Iran born woman targets Strauss-Kahn

but across the pond in Paris an Iranian-born woman is the vocal power behind another rape case against the French politician.

Strauss-Kahn, 64, was widely expected to be the Socialist candidate with a good chance of upsetting President Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential elections in France next year until he was accused in New York of raping a hotel maid May 14.

The veracity of the maid has been challenged and the rape charges are being reviewed by the Manhattan district attorney.

But in Paris, Strauss-Kahn, former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), faces another charge. That case centers on Anne Mansouret, 65, and her daughter, Tristane Banon, 32.

Mansouret was born in Tehran just after World War II, the daughter of a liaison between an Iranian man and a Belgian woman. Mansouret was raised by her mother and did not become a French citizen until she was 21. It wasn’t clear if she lived in Tehran long enough to remember it.

Mansouret is active in the Socialist party. She now holds elective office in the Normandy region and has lost four efforts to be elected to the French National Assembly.

She told police she had consensual sex with Strauss-Kahn in 2000 while they were working together on party matters. But she says Strauss-Kahn “took me with the vulgarity of a soldier” and engaged in “brutal sex,” acting only to satisfy himself. She pictured him as vulgar and crude, far from the sophisticated image he has painted of himself. According to the French magazine L’Express, which said it got the details of the police interview, she said, “He doesn’t try to please woman, but simply to possess them.”

Mansouret and her daughter say Strauss-Kahn attacked the daughter while she was trying to interview him for a book she was writing in 2003. Mansouret says she discouraged her daughter from saying anything until the New York rape case emerged. Mansouret recently said, “I thought at the time my daughter had more to lose than to gain.”

The daughter is now talking and adds to the picture of Strauss-Kahn as squalid. She has said publicly that the attack by Strauss-Kahn was very violent, with his “fingers in my mouth, his hands in my underwear.” The daughter says, “We fought on the floor. It wasn’t a case of a couple of slaps. I kicked him. He unhooked my bra, he tried to open my jeans.”

She described Strauss-Kahn as acting like a “rutting chimpanzee.”

The French authorities haven’t yet decided whether to proceed with the case. But the thrust of the comments from the two women is to paint Strauss-Kahn as tawdry and unworthy of the presidency even if the legal cases go nowhere. According to L’Express, Mansouret told police she was speaking up now to contradict the impression painted by Strauss-Kahn’s supporters that he was a seducer, but not a man capable of violence. Mansouret described him to police as a “predator.”