LILLE, France — Dominique Strauss-Kahn had a caustic reaction as four years of legal battles involving sex charges on two continents ended without a single conviction: “All that for this?”
From a sordid New York hotel encounter to orgies in Paris, the former International Monetary Fund chief has admitted to questionable behavior that destroyed his political career and onetime presidential ambitions.
He’s a sexual libertine, by his own admission. But courts have repeatedly found no grounds to convict him as a criminal.
Friday’s ruling in the northern French city of Lille closed a sometimes surreal chapter for Strauss-Kahn and for France, where the unusual public airing of his private life sent shockwaves through society and upended high-level politics. Some Frenchwomen hoped the DSK scandal, as it became known, would make it easier to hold powerful men accountable for sexual wrongdoing — a hope largely unfulfilled.
