Monday 28 November 2011

Was DSK set up?

One of the stranger stories to emerge over the weekend was the claim that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have been set up and may have been the victim of a conspiracy by his main political rival, French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Whether the later was involved in the events leading to arrest at the Sofitel hotel back on the 14th May is unclear but Edward Jay Epstein’s piece in the current New York Review of Books certainly is asking some questions

Epstein recounts that he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phones and he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy’s center-right political party.

She warned DSK, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.

Epstein then recounts the events that led to DSK being arrested on a charge of sexual assault,indicted by a grand jury on seven counts of attempted rape, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment, placed under house arrest for over a month before all the charges were dismissed by the prosecutor on August 23, 2011.

In the two months his career was finished and the man seen as most likely to topple Sarkozy was out of the running for President.

It's worth reading Epstein's version of events but whether they amount to conspiracy we shall probably never know

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