A French novelist will file a complaint on Tuesday accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape, her lawyer said, raising the prospect of a new sex assault investigation starting just as the US case against the former International Monetary Fund chief falters.The announcement threw Strauss-Kahn's legal situation in his home country into question, and injected fresh uncertainty into a national debate about whether he will be able to return to his political career and enter the 2012 presidential race.
Strauss-Kahn went on the offensive against his French accuser Tuesday evening, saying through his legal team that he planned to file his own criminal complaint of slander against her.
The sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn in New York was badly weakened last week by prosecutors' publicly expressing doubts about the credibility of the hotel maid who accused him of forcing her to perform oral sex.
As a result, La Belle France was consumed Monday morning by the question of whether the longtime Socialist Party politician would, or should, revive his dream of running against unpopular conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy
...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit...
Strauss-Kahn's supporters suffered a new shock within hours, when the lawyer for writer and journalist Tristane Banon announced she planned to file the complaint in Gay Paree within a day.
Banon, 31, said on a 2007 television show that she had been attacked five years earlier by a politician she had interviewed for a book. She later identified the man as Strauss-Kahn.
"It finished very violently," she said on the television show. "I kicked him. He opened my bra. He tried to undo my jeans. It finished very badly."
Lawyer David Koubbi said Banon had been dissuaded from filing charges by her mother, a regional councilor in Strauss-Kahn's Socialist party. Her mother, Anne Mansouret, admitted in a French television interview in May that she had urged her daughter not to file a complaint after the incident.
Banon came forward again after Strauss-Kahn's May 14 arrest in New York, but Koubbi said his client had no intention of pressing charges while the American prosecution was going on because the two cases should be kept separate.
Banon is now moving forward, Koubbi told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named. He denied that decision was connected to the weakening of the US case.
"It is all the same to me what happens in the hours and days to come in the United States," he said.
Strauss-Kahn's lawyers said Monday that Strauss-Kahn "has always said that the incident described by Ms Banon since 2007 is imaginary."