The word of Anne Sinclair has always been rare.
Particularly on the so-called Sofitel affair, which led to the incarceration in New York of her former husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Ten years after the events, the former television star decided for the first time to deliver his “feelings” on the “DSK affair”, which led to the downfall of the one who was then presented as the big favorite of the presidential election, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in an interview with the weekly Elle.
Read also DSK comes out of its silence: since the Sofitel affair, the discreet life of a fallen favorite
In this interview posted online Monday, she reacts to the "earthquake" triggered in May 2011 by the arrest in New York of her husband, accused of rape, and to the criticisms she suffered for having supported him.
Before separating from it in 2012. “It may be due to him, but perhaps also to me, I reproduced the pattern of dependence that linked me to my mother.
(…) I was with him in the fear of disagreement and the fear of displeasing him.
So, was it a hold, I don't know, but in any case, submission and acceptance, ”she says, a few days before the release of her memoir,“ Past composed ” (Grasset).
"I didn't know anything about my husband's behavior"
In this book, the former journalist star of TF1 (with the show 7 on 7) chose to tell "only (his) felt". “I don't feel authorized to talk about acts that are not my doing,” she says. Anne Sinclair insists on “two things that (him) matter”. "Contrary to everything we have said, I didn't want to go to the Elysee Palace, he (DSK) didn't really want elsewhere, it was a chain of circumstances ..."
Second, "I want people to understand that I didn't know anything about my husband's behavior." "I know it is very difficult to admit, I admit that myself, if I were told this, I would not believe it, but yet, it is true". At the time, Dominique Strauss-Kahn exercised "a very strong power of persuasion", until the Carlton Lille affair opened her eyes, she explains to Elle. “You don't let a man down who's on the ground,” she said. “I think I was important to him, but I was at the end of it. We never had a substantive explanation ”.
On May 14, 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF and engaged in the race for the Elysee Palace, was arrested and then imprisoned after accusations of attempted rape by a maid of the Sofitel, where he had spent the night. If this affair ultimately ended in a confidential financial transaction, it cost DSK his political career, later implicated in another sex scandal, that of the Carlton in Lille. In this interview, Anne Sinclair also reveals that François Hollande, at the end of his five-year term, had offered him "to become his Minister of Culture". "It was a great honor that I obviously declined", declares the journalist, companion today of the historian Pierre Nora.