Dominique Strauss-Kahn—the former IMF chief and one-time political rival to President Sarkozy, whose political ambitions were wrecked when he was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a maid in New York—may have been the target of a sting operation intended to exploit his sexual compulsiveness to finish his career, according to new evidence presented by veteran investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein.

His reporting is front-page news in France, and poses important questions raised by previously undisclosed hotel surveillance records. Among the tantalizing mysteries: Who was the mysterious occupant of the room next to DSK's suite, which accuser Nafissatou Diallo entered both immediately before and immediately after the alleged attack? (She initially lied about visiting the room, and the hotel later refused to tell police who was in there “on the grounds of privacy.”) Why do card-key records indicate that someone with a hotel employee's electronic pass entered DSK's room right before Diallo did? Why were two hotel security employees caught on film “high-five[ing] each other, clap[ping] their hands, and do[ing] what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes,” after Diallo reported what she described as rape? Most damning of all, why did DSK’s Blackberry vanish in the midst of all this—and why did some of his personal emails end up in the office of President Sarkozy’s political party? 

The question of whether DSK is a sex addict has been widely asked. Further recent allegations suggest that the answer is yes—with often-brutal sexual encounters scheduled with prostitutes on virtually a daily basis. And pretty much everyone knew it. While Sarkozy’s people rage against an “atmosphere in which such rumors multiply," to many observers the idea of a set-up by Sarkozy operatives is far from far-fetched. That Diallo deliberately attempted to lure Strauss-Kahn into a career-ending mistake looks like a no-brainer to the French chattering classes privy to the man's Achilles' heel of addiction: a similar proposition to offering a crack head a free hit on the pipe and expecting them to say “no”.