Sinclair stands by her man

Already a high-profile figure in France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's wealthy wife Anne Sinclair has now become famous around the world for her tireless campaign to help her husband.

Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

In his letter of resignation from the IMF last week, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said he loved his wife "more than everything".

They met during the making of a television show in 1989, and it was, say witnesses, love at first sight.

The television journalist and the socialist politician arranged to have lunch together the next day, and in 1991 they were married, after divorces on both sides.

They became a much-celebrated Parisian power couple. She presented a popular weekly politics show Sept sur Sept until she sacrificed her career when he became finance minister in 1997.

But though apparently happily married, by all accounts Strauss-Kahn felt no obligation to be faithful, and there were numerous stories of his extra-marital adventures, though France's privacy laws prohibited publication of the details.

Anne Sinclair appeared not to care too much, and questioned about her attitude to her husband's reputation, she once said "I'm rather proud of it", declaring: "a politician needs to be a seducer".

When, as president of the IMF in 2008,  he admitted an affair with an employee, Anne Sinclair issued a brief statement saying "we love each other as much as when we first met", and stated that the couple had "turned the page".

And indeed since 14 May, when Strauss-Kahn was arrested on a plane bound for France, she has shown extraordinary love, loyalty and strength.

She immediately issued a statement declaring that she did not believe "for one second" that the accusations levelled against him were true.

She has dipped into her massive fortune to pay for some of America's best legal brains, to pay the six-million-dollar bail, to rent a luxury apartment in preparation for his release, and then another when she was forced to think again. She is funding the 200 thousand dollar per month surveillance operation, including the salaries of the armed guards.

He is lucky she is loyal, but still luckier that she is so wealthy.

Her grandfather, Paul Rosenburg, made a huge fortune between the wars as one of the world's foremost contemporary art dealers, trading in New York and Paris.

Micheline Nanette Rosenburg, Anne's mother, is featured as a baby in one of Picasso's works, one of several by the great artist in the Rosenburg collection, valued at millions of dollars, to which Anne Sinclair is one of the heirs.

Micheline Rosenburg married a French Resistance fighter Joseph-Robert Sinclair, and Anne was born in New York in 1948.

Now the biggest drama of her life is being played out in the city where she was born, and the American media are discovering who she is.

As hundreds of journalists camp outside the apartment where her husband is a prisoner, she is engaged in the fight of her life on his behalf, and the great seducer has become almost totally dependent on her.