Dominique Strauss-Kahn undergoes forensic exam in sex case

NEW YORK — Handcuffed and haggard, International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was escorted by detectives from a New York police station late Sunday in his first public appearance since being accused of trying to rape a hotel maid.

Strauss-Kahn, the early favorite in France’s presidential election, was led by detectives to a waiting police sedan in front of a battery of television cameras.

An arraignment expected Sunday night was postponed until Monday. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer William Taylor said testing for evidence delayed the arraignment.

The IMF leader submitted to a forensic medical exam with police looking for scratches or other evidence of the alleged assault.

“Our client willingly consented to a scientific and forensic examination,” Taylor said. Strauss-Kahn is “tired, but he’s fine.”

Strauss-Kahn, 62, was arrested less than four hours after Saturday’s alleged assault, plucked from first class on a Paris-bound Air France flight that was just about to leave the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The hotel maid identified him from a police lineup that included five other men on Sunday, a police spokesman said.

A second lawyer for Strauss-Kahn, Benjamin Brafman, told The Associated Press that his client will plead not guilty.

“He intends to vigorously defend these charges and he denies any wrongdoing,” Brafman said Sunday night.

Brafman is one of the city’s most high-profile defense attorneys. His clients have included mobsters and celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and ex-New York Giants star Plaxico Burress.

The charges have blown the French election wide open and thrown the IMF into turmoil.

He led the IMF through the 2007-09 global financial meltdown and has been central in galvanizing Europe to tackle its debt woes.

But he now faces charges of a criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape, and could face a humiliating end to his public career and presidential ambitions.

Police say Strauss-Kahn does not have diplomatic immunity from the charges, which if proven could carry a prison sentence of 15 to 20 years.

Strauss-Kahn’s reputation with women earned him the nickname “the great seducer.”

The white-haired, thrice-married father of four was alone when he checked into the luxury Sofitel hotel, not far from Manhattan’s Times Square, on Friday afternoon, police said.

The Washington-based IMF said Strauss-Kahn had been in New York on private business.

He had been due in Germany on Sunday to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

$3,000-a-night suite

The 32-year-old maid told authorities that when she entered his spacious, $3,000-a-night suite early Saturday afternoon, she thought it was unoccupied. Instead, Strauss-Kahn emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway and pulled her into a bedroom, where he sexually assaulted her, New York Police Department spokesman Paul J. Browne said.

The woman told police she fought him off, but then he dragged her into the bathroom, where he forced her to perform oral sex on him and tried to remove her underwear. The woman was able to break free again, escaped the room and told hotel staff what had happened, authorities said.

Strauss-Kahn was gone by the time detectives arrived moments later. He left his cellphone behind. “It looked like he got out of there in a hurry,” Browne said.

The NYPD discovered he was at JFK and contacted officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. Port Authority police officers arrested him.

The maid was taken by police to a hospital and was treated for minor injuries. Stacy Royal, a spokeswoman for Sofitel, said the hotel’s staff was cooperating in the investigation and that the maid “has been a satisfactory employee of the hotel for the past three years.”

His wife, Anne Sinclair, defended him in a statement to French news agency AFP.

“I do not believe for one second the accusations brought against my husband. I have no doubt his innocence will be established,” said Sinclair, a New York-born journalist who hosted a popular weekly TV news broadcast in France in the 1980s. A member of France’s Socialist party, Strauss-Kahn was widely considered the strongest potential challenger next year to President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose political fortunes have been flagging.

“At the top of the polls,” Strauss-Kahn tweeted proudly in French last December, linking an article that showed him ahead in opinion polls when French voters were asked whom they would choose in a primary. At a soccer game in a Washington suburb last September, he, his wife and others were seen wearing T-shirts that read, “Yes we Kahn,” a play on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Yes we can.”

Strauss-Kahn also noted that he trailed only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on a list of 100 “global thinkers” compiled last November by Foreign Policy magazine. Strauss-Kahn was cited for his “steely vision at a moment of crisis” — for convincing Germany to help bail out Greece’s debt-laden government, and for helping to put the brakes on defaults in Hungary, Pakistan and Ukraine.

The charges against Strauss-Kahn are a huge embarrassment for an institution that oversees the global economic system and has authorized hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to troubled countries.

The arrest could throw France’s long-divided Socialists back into disarray about who they could present as Sarkozy’s opponent. Even some of his adversaries were stunned.

“It’s totally hallucinating. If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense, for French political life,” said Dominique Paille, a political rival to Strauss-Kahn on the center right, on BFM television. Still, he urged, “I hope that everyone respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manage to believe this affair.”

Candidates need to announce their intentions this summer to run in fall primary elections.

Strauss-Kahn is known as DSK in France, but media there also have dubbed him “the great seducer.” His reputation as a charmer of women has not hurt his career in France, where politicians’ private lives traditionally come under less scrutiny than in the United States.

In 2008, Strauss-Kahn was briefly investigated over whether he had an improper relationship with a subordinate female employee. The IMF board found that the relationship was consensual, but called his actions “regrettable” and said they “reflected a serious error of judgment.”

Strauss-Kahn issued an apology, writing in an email to IMF staff that he showed poor judgment but didn’t abuse his position.

The sexual assault allegations come amid French media reports about Strauss-Kahn’s lifestyle, including luxury cars and suits, that some have dubbed a smear campaign. Some French raised suspicions about the sexual assault case as well.

French voters are famously tolerant of political leaders’ extramarital affairs, but the allegations against Strauss-Kahn are entirely different, and much more serious.

A former economics professor, Strauss-Kahn served as French industry minister and finance minister in the 1990s, and is credited with preparing France for the adoption of the euro by taming its deficit.

He took over as head of the IMF in November 2007. The 187-nation lending agency provides help in the form of emergency loans for countries facing severe financial problems.

Caroline Atkinson, an IMF spokeswoman, issued a statement Sunday that said the agency would have no comment on the New York case. She referred all inquiries to Strauss-Kahn’s personal lawyer and said the “IMF remains fully functioning and operational.”

The fund’s executive board was expected to be briefed on developments related to Strauss-Kahn on Sunday, but the meeting was postponed. John Lipsky, the IMF’s first deputy managing director, would lead the organization in an acting capacity in Strauss-Kahn’s absence.