Dominique Strauss-Kahn, otherwise known as DSK, insists that he is innocent of the sexual assault, including attempted rape, charged against filed in a Manhattan courtroom.

DSK, heretofore the head of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in his resignation letter from the Fund that he will firmly defend himself from the charges and his lawyer assures the media that his client will be exonerated.

I believe that DSK is guilty as the day is long, but I also believe him when he insists he is innocent. I actually believe that the man is so narcissistic, such a inveterate seducer of women, and enamored with his own abilities, that he actually believes what took place is not an offense but an entirely acceptable act of sex. That roughing a woman up and overwhelmingly her is simply an manner of sex, the woman may fight back but it is part of the fun. He actually believes that it is okay and the woman ultimately does not mind.

Why? Beyond DSK’s history of frantic lust for women, even though he is married with child, he also has - it has now emerged - a history of, at a minimum, aggressive pursuit of his sexual appetite.

A year into his IMF tenure, in 2008, he conducted an affair with a subordinate. Although the IMF internal review concluded that DSK showed “serious error of judgment” it found no evidence of harassment and the affair was described as consensual by both parties. But the woman involved later went on to write a letter to the IMF’s board stating that DSK is “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command”. That tells us that this man was overbearing in his demands for sex masked as romantic “seduction”.

Then there is a 2007 incident, only recently risen to prominent news, where a French writer who went to interview DSK for book described fighting him off the floor and only decided not to file charges (in light of the New York incident, she has since brought charges) because her mother is a socialist politician who is a friend of DSK and considered the situation “delicate”, and the writer did not want, as she put it, to be forever seen as that woman who had that problem with a politician. Fighting a woman on a floor for sex? Clearly this man has a problem.

But I believe when he says he does not believe that he committed rape, for him it is all about perception. As he says it floor fighting is just sexy foreplay and that women appreciate a aggressive man to subdue them and have their way. They may play prudish, but deep down look for a man to overpower them into submission and sex. It is almost Romanesque.

DSK believes that he has done nothing wrong. I believe that he believes that. But a court will not excuse a crime because of the perception of the criminal. DSK’s punitive sexual conduct needs to be restrained.