For IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of sexually assaulting a Manhattan hotel worker last weekend, the defense has arrived: "There may well have been consent." Ah...ha. So that's what you're going with, old man?

A "source close to the defense" whispered those words to the New York Post, and with that, all the conspiracy theories get a lot harder to believe. I mean, sure, someone could have theoretically paid off someone to falsely accuse DSK of rape; but a random hotel worker falling for the old man coming out of the shower? It strains the limits of credulity. What other new outrages have emerged regarding this case?

  • In 2008, DSK was reprimanded for having an affair with an economist who worked under him at the IMF. Today, the NYT reports that that woman, Piroska Nagy, thinks that the affair "was consensual, but that she had felt coerced because Mr. Strauss-Kahn was so forceful and so senior to her, making it hard for her to, in effect, say no." This is in addition to charges (public since 2007, but now being re-examined) that DSK sexually assaulted Tristane Banon, a female journalist in 2002.
  • On the way to the airport after leaving the hotel, DSK reportedly called his wife to tell her he had a "serious problem."
  • French uber-intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy is passionately defending DSK already. "Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it's absurd." Gee, if only the African hotel worker had also been friends with Bernard Henri-Levy.
  • France is warning media outlets there not to show images of DSK in handcuffs—that's illegal, in France.
  • This whole case is making France re-evaluate its historic practice of demanding that all major politicians have at least eight secret mistresses and one secret love child. Evolution.

[Photo: AP]