But new claims have emerged alleging that Strauss-Kahn paid an infamous brothel madam for escort girls in 2006 before he took up his post at the IMF. The Times newspaper reports that the Frenchman was put in contact with Wicked Models owner Kristin Davis by a Bosnian prostitute living in Paris.There was also a photo of the buxom Davis with the caption calling her the Manhattan Madam.-- the same owner of an escort service which furnished call girls for Eliot Spitzer three years ago.
MSNBC reveals at the NBC New York website:
The so-called "Manhattan madam" who arranged prostitutes for former Gov. Eliot Spitzer claims she also provided them for the former International Monetary Fund chief who has been charged in the sexual assault of a New York hotel maid.
Kristin Davis tells NBC New York that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a client of her service in September 2006 when he was in town for the Clinton Global Initiative meeting.
Davis said he paid her $1,200 cash for two-hour sessions. Strauss-Kahn's lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The story was first reported by The Daily Telegraph.
"He wanted an 'All American girl,' with a fresh face, from the Midwest," she said. "A girl in January 2006 complained he was rough and angry, and said she didn't want to see him again."
Davis, who has claimed to have a "little black book" with more than 10,000 names -- many of them famous -- was arrested in 2008 for her affiliation with Spitzer.
She ran for governor of New York in 2010 and has vowed she will run for New York City mayor in 2013 if Spitzer decides to join the race.
Strauss-Kahn has been jailed without bail at Rikers Island after his arraignment on attempted rape, sex abuse, a criminal sex act, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching. His lawyers deny the charges and say there is no evidence of a forced encounter.
We are reminded of a call-girl ring tied to attorney Philip Bailley in 1972, which was under investigation at the same time the Democratic National Committee's Watergate office was being broken into. Not until 1984 Jim Hougan's book, Secret Agenda, came out was a connection exposed between that ring and Maureen Kane Biner Dean, White House Counsel John Dean's wife."Mo" Dean was a close friend of more than one of the women involved in the ring of escorts, who hired themselves out at exorbitant fees to men on "Capitol Hill" and out of towners referred by the DNC staff, some of whose phones had been wiretapped and conversations listened in on.
A second book which delved even deeper into that same call-girl ring was called Silent Coup. Written by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, its publisher was sued by the Deans, who worked out a settlement, by terms of which certain allegations contained in the book were removed.
We are also reminded of many other incidents of "honey traps," where girls are used to trap powerful men into compromising situations designed to destroy their future political prospects. The Christine Keeler ring brought down John Profumo. Other and varied examples of honey traps are described by Phillip Knightley in a history posted at Foreign Policy.
What Hougan presents in Secret Agenda is not so much a totally new version of Watergate as it is, to use Marro's words, "a significant new dimension and perspective." There is nothing in his account to suggest that Richard M. Nixon was not guilty of impeachable offenses. Nor does Hougan dispute that the break-in was planned in the White House, or that when the burglars were caught, the president and his men conspired to cover up their involvement.
An excellent analysis of Hougan's book was written by Phil Stanford, who zeroes in on what was important about that work:
What he [Hougan] does say is that all the while this was going on, the CIA, quite without the knowledge of the White House, was pursuing an agenda of it own. Hougan says that at least two of those involved in the break-in were actually spying on the White House for the CIA and conducting their own illegal domestic operations; that one of these domestic operations involved spying on the clients of a call-girl ring operating out of an apartment complex [Columbia Plaza] near the Watergate; and that when the White House-planned bugging of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters threatened to expose this operation - as it might have, since some of the clients for the call girls were being referred from the DNC - it was sabotaged in order to protect the CIA's role.
"Watergate," Hougan writes, "was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was . . . a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in the simplest of terms, tripped on its own shoelaces."What all of the above examples give us, however, is a picture of how men engaged in plotting attempts to discredit other men actually think. They like to use sex in ways that make their victims look foolish or depraved. And it almost always seems to work.
But probably the most shocking book to reveal who was behind the call girl ring at the Columbia Plaza Apartments is one recently published by TrineDay, Watergate Exposed. A confidential informant recruited originally by Carl Shoffler, a District of Columbia policeman, to spy on peace protesters and activists, came upon information about the call girl ring operating out of the apartments on Virginia Avenue in 1972. Robert Merritt told Shoffler about a break in that was planned at the Watergate, which led to Shoffler's stationing himself and others near the Watergate in order to arrest the burglars.
The most horrifying aspect of this book is what it reveals about details of the FBI's Cointelpro operations of the 1970s--about how informants are lured into a life of entrapment of others into crimes for which they can be arrested. After reading this book and becoming aware of how United States "justice" really operates, we can never look at political persons accused of sex crimes in the same way again.
