Strauss-Kahn files $1m suit against maid
2012-05-15 11:02
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Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy was born an outsider. A child of immigrants who grew up outside the circles of the...
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New York - Disgraced ex-International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has filed a $1m countersuit against the New York hotel maid at the centre of last year's explosive sexual assault allegations, a report said on Tuesday.
A year after the scandal broke, the former French Socialist party presidential hopeful accused the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, of "knowingly and intentionally making a false report to law-enforcement authorities", the New York Post said on Tuesday citing court documents.
The countersuit lodged on Monday at Bronx Supreme Court claims the maid's "malicious and wanton false allegation" undermined Strauss-Kahn's reputation and damaged "other professional opportunities", said the filing, without specifying political ambitions that were rocked by the scandal, the Post said.
Before the allegations brought down the IMF chief in the wake of his arrest last year in New York, Strauss-Kahn, aged 62, was seen as a champion of France's Socialist Party and expected to beat vulnerable President Nicolas Sarkozy at the polls this year.
Instead Socialist candidate Francois Hollande stood against Sarkozy, and won, and will take the oath of office on Tuesday.
The Post said Strauss-Kahn's suit also charges Diallo with "malicious prosecution, abuse of process, false imprisonment, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress".
His legal team was able to undermine the maid's criminal case last year, but the once-high-flying statesman has been helpless against a US judge who rejected his claim to diplomatic immunity and ordered a civil trial to go ahead.
Meanwhile in recent weeks Strauss-Kahn has been implicated in a prostitution ring probe in northern France, although he has insisted that he was unaware that women at the numerous orgies he took part in were prostitutes.
