Anne Sinclair, wife of the disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is France's most popular woman, just ahead of new IMF chief Christine Lagarde and well ahead of French first lady Carla Bruni, according to an opinion poll released on Monday.
Sinclair, a wealthy art heiress who was a star TV journalist in the 1980s, saw her life turned upside down on May 14 when her husband was arrested in New York on now-dropped charges of trying to rape a hotel maid. She stuck by him. In the CSA poll for on-line women's magazine Terrafemina, Sinclair won the "Woman of the Year" title with a first-place score of 25 percent, far ahead of President Nicolas Sarkozy's wife, singer and former supermodel Carla Bruni, who scored 16 percent.
Sinclair, who was much better known to the French than Strauss-Kahn when they married in the early 1990s, also took pride of place ahead of Christine Lagarde, who quit her job as French finance minister to replace Strauss-Kahn at the International Monetary Fund when he abruptly quit in May. Lagarde scored 24 percent.