New York, May 16: International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Khan is no stranger to scandals surrounding his frequent affairs. In fact, he's been described as an "insistent" womanizer.
Last year, French journalist Tristane Banon claimed she had to fight him off while interviewing him for a book she was writing about public figures and their missteps, the British newspaper The Guardian reported.
Banon said she didn't make a formal complaint for fear that the scandal would damage her reputation.
In his highest-profile fling -- the one in which he became known as "The Great Seducer" -- the married Strauss-Kahn admitted in 2008 that he carried on an affair with an IMF subordinate at an international summit in Davos, Switzerland.
The red-faced pol -- nicknamed "lapin chaud," (French for "hot rabbit" )-- was forced to admit to sweating up the sheets with Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian economist.
That scandal came to light when Nagy's furious husband lodged a complaint after finding the lovebirds' steamy e-mails.
But the IMF and an independent law firm determined that Strauss-Kahn had not used his power to coerce Nagy into sex -- or to help her land a prestigious job with a London bank.
And Strauss-Kahn, who's been married three times and has four kids, was able to minimize src="jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript">the damage with his wife, French TV personality Anne Sinclair -- who has laughed off his cheating ways.
"It's important for a politician to be able to seduce," Sinclair told L'Express magazine.
And that he does.
At about the same time as the Nagy affair, an unnamed actress told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper that Strauss-Kahn acted "like a gorilla" when they were alone together in Paris.
He's had his share of political scandals as well. In 1999, for example, he resigned as France's finance minister after being accused of corruption. He cleared his name and fought his way back to a public role by winning a seat in Parliament.
He failed in a bid for the Socialist Party nomination for president in 2005, yet when he was elected head of the IMF in 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn's political rival, declared it a "great victory for French diplomacy."
