Dominique Strauss-Kahn Called "Half Man, Half Pig" in Former Lover's Memoir

Would have been an interesting addition to the French presidency

Dominique Strauss-Kahn would have turned the Elysée Palace into a "swingers' club" if he had become president, according to an Argentine lawyer who had an affair with the former IMF chief after he faced rape charges.

In explosive extracts published on Thursday from her book Beauty and Beast, Marcela Iacub describes the 64-year-old one-time Socialist presidential hopeful as "half man, half pig".

She blames his estranged wife, Anne Sinclair, the former television presenter and heiress to an art fortune, for treating him like a "poodle" and forcing him to run for president instead of giving his wild side free rein.

"You would have transformed the Elysée into a giant swingers' club," writes the 48-year-old legal expert in passages published in Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine. "You would have used your assistants, henchmen, advisers and staff as touts, orgy organisers, experts in the art of satisfying your darkest urges.