Anne Sinclair

She was born Anne-Elise Schwartz on 15 July 1948 in New York to Joseph-Robert Schwartz (changed to Sinclair in 1949) and Micheline Nanette Rosenberg. Via her mother she is the maternal granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg,[1] one of France's and later New York's biggest art dealers. Both of her parents were French-born Jews who had married pre-war, and who with Paul Rosenberg and his wife had fled from the Nazi persecution of Jews after the 1940 Nazi invasion of France.[2]

A few years after her birth, the family returned to France.[3] She attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school.[4] She majored in politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and in law at the University of Paris.[5]

Sinclair's first radio hosting job was at Europe 1, one of the leading nationwide radio networks.[5]

Her grandfather Paul Rosenberg, as well as dealing art, owned a major private collection of noted classical, impressionist and post-impressionist works. He lost many of these paintings after fleeing France for New York in 1940 with her parents, but managed to retain a number of works which he had distributed on noting the growing threat of war in the late 1930s.

As the sole heir to her parents' estate, after the death of her mother Micheline in 2007, Sinclair donated a 1918 Picasso painting of her grandmother and mother painted for Paul Rosenberg, to the Picasso Museum in Paris.[8] She also sold an unwanted Matisse from her private collection in the same year, which raised in excess of $33M.[8]

In October 1997, Rosenberg's heirs including Sinclair filed suit in United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, Seattle, to recover the painting Odalisque (1927 or 1928) by Matisse, the first lawsuit against an American museum concerning ownership of art looted by Nazis during World War II.[9] In 2013, they demanded that the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter museum return Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace (1937), a Matisse painting that was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 in Paris.[10]

Sinclair's first husband was French journalist Ivan Levaï, with whom she has two sons.

In 1991, she married Dominique Strauss-Kahn, an economist, politician and the 2007-2011 managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She separated from Strauss-Kahn in August 2012 due to his sexual affairs with other women.[11] During his trial, it emerged that the couple owned homes in Place des Vosges; a $4 million townhouse in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; and a house within a compound in Marrakesh, Morocco.[8] The couple divorced in March 2013.

Since the separation from Strauss-Kahn, Sinclair has been living with the French historian Pierre Nora.

She resumed public life with a memoir of her grandfather, My Grandfather's Gallery, in 2014.[12]

A feature film Welcome to New York directed by Abel Ferrara (2014) was based on the Strauss-Kahn story. The film featured Gérard Depardieu as Devereaux, a character modeled on Strauss-Kahn, and Jacqueline Bisset as "Simone," a character based on Sinclair. The film was "built around the Sofitel scandal and portray[ed] both characters in an unforgiving light." Sinclair said the film was "disgusting" and Strauss-Kahn's lawyer said "his client would sue the film's producers for libel".[13]

In 2020 Netflix released the documentary series Room 2806: The Accusation, a reconstruction of the Sofitel-affair and other cases of alleged sexual assault and misconduct by Strauss-Kahn, based on interviews with persons involved. Sinclair also gave an interview, but Strauss-Kahn did not.

• Une année particulière (an extraordinary year), 1982
• Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'eux , 1997
• Caméra subjective, 2002
• 21, rue La Boétie, Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, 2012, ISBN 978-2-24673731-5 (a book about her grandfather, arts dealer Paul Rosenberg), 2013, ISBN 978-3-88897-820-3
• Chronique d'une France blessée : Juillet 2015-janvier 2017. Grasset & Fasquelle, March 2017, ISBN 978-2246812234

• Anne Sinclair's official political blog (in French, suspended in 2011)