French Huffington Post will run Strauss-Kahn stories, says editor Anne Sinclair

The wife of disgraced former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn says she will not dodge stories about her husband as she takes over the editorship of the French version of the Huffington Post.

Reuters

Anne Sinclair told Elle magazine that she is “neither a victim nor a saint”, just “a free woman”, in an interview days before the launch of Le Huffington Post on Monday.

Asked if the online news site would carry stories about her now infamous husband, Sinclair insisted there was no conflict of interest.

“It goes without saying that we will run the news stories which come up whatever they are,” she told journalist Anne-Cécile Sarfati. “I’m not saying that in such a case that I would do the story myself, but it would be done, and done in the most professional manner possible.”

Sinclair was a popular primetime television journalist until she stepped down when her husband became finance minister in 1997.

In the exclusive interview with Elle, she talks for the first time publicly about the affair which led to her husband’s downfall and declared that she is a feminist.

Questioned about her “unconditional support” for her husband, she declared “there is no such thing as unconditional support” adding “you support someone because you decide to”.

“I am a feminist, I have always been one and I always will be,” she said.

If some women felt disappointed by her decision to support her husband, that was “their problem”.

Her stance did not legitimise violence towards women, as some have claimed, she insisted.

“Violence horrifies me,” she stressed “there was no violence, if there had been, the prosecutors would have pursued the case.” Charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped when the woman at the centre of the affair was deemed to be untrustworthy.

France’s media is struggling to reconcile strict privacy laws with the age of twitter and the internet.

Until recently celebrities' private lives were safe from press intrusion, but last year Sinclair and her husband were regularly snapped around Paris and numerous stories about the state of their marriage were published.

As editor of the Huffington Post Anne Sinclair will be faced with decisions about other people’s privacy, and she has given the issue some thought.

“Twitter has made every individual a journalist, a reporter, a gossip columnist,” she told Elle. “You go out to dinner, you will be photographed with a mobile phone and someone will tweet that you are at a restaurant with so and so. They are intrusions into people’s private lives, yes….But they are also fantastic technical tools as well. You just have to be sure not to become controlled by them. Internet is a medium which magnifies everything, interesting news as well as false rumours.”
 

The French version of the Huffington Post, the first foreign-language spinoff, will go online on Monday.