New York magazine has a great, in-depth look at the marriage of Anne Sinclair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one studded with accusations of adultery and held up by her huge fortune. "The Womanizer's Wife," reports Vanessa Grigoriadis, "has always seen her role, in part, as that of Strauss-Kahn’s protector." She not only largely supports the couple with the hundreds of millions of dollars she inherited from her art-dealer grandfather, but she shields Strauss-Kahn from the "siege" of attacks that began long before the infamous May affair in the Sofitel hotel. This latest scandal, of course, is the one that has seared itself on the American psyche, and Sinclair's behavior has baffled some. The night Strauss-Kahn was arrested, Sinclair was out shoe shopping in Paris. When she learned of the accusations against him and that he would spend the night in prison, she "howled in pain, a long moan, like a stunned animal," Grigoriadis quotes from the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. Then Sinclair sat down and wrote a note of staunch support of her husband, before flying to New York to stand by him. “I don’t believe for a single second the accusations of sexual assault by my husband,” Grigoriadis reports she wrote. “I am certain his innocence will be proven.” It's a criminal case of sexual assault, but from the beginning "this was framed as a political crisis," and in this lengthy feature, we learn much about how expertly Sinclair and Strauss-Kahn play the political crisis game.

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Adam Martin