French President Nicolas Sarkozy's party on Sunday rejected as "grotesque" suggestions that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was brought down by an elaborate plot to wreck his presidential ambitions.
"This story is ridiculous this plot argument is grotesque," said UMP party leader Jean-Francois Cope, while Interior Minister Claude Gueant dismissed the allegations as "pure fantasy." The remarks came after a New York Review of Books article that included hints by associates of the disgraced ex-IMF chief that his arrest on sexual assault charges in New York on May 14 might have been a set-up.
Strauss-Kahn, then tipped to beat Sarkozy in France's 2012 presidential elections, was taken off a plane to Paris by police that afternoon after maid Nafissatou Diallo said he had attacked her in a posh Manhattan hotel. He resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund as a result of the scandal. The charges were later dropped after prosecutors said Diallo lied about details of her allegations, but they and subsequent claims of sexual misconduct in France were enough to end Strauss-Kahn's political ambitions.
Back in September, he told French television: "A trap? It's possible. A plot? We'll see."
The author of the New York Review of Books story, Edward Epstein, told AFP on Saturday: "I didn't say it was a political conspiracy but I would say that people wanted to find evidence of an indiscretion of his that could derail either his (French presidential) candidacy or even (his work at) the IMF."
One of the politician's lawyers, William Taylor, said Strauss-Kahn may have been "the target of a deliberate effort to destroy him as a political force." The New York Review of Books article quotes sources saying Strauss-Kahn suspected a smartphone that disappeared just before his arrest had been hacked.
It also describes camera footage showing an employee of the Sofitel hotel, where the sexual encounter was alleged to have taken place in Strauss-Kahn's room, high-fiving a colleague and appearing to perform a celebratory dance after listening to Diallo's testimony.
The article has rekindled speculation that began shortly after his arrest about a plot to undermine the Socialist politician, whose wife Anne Sinclair is a multi-millionaire art heiress and celebrity journalist.
UMP leader Cope said that "we will not fall into the trap of pursuing this story which has nothing to do with politics," adding that conspiracy theories were always abundant in the run-up to elections. Cope said Saturday that "to imagine that what happened to Strauss-Kahn was the object of some sort of collusion by the UMP is stretching things a lot."