Strauss-Kahn Lover Felt Coerced Into Having Affair

Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest on sexual assault charges has put an old affair under new scrutiny. The IMF chief had a fling at the height of the financial crisis with Piroska Nagy, a married, Hungarian-born economist. The IMF's board concluded that the 2008 affair was consensual and cleared its director of wrongdoing, but a friend of Nagy's now tells the New York Times that Nagy felt coerced into the affair because of Strauss-Kahn's power.

Strauss-Kahn began pestering Nagy soon after he became chief of the IMF in 2007, according to the friend, who says Nagy believes the IMF board's investigation ignored her allegations of abuse of power. "I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t,” Nagy wrote in a letter to investigators, describing Strauss-Kahn as “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command." (More Piroska Nagy stories.)