WASHINGTON – Talk about a high level perp walk. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was frog-marched into the Manhattan division of the Special Victims Unit in handcuffs (classic photo).  All that’s missing was the bumper music from NBC’s “Law & Order SVU.”  From the stories now hitting the fan, it looks like IMF’s man had a history of “womanizing,” but everyone protected him.

From the New York Times:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the leader of the International Monetary Fund, spent most of Sunday at the Manhattan Special Victims Unit in East Harlem as prosecutors sought additional evidence, including possible DNA evidence on his skin or beneath his fingernails, to bolster allegations that he had sexually assaulted a maid in a $3,000-a-night suite at a Midtown hotel, officials said.

Shortly before 11 p.m., Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, wearing a black jacket and pants and a gray shirt, and looking haggard, was taken from the Special Victims Unit, near the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, in handcuffs.

The problems for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who just saw his hopes of taking on Pres. Sarkozy collapse, are mounting, as another woman has come forward.

With this arrest other questions surface, like why if Strauss-Kahn’s womanizing was widely known in Paris political circles, with no female journalist willing to do an interview alone with him, he was allowed respect in the first place.

I guess the alleged assaults were permissible because Dominique Strauss-Kahn was part of the privileged class that many were willing to protect.  That is until a maid cleaning the $3,000/night suite was allegedly forced to perform sexual acts on Strauss-Kahn, but managed to escape and blow the whistle on the brute.  She’s already picked him out of a line-up.

Thanks to the maid at Sofitel New York, who had the courage to do what other women who knew about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “womanizing,” did not.

Taylor Marsh is a Washington based political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.

Screen capture from Huffington Post.