New twist in DSK affair

The mother of the French woman who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape has told police she also had a "violent" sexual encounter with him.

Anne Mansouret, 65, a Socialist politician in Normandy, told investigators that she had sex with the former French Finance Minister in his office in 2000.

The encounter was consensual, she told police, but Strauss-Kahn had acted "like a predator" and with the "obscenity of a common soldier".

Her evidence, leaked to the website of the new magazine L'Express, provides another extraordinary twist in the "affaire DSK", as it has become known in France.

Mansouret's daughter, Tristane Banon, 31, has brought a formal complaint that Strauss-Kahn attempted to rape her when she was interviewing him for a book in 2003.

Banon, then aged 24, said Strauss-Kahn lunged at her like a "rutting chimpanzee" in a Paris flat near the French Parliament where she had gone to interview him.

When later confronted by his second wife, who is Banon's godmother, Strauss-Kahn is said to have confessed: "I don't know what came over me.

"I had sex with the mother - but I blew a fuse when I saw the daughter," he is reported to have said.

According to evidence given to investigators last week by both women, Mansouret persuaded her daughter not to make a legal complaint against the Socialist politician at the time.

Mansouret described Strauss-Kahn to police as "a predator, a man who wants to take women, not to please them".

- Independent