When Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on 14 May, Sinclair was in Paris awaiting the birth of her first grandchild. She immediately got on a flight to the US. She closed her Washington blog and is likely to postpone her planned biography of her grandfather, a book in part designed to show the electorate that it was her who was mega-rich, not her hu*****and, dubbed a "champagne socialist". This is not the first time she has stood by him through scandal. She supported him in 1999 when he quit government over a financial issue, for which he was later cleared. In 2008, the IMF investigated Strauss-Kahn's affair with a junior colleague who said she was "damned if she did, damned if she didn't" agree to sleep with him. Sinclair deemed it a "one-night stand", saying "this kind of thing can happen to any couple", and: "We love each other like the first day."
One of Sinclair's close friends said: "It's strange, theirs is a great love story, they are intensely close, advising, supporting and accompanying each other. Yet it's a love story that notably never included fidelity on his part. That doesn't seem to fit the picture: a couple so intensely close, where the man is unfaithful. To keep the relationship, she shut herself into denial, she didn't allow herself to know or accept that he was what he was: unfaithful and addicted to sex. There were people who said: 'Be careful, he's a randy sod.' She said: 'No, do you believe that slander about him?' She fell out with friends over it."
The friend added: "She's suffering, that's clear. It's appalling. Even now she doesn't want to believe it, saying to people: "I hope you don't believe all those things that are written in the press."
Anne Sinclair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn at home in Paris in 1993. Photograph: Micheline Pelletier/ Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Corbis
Sinclair is described by those who know her as bourgeois, brave, intelligent, cultured, likable and possessed of "a sense of morality". But accusations of a brutal sex assault and attempted rape involve an alleged crime; they have nothing to do with "seduction". In France, two key legacies have emerged in the post-DSK era. First, a backlash against the sexism and harassment that has been rife in the political class. More important, a forced acknowledgement – after all the belittling of the charges by politicians – that rape is rape. At a recent feminist rally, protestors decried the macho response to Strauss-Kahn's arrest. (The Socialist Jack Lang was disgusted that Strauss-Kahn had been jailed over a charge that wasn't that serious – "no one had been killed". The journalist and philsopher Jean-François Kahn dismissed the case as a mere "troussage de domestique", a phrase suggestive of French aristocrats forcing sex on their servants. He later apologised.) Women in the crowd were divided over Sinclair. Many of the organisers felt she was not to blame and should be kept out of the issue. Others felt "uncomfortable" with her decades-old image as the perfect wife, while her hu*****and at best openly cheated and leched, at worst – if found guilty – was a sex attacker. In the Socialist party, many admire her courage and bravery in supporting him, while others are privately surprised she hasn't left him.
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