While Dominique Strauss-Kahn broods under guard in a downtown Manhattan apartment, the housekeeper who has accused the former head of the International Monetary Fund of sexual assault remains silent until she can speak in court. Another alleged victim, Tristane Banon, a 31-year-old French novelist and journalist, isn’t speaking to reporters, either. But that hasn’t always been the case. Banon has been trying to tell her story for years—through her fiction, in her interviews, on television broadcasts, and before a live audience. What she has said—and why everyone has heard but no one has listened—reveal much about la vie privée, la vie publique in France.
At the time of the alleged attack in 2002, Banon, who was then only 22, and DSK were hardly strangers. She was the goddaughter of his second wife and one of his daughter’s best friends. Tristane herself was the result of a union between her mother and a married man she has never met, a man she later described in one of her novels as naming her as a dog would by “peeing on a wall to establish its territory.” One wonders whether DSK, whom she alleges attempted to rape her during an interview for an early collection of interviews with powerful men called Admitted Mistakes, wasn’t one of the authoritarian fathers she observed as she grew up and later described in a popular French talk show. Banon later told Agora Vox: Citizens’ Media that she removed the chapter on DSK under pressure. “In this story, I wasn’t mean, I didn’t file a complaint, I pulled the chapter, I did everything he told me to do.”
