Post date: May 21, 2011 3:56:27 PM
Lawyer for Tristane Banon says the French writer will not testify against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, even though she has not been asked to do so.
PARIS, FRANCE (MAY 17, 2011) REUTERS - A French woman considering filing a complaint against Dominique Strauss-Kahn over an alleged 2002 sexual assault does not want to testify in an attempted rape case against former IMF chief in New York, her lawyer said on Saturday (May 21).In France, lawyer David Koubbi said that his client, writer Tristane Banon, would not testify in front of U.S. investigators, even though she has yet to be asked to do so.
"Miss Tristane Banon will not collaborate with the American justice," Koubbi said.
U.S. law enforcement authorities are reviewing at least two earlier cases involving alleged sexual misconduct by the French former IMF managing director, who has denied the charges and says he will fight to prove his innocence.
Koubbi said if his client were to file a complaint, it would be in a French courtroom.
"I don't wish that the two dossiers be put together to obtain a mediatised, judicial conviction for Mr. Strauss-Kahn. If Mr. Strauss-Kahn should be convicted in the United States, he will be. I'm not his lawyer but he will be, based on the elements of the American dossier. I don't understand for what reason the New York prosecutor and his office would need our collaboration. I am a French lawyer, Tristane Banon is a French citizen and if we have things to say to Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we will do it in the framework of a French procedure which respects French law on French soil," he said.
The lawyer added that he had not been contacted by prosecutors in the Strauss-Kahn case and speculation of any future testimony in the case had only come from journalists.
French media did not pay so much attention to the Banon case when an account of it first surfaced in 2007 but have returned to the matter, which was never subject of a formal legal complaint, since Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York. Under French law, sexual assault charges must be filed within three years but attempted rape charges can be brought up to 10 years after the alleged attack.