A NEW York judge yesterday granted bail of $1m with a $5 million insurance bond to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, after he was indicted on charges of sexual assault of a 32-year-old African hotel maid in Manhattan on May 14th.
Mr Strauss-Kahn will remain confined to his wife’s New York City apartment with around-the-clock electronic monitoring.
The former IMF chief’s indictment means he will stand trial before a grand jury on seven charges of sexual crimes in relation to the alleged assault. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison.
Prosecutors argued against Mr Strauss-Kahn’s second application to be released on bail, after the lawyers of the accused offered to post $1 million in bond. Mr Strauss-Kahn was prepared to wear an electronic bracelet and live in the upper West Side apartment of his 26-year-old daughter Camille, who is a student at Columbia University.
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s wife Anne Sinclair, a Franco-American heiress and well-known journalist, offered to pay for armed security guards to stand outside the apartment. Supreme court judge Michael Obus asked what would happen if the electronic bracelet stopped working and Mr Strauss-Kahn fled to the French diplomatic mission. France does not have an extradition treaty with the US, and the film director Roman Polanski avoided extradition to the US for three decades on charges of statutory rape.
Mr Strauss-Kahn resigned from the IMF on Wednesday night. “It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the executive board my resignation from my post of managing director of the IMF,” he wrote.
Mr Strauss-Kahn wrote the letter from the notorious Rikers Island jail complex, where he has been held in a solitary wing since he was refused bail on Monday.
Prison authorities said he is under suicide watch, but one of his lawyers, William Taylor, said his mood was “serious, but good”.
US authorities yesterday released Mr Strauss-Kahn’s police mug-shot, in which he looks haggard and unshaven and stares downward.
French socialists have expressed outrage at his treatment in the US, in particular his being filmed in handcuffs after his first night in jail. Such images are banned in France. In an opinion poll published on Wednesday, 57 per cent of French respondents said they believed Mr Strauss-Kahn was the “victim of a plot”. That figure rose to 70 per cent among Socialist Party supporters.
In his resignation letter, Mr Strauss-Kahn said he wanted “to protect this institution which I have served with honour and devotion, and especially . . . I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence”.
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers are expected to argue that the alleged victim consented to sexual contact with him.
Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest and indictment have revived memories of his affair in 2008 with Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian economist who was his subordinate at the IMF. Ms Nagy’s lawyers have reportedly warned Mr Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers not to repeat their “insinuation” that she pursued him. In 2008, Ms Nagy wrote a letter to a lawyer who was hired by the IMF to investigate the affair, in which she said she was unprepared for her boss’s advances. “I did not know how to handle this; as I told you I felt I was ‘damned if I did and damned if I didn’t’,” the letter said.
Mr Strauss-Kahn arrived at the New York supreme court at 9.30am and waved to supporters in the visitors’ gallery, including his wife and daughter.
“I think, at this time, first of my wife – whom I love more than anything – of my children, of my family, of my friends,” he wrote in his resignation letter.