QUELLE HORREUR! Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s mug shot after his arrest in New York over the weekend on sex-assault charges. (Reuters)
Jailed sex crime suspect Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned last night as head of the IMF, saying he needed “all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence.”
But the international moneyman sounded more like a homesick tourist than an accused perv in handing in his resignation to the powerful global agency.
“I think at this time first of my wife — whom I love more than anything — of my children, of my family, of my friends,” he wrote the IMF board.
“I think also of my colleagues at the [International Monetary] Fund; together we have accomplished such great things over the last three years and more.
“To all, I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me.”
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Calls had been getting more insistent for his resignation — and the bombshell was timed to land in the news just as his native France was waking up to the continuing nightmare of one of its highest-profile pols facing sickening sex charges.
Meanwhile, the indignities keep piling on for Strauss-Kahn.
Prison brass and the NYPD have an airtight plan to safeguard the jet-setting French moneyman by having him isolated, chained, shackled — and repeatedly strip-searched — before and after court appearances, including a bail hearing newly scheduled for today.
“He will be strip-searched when he leaves Rikers Island. He will be strip-searched when he arrives in court. He’s strip-searched when he leaves court, and he’s strip-searched when he gets back to Rikers,” said Norman Seabrook, head of the correction-officers union.
“When he arrives to the courthouse, he’s going to be put in an isolated cell away from other inmates,” said Seabrook. “This is for fear that another inmate would try to kill him to make a name for himself.”
Strauss-Kahn, 62, who is far more accustomed to luxury hotels, designer suits and first-class travel, will be cuffed and shackled when transported by cops from his cramped 11-by-13-foot cell at Rikers and taken to Manhattan Supreme Court today.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers will ask Judge Michael Obus to spring him from Rikers, where he has been held without bail and on suicide watch since his arraignment Monday on felony sex-assault charges in the alleged sodomy and attempted rape of a 32-year-old maid at the Sofitel New York.
His legal team, headed by Benjamin Brafman, filed a bail application yesterday, saying the aging lothario would agree to post $1 million cash bail and “be confined to home detention at an address in Manhattan 24 hours per day with electronic monitoring.”
He’ll also waive his extradition rights.
Lawyers noted his daughter Camille, 26, has a home near Columbia University, where she is a graduate student.
“Mr. Strauss-Kahn is a loving husband and father and a highly regarded international diplomat, lawyer, politician, economist and professor with no prior criminal record,” the bail application says, adding that Strauss-Kahn and his New York-born wife, Anne Sinclair, 62, would put up the deed to their posh, $4 million Washington, DC, home to ensure he shows up in court.
In another development, it emerged yesterday that Strauss-Kahn was such a notorious womanizer that French President Nicolas Sarkozy personally warned him to control himself before he left for Washington in 2007 to head the IMF.
“Over there, they don’t joke about this sort of thing,” Sarkozy told Strauss-Kahn, the Times of London reported. “Your life will be passed under a magnifying glass. Avoid taking the lift [elevator] alone with interns. France cannot permit a scandal.”
After news broke that cops had yanked the testosterone-charged pol out of his first-class seat at JFK, Sarkozy aides said the French president rolled his eyes.
“We did warn him,” Sarkozy said of the man he expected to face in France’s 2012 presidential race.
Also yesterday, Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim remained out of sight with her 15-year-old daughter.
A source familiar with the first of two High Bridge apartments the Guinean native lived in confirmed that she rented her apartment through Harlem United Community AIDS Center, a social-service agency that provides housing for adults with HIV/AIDS.
“There was a lease and monthly rental payments by Harlem United,” the source said, noting that the victim’s name was on the lease.
The Post has not been able to determine whether the maid, 32, has HIV/AIDS because of medical confidentiality laws. But the agency rents apartments only for adults with the virus, an employee said.
The woman, whose lawyer said she had testified before a Manhattan grand jury yesterday, moved in January to another High Bridge apartment rented by Harlem United. A spokeswoman for the maid’s lawyer also confirmed her address.
“She won’t be living there anymore. She’s moving,” said Lois Katz, a spokeswoman for lawyer Jeffrey Shapiro. The hotel worker said her ordeal began Saturday when she told cops she went to Strauss-Kahn’s room at the Sofitel at about noon to clean, thinking it was empty.
But he jumped from a bathroom stark naked and brutally forced her to perform oral sex, she said.
After he sodomized her, she spit out his semen, a law-enforcement source said. Investigators are running DNA tests on the sample from pieces of carpet taken from the room. Cops are also looking at the maid’s hotel room keycard to determine whether she used it to enter the room, and how long she was there.
Additional reporting by Vinita Singla, Rebecca Rosenberg, Doug Montero and Amber Sutherland,