Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have disappeared from public life but his spectacular and sordid fall from grace is being played out again and again in books, plays, TV shows and movies.
It fascinates enormously because he was at the summit of the world and he found himself in the gutter overnight, thanks to a six-minute fellatio
The six-minute sexual encounter between the man who might have been France’s next President and a maid in a Manhattan hotel continues to fascinate long after the story fell off front pages of newspapers.
“The DSK affair is the incarnation of contemporary folly,” said novelist Stephane Zagdanski, using the initials by which the former head of the International Monetary Fund is best known in France.
“It fascinates enormously because he was at the summit of the world and he found himself in the gutter overnight, thanks to a six-minute fellatio,” he said.
“It shows the two faces of our world. People are fascinated by money, the rich, the stars, Hollywood etc. But they see that on the other side of this world of glamour there is also is banal human misery which is not so unlike ordinary folks’ misery,” he said.
Chaos Brulant (Burning Chaos), the title of Ms Zagdanski’s book, is taken from a quote by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that says that “civilisation is only a paper-thin veneer covering burning chaos”.
The tragi-comic novel – which follows the DSK affair through the eyes of a psychotic inmate of a Manhattan mental hospital – is liberally inspired by the events of May 14, 2011, and their aftermath.
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s career collapsed after his arrest on accusations by the maid, a West African immigrant called Nafissatou Diallo, that he sexually assaulted her after she went in to clean his New York hotel suite.
The charges were eventually dropped but Ms Diallo has launched a civil suit against him in New York seeking unspecified damages, while he in turn has filed a countersuit for malicious prosecution and defamation.
The silver-haired 63-year-old’s woes did not stop on the other side of the Atlantic. When he finally got to Paris, a string of more sordid revelations about him emerged.
In March this year, the ex-IMF chief, two businessmen and a police chief were charged with “aggravated pimping in an organised gang” for allegedly organising a prostitution ring for orgies in France and the US.
Mr Strauss-Kahn admits he attended orgies in various cities but insists he had no idea that many of the female guests were paid to attend.
Then in July, it emerged that Anne Sinclair, his fabulously rich wife of 20 years and a TV journalist famous in France, had separated from the man who until his disgrace was favourite to win this year’s French presidential race.
The real-life saga was more than many a writer or film-maker could have invented, and now the Strauss-Kahn drama is being fictionally transformed by a host of film-makers, playwrights and novelists. A US thriller inspired by the case made it onto the The New York Times bestseller list.
Night Watch was written by the former chief of the sex crimes unit in Manhattan, Linda Fairstein, who says that if she had still been in the job she left in 2002 she would have handled the DSK case.