When the rumors started swirling that Anne Sinclair was planning to leave her then-husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn it didn't come as any surprise, nor could we blame her, and now that she's talking openly about their split , she sounds like she's doing well. Sinclair confirmed the divorce for the first time in an interview with Le Parisien on Friday, following a year and a half in which Strauss-Kahn faced sexual assault charges in New York and then aggravated pimping charges in France.
Most reports are going with one takeaway quote in particular, per The Telegraph : "I'm in good form, I've been on holiday, I'm working hard, I'm focusing on the American elections. To the amazement of many, self-declared feminist Anne Sinclair stuck with him throughout the scandal, saying "you don't leave a man when he's at his lowest" but split with him quietly a year later.
Now, a divorce and a new career later, as editorial director of the French edition of The Huffington Post, as well as presenting a "Miriam Meets" type weekend interview show on French radio station Europe 1, she seems to have moved on from the difficult days when she lived under the media microscope. Most recently, she's published a moving account of her legendary art-dealer grandfather's escape from Vichy France, entitled My Grandfather's Gallery, the first edition of which was printed in French in but now has been updated and launched internationally in English.
It's a wonder she waited so long. Sinclair's grandfather was no small-time player who sold a few paintings to put food on the table, but one of the world's major art-traders.
He represented Picasso, Braque, Leger and Matisse, and had a particularly close friendship with Picasso. But those glory days changed sharply with the onset of World War II.
Using his connections and through considerable good fortune, Rosenberg managed to flee to New York in with his family. The art collection wasn't so fortunate however, and dozens of his paintings by Cezanne, Monet, Sisley and others were seized by the Nazis. In a cruel twist of fate, his abandoned Paris gallery was even turned into a Nazi headquarters, called "The Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions.
After his death in , his son, Alexandre, Ms Sinclair's uncle, managed the gallery until the s. And yet, of a once vast collection, Anne Sinclair claims to only have four important paintings left today.
Given the struggle and difficulties surrounding the early years of her life, it's perhaps not surprising she wanted to move on from those days and create a life on her own terms. She says that, growing up, she wasn't as interested in the world of art as she was in politics and journalism. It wasn't until she was 62 that she decided to probe her family history. The trigger was a commonplace event - she lost her identity card and had to go to the police station to renew it.
While there, she noticed the harsh treatments of immigrants who have to fight to obtain or maintain French nationality. When she faced with an officious clerk who asked her to produce her grandparents' birth certificates to prove her Frenchness Sinclair was born in New York City , she spat back with "the last time people of [my grandparents] generation were asked this kind of question was before they were put on a train to Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande" naming the French camps where Jews were interned before being deported by the Nazis to concentration camps.
The event made her reflect. If she, a famous broadcast journalist who once sat as the model for the face of Marianne, the national emblem of France whose bust sits in every French town hall, had to fight to remove any doubts about her origins, what about everyone else? She realised that she could no longer ignore her past, and in , a year before her husband would do the "perp walk" before the whole world, began to dig into her family's Pandora's box.
Get the best home, property and gardening stories straight to your inbox every Saturday. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. Before she began her research, Sinclair knew the broad outlines of her family history, but didn't realise all she would find. To her surprise, she discovered her grandmother had an affair with her grandfather's arch business rival, Georges Wildenstein.
Rosenberg knew about the affair and wrote bitter letters to his wife, which he never sent. Sinclair writes: "I feel unmoored in the face of such intimacy, and I turn the letters around in my hands, trying to work out what to do I loathe absolute transparency, finding it voyeuristic at best and a bit totalitarian at worst.
Although in this passage Sinclair doesn't deliberately set out to reveal her personality, in it we can clearly see the same woman who rejected media intrusion into her life so vehemently in the wake of the DSK scandal. Throughout, Sinclair held her head up high and stood by her husband in the face of criticism from the whole world. Having journalists dig into her personal affairs must have felt like a violation, especially when the couple were trapped by the media in their Washington DC home in the summer of In another interesting reflection, Sinclair explains that according to her paternal grandmother, when faced with adversity, you "button up" - grit your teeth and get on with life.
It seems this has been her motto through her own life, too. Before all hell broke loose that summer, Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair were very happy together. They first met back in the late s. She was still married to Ivan Levai, a well-known radio journalist with whom she has two sons, David and Elie. But her love story with Strauss-Kahn was too passionate for her to resist. But, Sinclair says she never believed the claims of Nafissatou Diallo who said Strauss-Khan emerged naked from the bathroom of the hotel suite she was cleaning and forced her to perform sexual acts.
In August , prosecutors dropped criminal charges and Strauss-Kahn quickly returned to France. Diallo maintained a civil suit, which was later settled for an undisclosed sum estimated to be worth several million dollars.
However, he has been ordered to stand trial over allegations of his participation in a prostitution ring centred on the Carlton Hotel in Lille and also active in Paris and the US, according to prosecutors.
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