A strange role reversal occurred on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s second day in the dock at his trial for “aggravated pimping”.
Jade, a prudish and hygiene-obsessed former prostitute, defied the unabashedly lascivious former guarantor of the stability of the international monetary system.
She was hired to "service" "DSK", as he is known, three times in 2009 and 2010. She expressed disgust at seeing him "in the middle of a pile of bodies on mattresses, arms, legs everywhere", in an orgy in a partner-swapping club in Belgium.
Jade spoke repeatedly of taking showers before and after sex. She paid a higher insurance premium for frequent blood tests because “I want to be clean” and wept when she became the second prostitute in as many days to tell the court that Strauss-Kahn sodomised her.
After Strauss-Kahn and his close friend Fabrice Paszkowski "gave" Jade to a French painter for sex in Washington, she turned the duvet over on the king-size bed in her luxury suite in the W Hotel, "so I wouldn't have to sleep in the odour of these men, because I can't sleep where I've done things".
The protagonists in the so-called Carlton trial (after the Lille hotel where the prostitution ring started) can be divided into the shamed and the shameless. Jade dissolved in tears when a magistrate used the word sodomy. “I was trying not to say it,” she said. “You just pronounced it.”
Jade gave up prostitution in 2010, shortly after she had a role in the first of three visits to Washington DC by Strauss-Kahn’s friends from Lille. She now works in an office. “I have to go back to work next week. Everyone will know!” she said.
Surprise
By contrast, Strauss-Kahn speaks matter-of-factly of his “minority sex practices” and expresses surprise that he upset the prostitutes he sodomised.
“I guess I must have a rougher sexuality than the average man,” he said. “I’m discovering that through this trial.”
Strauss-Kahn was responding to allegations by Jade and Mounia, a woman who testified earlier, that he would not have sodomised them if he had not known they were prostitutes. The question of his knowledge is central to the outcome of the trial. “He could not have had any doubts, to inflict on me what he did,” Jade said. “He had no respect for me. I was an object.”
Strauss-Kahn said: “I could not imagine for a moment that she was anything other than a libertine.” Jade had been paid €500 by one of Strauss-Kahn’s friends to attend an orgy at the Tantra partner-swapping club outside Brussels in the autumn of 2009. She was so revolted by the “slaughter” going on – with dozens of couples engaging in group sex – that she stayed at the bar talking to Strauss-Kahn’s African companion.
When Jade drove them back to the Amigo Hotel in Brussels, Strauss-Kahn suggested an “afters” threesome. Jade said she felt she had to earn her €500.
“I turned my back to Monsieur Strauss-Kahn and he impaled me,” Jade said. “Every time I see his picture or see him, I relive it, tearing me inside. No client ever dared do that. Does this man think he can do anything he wants because of his social status? If I were a libertine, he would have at least asked me.”
Strauss-Kahn appeared baffled: “If she was so upset, why didn’t she leave right away? She stayed and had coffee with us. It was friendly. I had no way of knowing.”
In the car on the way to Brussels that night, Jade told Strauss-Kahn she worked in a libertine club where she did an erotic striptease, followed by sex onstage with a partner she chose from the audience. Jade said she believed he could have no doubt she was a prostitute.
“I don’t see how that makes her a prostitute,” he said. “A lot of people in libertine clubs are exhibitionists.”
The court heard a debate over whether Strauss-Kahn’s sporadic willingness to wear a condom meant he knew which partners were prostitutes.
‘Trial of sodomy’
French writer
Patrick Besson
has labelled this the “trial of sodomy”. Only two of the seven prostitutes with whom Strauss-Kahn had sex have testified. Judge
Bernard Lemaire
read the depositions of several others, one of whom said she was sodomised despite her protests on a trip to Washington.
In the remand order which sent Strauss-Kahn and a dozen others to trial, two prostitutes told how they resisted his attempts to sodomise them. Estelle, who joined in sex parties in Paris, Brussels and Washington, refused repeatedly. Of Strauss-Kahn’s Paris apartment, she said: “I remember Dominique sodomising a black girl and telling me, ‘Look how I do it, look. She likes it. You’ll like it too’.”
