France: A French court on Saturday acquitted former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of procuring prostitutes, in a case that dragged his colourful sex life into the public eye.
The verdict draws a line under four years of legal proceedings for a man whose strong prospects of becoming French president were destroyed by a New York chamber maid's accusations of sexual assault in 2011.
In a court in the northern city of Lille, 66-year-old Strauss-Kahn merely nodded his head to acknowledge the verdict of not guilty to charges of "aggravated pimping" at parties in Paris, Brussels and Washington. One of Strauss-Kahn's lawyers, Richard Malka, said the case had collapsed "like a house of cards" after even the prosecutor called for him to be let off due to a lack of evidence that he had organised or profited from prostitution.
Chief judge Bernard Lemaire ruled that Strauss-Kahn was not the "instigator" of orgies attended by prostitutes but merely the "beneficiary of group sex". The trial was the latest in a long series of high-profile corruption and sexual scandals that have landed Strauss-Kahn in the dock in the past 16 years, only to fizzle out.
Strauss-Kahn saw his career as the head of the International Monetary Fund implode over the accusations in New York. Those criminal charges were dropped in 2012 and the case was settled in a civil suit, but soon afterwards his name cropped up in a probe into an alleged prostitution ring in northern France, which provided sex workers for orgies he attended.
Under French law, prostitution is legal, but procuring and benefiting from it is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The trial heard lurid details of champagne-fuelled orgies attended by Strauss-Kahn, as his lawyers accused the prosecution of putting his morals, and prostitution itself, on trial.
Strauss-Kahn said that while he was a libertine who enjoyed group sex, he was unaware any of the women attending the parties had been paid to be there. Judge Lemaire said there had been several inconsistencies in the testimony of former prostitutes who attended the parties and gave dramatic accounts of nights of "carnage".
The women said Strauss-Kahn would have been "naive" to be unaware of their role and recounted brutal scenes of sodomy, angering the accused who said he was not on trial for "deviant practices". He said the use of prostitutes "horrified" him and that paying for sex would be too great a risk for a man at the head of the IMF, which was busy "saving the world" from the financial crisis.
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