Ex-IMF chief admits assault

PARIS – French prosecutors say Dominique Strauss-Kahn did something to a writer that qualifies as sexual assault, but they can’t send him to trial because it happened too long ago and they are dropping the case.

Thursday’s announcement is a legal victory, but a moral embarrassment, for the suave, assured, and married economist who earlier this year led the International Monetary Fund and was on track to seek the French presidency.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said it has dropped an investigation into writer Tristane Banon’s claim that he tried to rape her during a 2003 interview for a book the then-23-year-old was writing. But it said – without offering details – that Strauss-Kahn admitted during questioning to actions that qualify for the lesser charge of sexual assault.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer told the Associated Press that the ex-IMF chief admitted only that he tried to kiss Banon without her consent and she refused.

Under French law, sexual assault is an attack that does not involve an attempt to penetrate the victim. Prosecutors can’t pursue the charge because the statute of limitations is three years.

“For lack of sufficient elements of evidence, prosecution cannot be undertaken on the charge of attempted rape,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. However, it added that “facts that can be qualified as sexual assault have been acknowledged.”

The prosecutor’s unusual statement revived questions about Strauss-Kahn’s behavior toward women that have trailed him throughout his decades in French politics but that remained largely ignored by mainstream French media. In France, politicians’ private lives have traditionally been considered off-limits.

Not so in the United States, where Strauss-Kahn was jailed in May on charges he tried to rape a New York hotel maid. Prosecutors later dropped that case, too.

In the French incident, Banon, a writer 30 years his junior, has said that Strauss-Kahn invited her to an empty apartment for the book interview, and they ended up tussling on the floor, with the politician trying to open her jeans and bra and putting his fingers in her mouth and underwear.