Backing Her Man With Impressive Resources

 Now she joins the unhappy club of wives standing by their man in the face of a crescendo of tales of sexual betrayal, spurred in her case by extraordinary and tawdry criminal charges of attempted rape of a hotel maid.
When Anne Sinclair married Dominique Strauss-Kahn in November 1991, she was a famous television journalist, her brown hair and steely blue eyes a fixture on the most popular interview show in the country, called “7/7.” She did over 500 interviews, including of presidents like François Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton as first lady, and stars like Yves Montand and even Madonna. The show attracted as many as 12 million viewers every Sunday.
The 1991 marriage was a love match — Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been married twice before and had four children, and she had been married once and had two children of her own. The New York-born child of a family who fled to America to escape the Nazis, and of a father who had the code-name “Sinclair” in the French Resistance, she insisted on a Jewish ceremony after the legal exchange of vows in a Paris city hall.
And as a measure of her beauty and fame, she was married in a room with a bust of Marianne — the symbol of freedom and republican pride in France — that was modeled on her. Her face was not only on most French televisions, but in every city hall.
The two met, predictably, on a television set in 1989. Michel Taubmann, who wrote a recent biography of Mr. Strauss-Kahn timed for a possible presidential campaign, said: “She was subjugated by his intelligence and charm.”
She quit her show after 13 years to avoid a conflict of interest when her husband became finance minister in 1997. She herself became deputy director of channel TF1 and later, director general of its Internet arm. “When you spend 13 years interviewing politicians,” she said then, “you aren’t fascinated by power anymore.”
Still, she was the driving force behind Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political ambitions, and her wealth, inherited from her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, enabled the couple to live lavishly and independently, with two extraordinary apartments in Paris, a $4 million house in Georgetown and a riad in Marrakesh.
She also helped finance a group of political advisers, press aides and Internet sites that were preparing the ground for what was soon supposed to be a triumphant return to France for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, to begin a race for the presidency many thought he would win.
“She always wanted to prove that, 75 years after Léon Blum, the French were capable of electing a Jew,” a friend told Le Monde. “In her eyes, that would be a formidable revenge on history.”
But her close friend of many years, Alain Duhamel, said in an interview that “she feared the campaign a lot — she knew it would be a great sacrifice in her way of life.” She and her husband considered their religion, he said, “a practical question for the campaign,” not some great cause.
Repeated efforts to contact Ms. Sinclair, through her friends and spokeswoman, both here and in New York, where she flew to see her husband, were unsuccessful.
THE same age as her husband, 62, she was born Anne-Élise Schwartz. Her father, Joseph-Robert Schwartz, legally took the name Sinclair a year later, in 1949; her mother, Micheline Nanette Rosenberg, was painted by Picasso, who called her “Michou.” From Mr. Rosenberg, one of Picasso’s early champions, the family inherited part of a collection of paintings worth many millions of dollars. Just one Matisse, “L’Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue,” was sold in 2007 at Christie’s for $33.6 million.
Ms. Sinclair is on the board of the Picasso Museum in Paris and is writing a book about her grandfather and his life. She graduated from the Institute for Political Studies in Paris and in law from the University of Paris, beginning her career as a radio journalist for Europe 1.
Elie Wiesel was a close friend of Ms. Sinclair and her first husband, the Hungarian-born journalist Ivan Levaï, whose mother brought him to France as a child and was then deported, killed by the Nazis. Mr. Levaï, who was hidden in the French countryside, once called her “too beautiful for me.” The couple’s second son, Elie, is named after Mr. Wiesel.
“She was charming, intelligent, famous in the best sense of the word,” Mr. Wiesel said. “She was a combination of Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters, very well read, very well prepared.”