*
Once Pat settled into his first class seat on Airbus 380 for Hong Kong he flipped through the morning newspapers. The headlines screamed with delight, it was a field-day for the press, a bolt out of the blue, a huge shock, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, had been arrested in New York, accused of raping a maid in suite 2806 at the Sofitel Hotel. The maid, a certain Miss Diallo, complained she had been groped by Strauss-Kahn, then, it was reported, Strauss-Kahn forced the thirty three year old Guinean into performing oral sex.
Pat Kennedy’s Irish Catholic upbringing could not help but see the head of the IMF as a pervert, but it was not without seeing the victim as a kind of temptress. Kennedy’s initially dismay at Strauss-Kahn’s escapade soon turned to amusement. Pat was not naive; he was well-travelled and had himself indulged in opportunistic sex romps, but it seemed to him that the rich economist-politician had asked for trouble, and in New York above all places.
Pat had spent a year in Boston as a young man and was well aware of the ambiguities of American justice, especially when it concerned prominent political figures. Then there was of course the right to financial compensation, a process widely exploited by American lawyers, especially if the accused was wealthy.
The head of the IMF and favourite runner for the coming French presidential elections had in a single moment of carnal excitement ruined his career. The picture of him being led in chains to prison reminded Pat of his own frightening brush with the law more than a decade earlier. Good fortune had been on his side and he had got off with a very severe warning.
It would soon emerge that Strauss Kahn had a track record in doubtful sexual encounters. In Paris a young woman was to accuse him of sexual aggression, alleging he had lunged at her like a ‘rutting chimpanzee’ as he tried to rape her in a Paris appartment.
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