Anne Sinclair calls it “the incident”. In May 2011, her then husband and head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was accused of sexual assault by a hotel maid while staying in the Sofitel New York. He was arrested, charged with attempted rape, and detained for four days in the notorious Rikers Island jail. He later claimed the encounter had been “consensual but stupid”.
Sinclair flew out to be by his side, telling friends that she did not believe the allegations “for a single second”. She posted $6m in bail, $1m of it in cash, from her own money. When Strauss-Kahn was put under house arrest, she stumped up $200,000 a month for round-the-clock security guards and $50,000 monthly rent on a Manhattan townhouse. Sinclair was trailed by reporters everywhere she went. Her personal life, her private fortune and her decision to stand by her man were endlessly pored over in the media. It was, she says now, “a sort of violence”.
We are sitting in the plush environs of a Paris hotel, surrounded by flock wallpaper and velvet-upholstered sofas. Sinclair, 66, tanned and blow-dried and sporting a patterned silk blouse and patent beige four-inch heels, is talking in a calm, low voice about this tumultuous period of her life. As one of France’s most famous television journalists, she knows all about the art of the interview. And although we have been talking for the best part of an hour about her new book – a memoir of her art-dealer grandfather Paul Rosenberg – she must have suspected this question was hovering in the background, waiting to pounce.
What does she mean by using the word “violent”?
“The justice was violent,” Sinclair says, choosing her words with care. “And the press were violent because they were on the pavement just in front of the house where I was staying. I would be fixing something at the window and they would be out there. They were quite harsh and rude. When I went out they followed me and I felt it was like an aggression.”
She was “surprised” at this behaviour from the people she thought of as her colleagues: “Usually, this behaviour is coming from the tabloids and what was new was that it was from the serious press,” she says, in accented English.
It hurt, too, that it was all unfolding in New York, a city that had previously been an “enchanted” place for her – Sinclair was born there in 1948, to French-Jewish parents who had fled the Nazis during the second world war (her father changed the family name from Schwartz to Sinclair the year after her birth). Her parents took her back to France as a toddler. Until the events of three years ago, she remembered New York with great affection.
The charges against Strauss-Kahn were finally dismissed in August 2011 after prosecutors lost faith in the credibility of his accuser. By then, he had apologised for his “moral error” and vowed to stay out of the 2012 presidential campaign, despite once having been thought of as the great socialist hope for the French electorate.
It was a nasty fracas nonetheless – and, back in France, a steady stream of rumour started to emerge that this was not the first time Strauss-Kahn had been seriously indiscreet. Although she had always loyally dismissed gossip about her husband’s infidelity, eventually the clamour of voices became too loud to ignore. Sinclair divorced him in June 2012 amid suspicions that Strauss-Kahn had been involved in a prostitution ring. Next year, he is due to stand trial for “aggravated pimping”.
For months, Sinclair was the unfortunate casualty of the whole affair: caught up in relentless media attention and a confrontation of difficult truths about her marriage to a man who, despite it all, she had loved for more than 20 years. How, I ask her, did she get through it?
“As you can imagine, it has been very painful for me and not only for me, but for my family as well,” she says, shifting in her seat. The couple had six children between them – two sons from Sinclair’s first marriage; four daughters from Strauss-Kahn’s. “And this incident – let’s call it that – pulled me into something beyond my powers and I…” She breaks off, searching for the right expression. “This was many worlds away from what I was, from what I had experienced, from my life as a journalist, as a mother, as a spouse – everything. It was really painful. That’s why I hope you will excuse me – I don’t want to speak too much about it. It’s now far behind me and I’ve rebuilt my life… I’ve turned the page.”
But although she is trying to move on, events have a habit of reminding her. Welcome to New York, a film loosely based on Strauss-Kahn’s indiscretion and starring Gérard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset, was released last month in the UK. Widely derided by the critics, Sinclair dismisses it as “not just a B-movie, but a B, C, D, E and F-movie”.
Did she ever question the rightness of standing by her man?
“At that time, I had to deal with it head-on and I did what I thought I should do.”
Was she heartbroken? She looks at me with tired eyes.
“I don’t want to comment on that. I don’t want to go into my own feelings. That’s private. I want to have a limit on my private life and fortunately my private life is private once again. I already told you: it was painful.”
We leave it there. Sinclair is understandably sick of being known as Strauss-Kahn’s ex-wife. As well as the implosion of their long-term relationship, her former husband’s actions had the irritating consequence of overshadowing Sinclair’s own professional achievements.
In France, Sinclair is a respected and renowned journalist who, for 13 years between 1984 and 1997, hosted 7 sur 7 – one of the most popular primetime chat shows on French television. Her interviewees included key politicians of the day – including François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton – as well as celebrities such as Woody Allen and Sharon Stone. It was also where she first met Strauss-Kahn, whom she interviewed in 1989.
Despite inheriting a fortune largely derived from her grandfather’s impressive art collection, Sinclair always “wanted to build my life distinctly [from that]. I wanted to be a journalist.”
She studied politics at the elite Sciences Po (the Paris Institute of Political Studies) before graduating in law from the University of Paris and then working as a radio presenter for Europe 1. There she met and married Ivan Levaï, the political chief of the station. In the 1970s, she moved into television. It was a deeply sexist environment.
“When I began, women were supposed to be interested in health and fashion and when I decided to be interested in politics, there were very few of us,” she recalls. “The difficulty at the time was that women had several lives – they still do. There is the life at work, at home, they are mothers, they are spouses and it was more the case in the 80s that you wanted to be the perfect woman… Now it’s easier for women who work because [domestic] tasks are more equally shared between men and women. But at that time, when your son had a little fever, it was you who were split all the time between work and home. Now, you can say to your partner or husband ‘Just take care of the baby.’”
One of her early bosses told her: “‘No one will believe a woman talking about serious topics…’ He said ‘Don’t go out and mess around. Why do you want to put the cat among the pigeons?’”
Still, Sinclair was determined. At the TV channel TF1, she rapidly became part of what she describes as “a privileged minority” of high-profile women. The male politicians she interviewed routinely underestimated her because of her gender and her beauty.
“When they were asked a question by a woman, they thought they couldn’t be rude,” she says, chuckling. “Now they are! But at the time, they were destabilised.”
She interviewed the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen once in 1988 when, as leader of the Front National, he was a presidential candidate. As a Jewish woman whose parents fled Nazi-occupied France, Sinclair found the experience “impossible… [Le Pen] was at the edge of democracy… His words were so rude, so excluding, so from the extreme right that I said I’m not able to interview him again.”
She was the only journalist to make such a stand. Today, when I ask her about it, she is surprisingly disparaging of her younger self.
“I must criticise myself [for it] because it was absolutely useless to do so. He made it to the second round of the presidential elections in 2002 so I failed completely.”
But some, surely, would see it as admirable that she made a decision driven by conscience rather than professional ambition?
Sinclair shrugs. “I wouldn’t say the same today. I recognise that, then, I didn’t know how to do it… You see, what I think deeply – and I don’t know if you agree – but an interview is a way to give the person you’re interviewing a way to speak with everyone. So we [the interviewers] have to be humble. It is very humble work. Often people do this work to be very proud of themselves but, no, you are someone that is interested in the person you are talking to and you want to bring their words to a wider group of people. I found it impossible to do with that man.” She takes a sip of her green tea. “But it’s a lost fight.”
She remains concerned about the rise of right-wing, anti-immigration political parties across Europe – “I prefer efforts to try and integrate immigrants rather than laws to put them aside” – and her sensitivities towards issues of national identity are explored in her new book, My Grandfather’s Gallery.
Sinclair’s maternal grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, was a successful Jewish art dealer in the early 20th century, who represented Matisse, Braque and Picasso. The latter became a close personal friend whom he nicknamed “Pic”. Some of Sinclair’s most vivid childhood memories are visiting the painter at his home in Mougins in the south of France.
“I remember the look he gave with his eyes,” she says. “It was very special, very deep and very accurate. It was magnetic but I was too young to appreciate who he was.”
In fact, she was horrified when, at the age of 14, Picasso said he wanted to paint her.
“I screamed ‘No!’ and ran to play with his son Claude in the garden. I was afraid of having a twisted face like Dora Maar with eyes all over her face.” She laughs. “And that’s why I was never painted by Picasso.”
When France was occupied in 1940, Rosenberg’s gallery was shut down by the Nazis and his collection looted. He reopened his business in Manhattan but to this day several key works remain missing, despite efforts by Rosenberg’s descendants to track them down.
Sinclair had never thought of writing a book about those events but in 2010 her mother died and she started trawling through old papers and rediscovering a grandfather she never fully knew – he died when Sinclair was 11. The memoir was published in France two years ago and, although she doesn’t say so, it is clear that the writing of it was a welcome distraction from the emotional upheaval in her personal life.
She had given up her much-loved television job for Strauss-Kahn when he became the French finance minister in 1997. Now that she has no such conflicts of interest, Sinclair has been recultivating her professional profile: she is currently the editorial director of the Huffington Post in France and has returned to Europe 1, the radio station where she got her first break, to do a weekly interview slot. She is also in a new relationship, with the 82-year-old historian Pierre Nora – a recent edition of Paris Match photographed the couple in swimsuits on holiday, breathlessly describing Sinclair’s “newfound serenity” by his side.
Now that Sinclair’s children are grown up – her sons are 34 and 31 and her stepdaughters, with whom she still has a close relationship, range in age from 29 to 40 – I wonder whether she would consider a career in politics herself?
“No, never,” she says, shuddering at the prospect. “I’m fed up now of the political scene in France. It is quite stagnant… I was thinking the other day, if I was still doing my interview show like I did 17 years ago, we would have almost the same names: Sarkozy, Royal, Hollande.
“I’m much better at asking the questions than having the answers. I prefer watching and analysing – it’s a lot easier.”
But I wonder if it’s also because Sinclair lacks the confidence – some might say arrogance – necessary for a bruising life on the political front-line. Despite her intelligence, her success and her looks, she is one of the most self-critical people I have ever interviewed.
When she is being photographed, she says again and again that she looks terrible in pictures, that she’s “too stiff” or “too fat”. All through those years of doing live weekly interviews, she never once watched herself on screen: “I would always think ‘I should have said that’,” she says. “Or: ‘That’s not a good answer. There, you should have done this!’”
Does she think she is beautiful?
“No!” she says with a matter-of-factness that squashes any idea of false modesty. “I know I’m not ugly – especially if you go on TV, it’s better to have nice skin and not be a hunchback – but beautiful? No. Movie stars are beautiful.”
But people must have told her she looks good?
“Yes, the men I loved and the women who loved me, they said that but I never believed what they said to me… To be blunt, I don’t pay much attention to it. I think: ‘Well, you’re too nice, you’re biased.’ I always feel myself that I’m fat, my hair is no good, I don’t have a nice complexion. All the time. I do myself down.”
I wonder if she’s ever considered where this insecurity comes from?
“Probably, I’m not so sure of myself,” she says. And, at its most basic, perhaps there is a self-doubt that comes from having loved a man so deeply she gave up her career for him, only to discover that he had lied to her.
She says that enduring what she did finally made her realise that “I was solid after all. That was something… I think the fact that I’m not satisfied with myself is an engine that makes me be better.” Sinclair turns to her two female assistants. “But if I’d really made an effort, I would have lost three kilos – you can ask them.” Her assistants roll their eyes and shake their heads.
Sinclair has always surrounded herself with other women and considers herself a feminist by example. A profile in the French magazine Télérama in 2003 talked to former colleagues, including secretaries and assistants, and found not one person with a bad word to say about her. She was “adorable”, “funny,” “affectionate,” “charismatic” and “maternal”.
She continues to be a role model for many female journalists in France, some of whom still come up to her in the street to say they grew up watching her on television.
“And I say: ‘Poor you, you should have been watching a cartoon,’” she jokes. “It’s a gift to me and I’m really proud of that but at the same time, I feel shy about it and intimidated… I’m just an ordinary woman.”
As we get up to leave, Sinclair thanks me for my questions. She did not want to talk too much about her ex-husband, she says, and she hopes I understand. I tell her I do and that, given her own achievements, it would be unfair to continue defining her purely in relation to Strauss-Kahn. She is worth so much more than his indiscretions. If only she could believe it herself.
My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Legendary Art Dealer’s Escape from Vichy France is published by Profile (£15.99). Click here to buy it for £12.79
