her.”
The prospect of a fresh criminal complaint against Strauss-Kahn came as the case in New York, where he was recently released from house arrest on charges of trying to rape a hotel maid, looked set to collapse after prosecutors revealed they had doubts about the credibility of his accuser.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said Banon’s complaint “comes at a time when the untruthful nature of the accusations he faces in the United States are no longer in any doubt.”