Pat Dollard

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Lawyer: ‘The evidence will not be consistent with a forcible encounter’
Victim called her brother an hour after alleged assault
Claimed IMF chief ‘twice forced himself on her’
Banker is denied $1million bail by New York court
Spends his first night in cell at Rikers Island prison
Police reportedly found blood on sheets in suite
Fresh claim he victimised other maids at same hotel

Daily Mail:

Defence lawyers representing Dominique Strauss-Khan have indicated the hotel maid at the centre of the sex allegations consented to the IMF boss’s advances.

During a bail hearing yesterday Strauss-Khan’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman told Manhattan Criminal Court: ‘The evidence, we believe, will not be consistent with a forcible encounter’ suggesting this could be Strauss-Khan’s main line of defence if the case goes to trial.

A source close to the defence later said: ‘There may well have been consent,’ according to the New York Post.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, was spending his first night in an isolation cell at New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail yesterday after a female judge denied $1m bail on charges that he raped the maid who works for the Sofitel Hotel in New York.

The alleged rape victim told a relative in her first phone call after the attack: ‘Somebody did something really bad to me’, her brother revealed last night.

The woman phoned her older brother an hour after the alleged assault took place and gave him a horrifying account what the head of the IMF allegedly did to her.

Crying uncontrollably, she said that she had been trapped inside the hotel bedroom while the Frenchman twice tried to force himself on her.

She told him he was the first member of family to whom she had revealed the alleged attack He said he told her not to talk to anybody and immediately contacted a lawyer to represent her.

Speaking exclusively to Mail Online, the alleged victim’s brother said: ‘No family should have to go through this.

‘She is a hard-working woman who is just a victim. She is a wonderful west African immigrant who just wants to work hard.

‘I love her, she is my little sister and she is doing better now she has had a chance to talk to a lawyer. She is somewhere very, very safe and will stay that way’.

The brother, 43, a restaurant manager from Harlem in New York, said his sister, 32, called him on Saturday in the afternoon, a mere hour or so after she claimed the attack took place.

He recalled: ‘She rang me and she said: “Somebody has done something really bad to me. I’ve been attacked”.

‘She was crying all the time.’

The brother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said that he wanted to see Strauss-Kahn face a trial if he pleaded not guilty.

‘I trust the American justice system and will let it do what it has to do,’ he said.

‘I want him to see justice. Justice will be served’.

Yesterday prosecutors revealed graphic details of Strauss-Kahn’s alleged brutal sex attack on the maid.

Police also reportedly found blood on bed sheets in the hotel suite where the assault allegedly took place and DNA samples on carpet and fabric that they removed for testing.

These include two counts of a first degree criminal sexual act, two counts of sexual abuse, attempted rape, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

A one-page indictment provided further lurid claims, accusing Strauss-Kahn of forcing the maid to take part in both oral and anal sex.

The court papers claim he forcibly touched the woman’s breasts, twice ‘forcibly made contact with his penis and the informant’s mouth’ and ‘engaged in oral sexual conduct and anal sexual conduct with another person by forcible compulsion’.

It took 20 minutes for Judge Melissa Jackson to refuse Strauss-Kahn’s bail offer of $1million at the hearing.

He had also offered to stay with his 26-year-old daughter Camille, a married political science student at Columbia University who lives in New York and have all his travel documents confiscated, his lawyer Mr Brafman said.

Camille and her husband arrived halfway through the hearing and stood at the back of the court alongside a sea of reporters.

Judge Jackson said she was a ‘fair judge’ but added: ‘When I hear your client was at JFK airport about to board a flight that raises concern.’ Strauss-Kahn was on an Air France flight minutes from take-off when he was arrested.

Assistant District Attorney John A McConnell had earlier called Strauss-Kahn an ‘incurable flight risk’ and voiced concerns that if he managed to flee to France the U.S. would not be able to extradite him.

‘It’s just like Roman Polanski – it’s the same, exact situation,’ he said referring to the film director who was charged with a sex act involving a child in 1977 before fleeing to France where he stayed for more than 30 years.

He called the charges severe and said that ‘the victim provided a very powerful and detailed account’ of the alleged attack and had had a full sexual assault examination in hospital.

The maid, a Guinean immigrant, told authorities that when she entered Strauss-Kahn’s suite to clean it on Saturday afternoon, he emerged naked from the bathroom and chased her down a hallway before pulling her back inside.

The maid claims she then briefly fought him off before he dragged her into the bathroom and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

The woman said she was able to break free again as he tried to remove her underwear and ran downstairs to tell hotel staff what had happened.

After Strauss-Kahn rang to recover his mobile phone, which he had left in his room, detectives were able to find him at John F Kennedy airport.

Indicating that there ‘may be’ forensic evidence in the suite supporting the maid’s claims, Mr McConnell added that he had seen CCTV video footage of Strauss-Kahn leaving the hotel.

He appeared to be ‘a man who was in a hurry’, he said.

Mr Brafman, who defended Michael Jackson from child molestation charges, and has also defended Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs, argued that it was ‘simply wrong’ to disallow his client bail.

He has no previous criminal record and has a daughter in New York who he was prepared to stay with, he said.

He is not planning to leave New York city and was ‘probably the most easily identifiable person in the world today,’ he added.

Mr Brafman also argued that if Strauss-Kahn had appeared in a hurry it was because he had a prior lunch engagement with his daughter Camille before his flight to Germany, which he added had been booked before the alleged incident.

However Straus-Khan apparently met his daughter at 12.45pm making it too late for her to act as an alibi, a source told the New York Post.

Strauss-Kahn had co-operated ‘completely’ with police requests, Mr Brafman said, before adding that all of these aspects were not ‘consistent with someone who has something to hide’.

On top of offering to post a $1million bail, Mr Brafman argued that his client would give up all his travel documents and said he would be able to stay with his daughter in New York.

He added that Strauss-Kahn’s wife, the French journalist and millionaire heiress Anne Sinclair, was due to arrive in New York and had wired the bail funds through to a U.S. bank account.

Outside court, Mr Brafman said they were ‘disappointed’ by the court’s decision.

‘Mr Strauss-Kahn is innocent of these charges,’ he said. ‘It is a very defensible case. It is his intention to try and clear his name. This case has just begun.’

Strauss-Kahn, dubbed the ‘Great Seducer’ by the French media, will now be housed in ‘protective custody’ at the West Facility on Rikers Island in a cell on his own, a spokesman for the prison told MailOnline.

He will eat eat his meals alone and spend his recreation time alone, he added.

The disgraced banker was supposed to appear in court yesterday but the hearing was postponed until today after Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said their client had agreed to undergo some ‘scientific tests’.

He was reportedly being searched for scratches and traces of his accuser’s DNA at the unit, where prisoners are served meals costing $1.80.

French author Tristane Banon, now 31, also spoke out today to claim that Strauss-Kahn forcefully tried to seduce her ten years ago in Paris, allegedly leaving her having to fight him off.

At the time, her mother, Anne Mansouret, a regional Socialist official in Normandy, said she advised her daughter against pursuing a claim at the time.

A French lawmaker from a rival political party also alleged, without offering evidence, that Strauss-Kahn had victimised several maids during past stays at the Sofitel near Times Square.

The hotel issued a statement calling conservative lawmaker Michel Debre’s claims ‘baseless and defamatory’.

Sofitel management ‘has had no knowledge of any previous attempted aggressions’, the hotel said, adding that it had set up a hotline for workers to report incidents more than a year ago.

Assistant District Attorney Mr McConnell said in court that New York authorities are working to verify at least one other case of ‘conduct similar to the conduct alleged’.

When the judge asked whether the potential other incident occurred in the United States, McConnell said he ‘believed that was abroad’.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said they had no immediate response to the allegations emerging from overseas.

The scandal involving the IMF boss has torn France’s presidential race asunder and savaged the reputation of the suave and self-assured Strauss-Kahn.’

He had been considered a leading contender to run on the Socialist Party ticket against President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s French elections. He has topped opinion polls for months as the man most likely to become the nation’s next president.

In France, for some, the arrest spells the end of his presidential ambitions and even his political career; others warned that it was too early to judge a man who denies wrongdoing; and still others suspect a plot to blacken his name just as the campaign heats up for the April 2012 first-round vote

French voters are famously tolerant of political leaders’ extramarital affairs. The allegations against Strauss-Kahn are entirely different, and much more serious.

Many politicians have fallen after being caught in extramarital affairs and others have survived them, including former U.S. presidents John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton as well as former French President Francois Mitterrand.

Rarely have senior figures faced brutal assault charges like those filed against Strauss-Kahn.

Police made the revelations as Strauss-Kahn’s wife said she ‘does not believe for a second’ the allegations made against her husband.

Miss Sinclair, 63, made it clear she would be sticking by him.

Calling for ‘decency and restraint’ in the coverage of the scandal, she said: ‘I don’t believe for one second the accusations made against my husband. I have no doubt that his innocence will be established.’

It was not clear why Strauss-Kahn was in New York. The IMF is based in Washington DC and he was due in Germany yesterday.

The IMF said Strauss-Kahn had been in New York on private business.

Christine Boutin, president of the Christian Democrat Party, suggested Strauss-Kahn may have been set up.

‘I think it’s very likely a trap was set for Dominique Strauss-Kahn and he fell into it,’ she told France’s BFM television. ‘It’s a political bomb for domestic politics.’

On Saturday far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen said that Strauss-Kahn’s bid for the top job was now ‘doomed’.

A French government spokesman said it was important to remain cautious and reserve judgment. ‘We have to be extremely prudent in analysis, comments and consequences,’ he told France 2 television.

The spokesman added that the government’s position was to respect the presumption of innocence.

Strauss-Kahn has been dogged by scandal.

In 2008 he was embroiled in controversy over accusations that he had had a sexual relationship with one of his subordinates, Piroska Nagy, senior official in the IMF’s Africa Department.

The IMF hired a law firm to launch an investigation. Ms Nagy left the fund and joined the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

He was cleared of harassment, favouritism and abuse of power following an inquiry – and kept his job, though he later apologised for an ‘error of judgment’.

Strauss-Kahn, who was rejected by the French Socialists as their presidential candidate in 2006, gained international recognition as France’s finance minister from 1997-99.

He is credited with preparing France for the adoption of the euro by reducing its deficit and persuading then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to sign up to an EU pact of fiscal prudence.

A former economics professor, Strauss-Kahn joined the Socialist party in 1976 and was elected to parliament in 1986 from the Val-d’Oise district, north of Paris.

He went on to become mayor of Sarcelles, a working-class immigrant suburb of Paris.

Hours before Strauss-Kahn was pulled from the flight, a close Socialist Party ally claimed he was the target of a smear campaign by French President Sarkozy.

‘There is now a totally structured and orchestrated campaign, which has already been announced by Mr Sarkozy and his closest allies, to attack the character of Strauss-Kahn,’ Socialist politician Jean-Marie Le Guen told Europe 1 radio.

Formed at the end of World War II, the IMF provides low-cost loans to countries in financial crisis.

After 2008, it became increasingly significant after brokering rescue packages for countries like Greece, Pakistan, Iceland, Hungary and Ukraine.

France could face a ‘political earthquake’ after the arrest of presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The brilliant economist was seen as the strongest potential challenger to the conservative President Sarkozy in next year’s presidential elections, despite not announcing his candidacy.

Unless the charges are quickly dropped, they could destroy his chances in a presidential race that is just starting to heat up.

The allegations over his arrest in New York dominated special editions of Paris newspapers and there was also blanket coverage on TV and radio.

It is unclear how damaging the allegations could be. A poll for Le Parisien gave him 41 per cent of the votes among supporters of the Socialist Party.

‘At the top of the polls,’ Strauss-Kahn tweeted proudly in French last December, linking an article that showed him ahead in opinion polls when French voters were asked whom they would choose in a primary.

At a soccer game in a Washington suburb last September, he, his wife and others were seen wearing T-shirts that read, ‘Yes we Kahn’.

Strauss-Kahn also noted that he trailed only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on a list of 100 ‘global thinkers’ compiled last November by Foreign Policy magazine.

He was cited for his ‘steely vision at a moment of crisis’ – for convincing Germany to help bail out Greece’s debt-laden government, and for helping to put the brakes on defaults in Hungary, Pakistan and Ukraine.

The arrest could throw the long-divided Socialists back into disarray about who they could present as Sarkozy’s opponent. Even some of his adversaries were stunned.

‘It’s totally hallucinating. If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense, for French political life,’ said Dominique Paille, a political rival to Strauss-Kahn on the centre right, on BFM television.

Still, he urged, ‘I hope that everyone respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manage to believe this affair.’

Candidates need to announce their intentions this summer to run in fall primary elections.

‘If he’s cleared, he could return – but if he is let off only after four or five months, he won’t be able to run’ because the campaign will be too far along, said Jerome Fourquet of the IFOP polling agency.

‘I think his political career is over,’ Philippe Martinat, who wrote a book called DSK-Sarkozy: The Duel, said..

‘Behind him he has other affairs … I don’t see very well how he can pick himself back up.’