Strauss-Kahn gets slapped with pimping charges

Dominique Strauss Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and one-time contender for the presidency of France, will face charges of aggravated pimping, along with a group of other men, a French court ruled Friday.  

The crime carries a maximum term of 10 years in prison and a fine of $2 million.

Strauss-Kahn, 64, had been under investigation for the allegations since 2012. His lawyer maintains his innocence.

"We're not in the realm of the law, we're in ideology," said Henri Leclerc, one of Strauss-Kahn's attorneys. We're sending someone to court for nothing."

The charges involve sex parties at the Carlton Hotel in the city of Lille. Strauss-Kahn has admitted to attending the parties, but denies knowing that the women who participated were paid as prostitutes. The scandal is referred to in France as the “affair du Carlton.”

The decision to charge Strauss-Kahn came as somewhat of a surprise because a public prosecutor had recommended in June that the inquiry be dropped without trial.

Though patronizing a prostitute is not illegal in France, pimping under French law is a broad crime that can encompass aiding or encouraging the act of prostitution. Strauss-Kahn was charged with the more serious form -- aggravation -- because his alleged actions involved more than one prostitute.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, 12 others face pimping charges alongside Kahn. A fourteenth person, a woman, faces charges for abetting the crime, the paper reports.

The judges said that Strauss-Kahn couldn’t have participated in the alleged crimes without knowing that the women involved had received payment, and that some had revealed their status as prostitutes by "words and by attitudes," according to Le Monde.

The disgraced French politician lost his position as head of the IMF after facing accusations of rape by a maid, Nafissatou Diallo, at a New York hotel in May 2011.

Manhattan prosecutors later dropped the rape charges against him in August 2011 after saying they found discrepancies in Diallo’s account of the alleged events. Diallo and Strauss-Kahn later settled in a New York civil court in December 2012.

Strauss-Kahn had become a powerful force in France and on the world stage by the time a barrage of camera flashes greeted him during his 2011 “perp walk” out of a New York police precinct.

Police had pulled him off a Paris-bound flight and arrested him moments before it was due to take off from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport

The Socialist economist owed his wealth to his heiress wife, Anne Sinclair, once France's top political talk show host and now the editor of the Huffington Post in France.

Sinclair put up the $1 million bail for DSK and paid the rent on an expensive townhouse in lower Manhattan while her husband fought the lawsuit, but the couple separated as new charges began to pile up.

Soon after his arrest for the allegations at the New York hotel, French writer Tristane Banon, 34, said Strauss-Kahn had attempted to rape her during an interview in 2003. He denied her accusations.

Prosecutors said they believed the encounter qualified as a sexual assault, but the legal timeframe to pursue her complaint had lapsed.

A prostitute also accused Strauss-Kahn and other men of gang-raping her in Washington D.C., but she later dropped the charges.

Despite their separation, Sinclair loaned her estranged husband half of the settlement that reportedly went to Diallo, which sources put at $6 million. DSK's lawyer said that sum is inaccurate, according to the New York Times.

Sinclair and Strauss-Kahn formally divorced in March 2013.

Lisa De Bode contributed to this report. Al Jazeera and Wire Services