The Times today profiles Mrs. Strauss-Kahn, Anne Sinclair: a handsome French brunette with “steely blue eyes,” according to the paper. As is usually the wont of political wives in the first phases of scandal, Sinclair is standing by Strauss-Kahn. “I don’t believe for a single second the accusations of sexual assault by my husband,” she said in a statement. “I am certain his innocence will be proven.” Sinclair’s support might actually be genuine. Here are a few things we learned about this lady:
She’s not a gold-digger. “She was much more famous than her husband, and much wealthier, too,” Steven Erlanger writes. “The 1991 marriage was a love match.” In fact, Sinclair was a fixture on France’s most popular interview show, 7/7, before she married, and she had met Madonna before she’d even met Strauss-Kahn. “She quit her show after 13 years to avoid a conflict of interest when her husband became finance minister in 1997,” the Times reports. But not because he made her. She just wanted to.
She is close friends with Elie Wiesel. “She was charming, intelligent, famous in the best sense of the word,” Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, said. “She was a combination of Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters.” Sinclair’s son with journalist Ivan Levaï is named after Wiesel.
Men like her. Her first husband can’t even hate her: “She was too beautiful for me,” he said.
She encouraged her husband’s presidential ambitions. “She always wanted to prove that, 75 years after Léon Blum, the French were capable of electing a Jew,” a friend told Le Monde. “In her eyes, that would be a formidable revenge on history.”
She looks the other way when her husband cheats on her. “There is no doubt that Ms. Sinclair was aware of her husband’s skirt-chasing, but in public, at least, seemed not to care,” the Times reports. When Sinclair was asked, back in 2006, if she was pained by Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as a womanizer, she said: “No! I’m even proud of it. As long as he is still attracted to me, and I to him, it is sufficient.” Plus, when he admitted to having an affair with a married Hungarian economist, Piroska Nagy, Sinclair said, “Everyone knows that those things happen in couples’ lives.” These two might make it, after all.
