HANDS ON: The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (above) has inspired two women to allege sexual assault against French politician Georges Tron. (AFP/Getty Images)
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Dominique Strauss-Kahn is ready for some Memorial Day fun in the sun.
The former International Monetary Fund head didn’t let a little thing like house arrest get in the way of the start-of-summer festivities — he set up new patio furniture yesterday and was visited by his younger brother.
Flunkies outside Strauss-Kahn’s $50,000-a- month TriBeCa townhouse were spotted removing boxes for outdoor-patio umbrellas.
The umbrellas will be perfect to shield the onetime French presidential contender from the sun — and prying eyes of the press — when he steps out onto his townhouse’s elaborate planted terrace.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, is due back in court on June 6 and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of sexually assaulting a Sofitel hotel maid.
Maybe that’s why he needed cheering up from younger brother Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn.
Dressed in slacks and short-sleeve button-down shirt and accompanied by a woman who appeared in her 50s, Marc-Oliver declined to comment.
The younger Strauss-Kahn is also a major player in the world of international finance.
He is a director at Banque de France and is a visiting senior adviser to the US Federal Reserve.
But, even as Dominique Strauss-Kahn enjoyed the weekend weather, fallout from his alleged sex attack reverberated in Paris, where two women — inspired by the courage showed by the alleged victim — made similar accusations against another allegedly pervy politician.
Georges Tron, 52, a junior minister for public affairs and a rising star of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party, quit yesterday after two ex-secretaries accused him of sexual assault.
“When I see that a chambermaid was capable of taking on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I tell myself I don’t have the right to stay silent,” one Tron accuser told Le Parisien newspaper. “We must break this code of silence.”
Tron earned the moniker “foot fetishist” and “Chinese masseur” by massaging the feet of 1,000 women, according to fellow ministers.
His two accusers, aged 34 and 36, claimed in criminal complaints that Tron assaulted them between 2007 and 2010 while they worked in the town hall of the Paris suburb of Draveil, where Tron is also mayor.
They said his massages turned into “very real sexual attacks” and were so traumatic that they contemplated suicide.
Although he resigned, Tron denied the allegations, and his attorney branded the accusers as “inveterate liars.”
Back in New York, Strauss-Kahn’s defense team employed Guidepost Solutions, a private investigations firm run by ex-federal prosecutors, to cross-check every statement in his accuser’s allegation.
The private detectives may also delve into the accuser’s immigration status, which hasn’t yet been made public. Prosecutors have already said it would not be relevant to the charges that Strauss-Kahn attempted to rape her and forced her to perform oral sex.
In the 32-year-old accuser’s African home country of Guinea, her mother said her daughter was near illiterate before coming to the US.
“She couldn’t read, but she did receive a good religious education from her parents,” her mother told the UK’s Sunday Telegraph.