Nine years ago, Anne Mansouret dissuaded her daughter from filing a legal complaint for attempted rape against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a prominent member of the Socialist Party in France and the former husband of one of her best friends.
But now she is speaking out about what happened and what other Socialist leaders knew. And some Socialists -- deeply embarrassed by the accusations against the wealthy man who was likely to be their presidential candidate next year -- have called for her expulsion from the party.
In a series of interviews, Mrs. Mansouret -- by turns defensive, emotional, argumentative and uncompromising -- said she did it to protect her daughter, Tristane Banon, now 31, and the party itself.
Ms. Banon, a journalist and novelist, asserts that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who is facing criminal charges in New York of attempted rape of a hotel housekeeper, tried to rape her during an interview in an empty apartment in 2002 -- grabbing her arm, pulling off her bra, trying to unzip her jeans, fighting with her on the floor and ignoring her cries of "no." She described him as "a chimpanzee in rut."
Party leaders knew of her daughter's experience with Mr. Strauss-Kahn, Mrs. Mansouret said, but chose to ignore it. And she herself felt stymied, in part, because Mr. Strauss-Kahn's second wife, Brigitte Guillemette, was one of her best friends and the godmother of Ms. Banon.
"Many people knew the story, but didn't want to talk about it," Mrs. Mansouret said.
With Ms. Guillemette's intercession, after the incident, Mrs. Mansouret even had a drink with Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who admitted to her then that he "couldn't control himself" during the interview he had arranged with her daughter in an empty apartment.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn appeared relaxed, she said, "but maybe more than he really was." She described him as a man who never resisted any kind of temptation and who "was never able to go on a diet for more than 15 days."
Since the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in New York, Mrs. Mansouret, a Socialist member of the regional council of Haute-Normandie, has been caught in a highly politicized drama. She is widely seen as a betraying mother who silenced her daughter's trauma for nearly a decade and who is now tarnishing the image of the party she originally tried to protect.
Michèle Sabban, vice president of the regional council of Île-de-France, asked for her expulsion from the Socialist Party.
"She has no spirit of responsibility," Mrs. Sabban told the French radio station RMC. "She didn't take the measure of the catastrophe" to the party, she said, after the indictment of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the party's leading candidate for the presidency. He resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund.
Ms. Banon talked about the alleged assault in a television interview in 2007, but Mr. Strauss-Kahn's name was bleeped out. She revealed it a year later.
After the episode, François Hollande, then the leader of the Socialist Party, even called Ms. Banon, Mrs. Mansouret said. But there is no indication that he undertook any investigation.
Mr. Hollande, now himself a leading presidential candidate after the fall of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said he knew about "rumors," but they were not "as serious as those that have been reported," he told Le Figaro. He said that his job was not to meddle in people's private lives.
Mrs. Mansouret, 65, said that the story had caused internal embarrassment, but given a culture of privacy about sex, politicians did not want to throw the first stone.
"I knew the Socialists would deny it," Mrs. Mansouret said. "Between the truth, what you know as being true, and what people present as being true, there is often a difference in politics." Ms. Banon herself said in 2008 that she was struck by a "general hypocrisy on this story," which the mainstream press did not investigate.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn's team also pressured Ms. Banon to remove a chapter about him from the book she was reporting at the time of the alleged attack. She refused, but her publisher deleted the chapter anyway. In the book, published in 2003, she interviewed several well-known men about errors they had made in their careers. Mr. Strauss-Kahn spoke of his involvement in a major political and financial scandal in 1998, although he was cleared of charges.
Ramzi Khiroun, Mr. Strauss-Kahn's communications adviser at the time, explained then that he was afraid the book "could attract too much attention" to Mr. Strauss-Kahn, Mrs. Mansouret said. Mr. Khiroun did not respond to telephone messages seeking comment.