Power, sex and bad choices …

John Edwards fell for it. Now two more powerful men are being watched as their lives are ruined by outside booty and sexual assault allegations.

Time magazine asked: “What makes powerful men do bad things.” Well, apparently, it starts with a “P” and ends with a “Y.”

When her husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn was preparing to run for President of France five years ago, Anne Sinclair told a Paris newspaper that she was “rather proud” of his reputation as a ladies’ man, a chaud lapin (hot rabbit) nicknamed the Great Seducer.

“It’s important,” she said, “for a man in politics to be able to seduce.”

Maybe it was pride that inspired French politicians and International Monetary Fund officials to look the other way as the rumors about “DSK” piled up, from the young journalist who says Strauss-Kahn tried to rip off her clothes when she went to interview him, to the female lawmaker who describes being groped and pawed and vowed never to be in a room alone with him again, to the economist who argued in a letter to IMF investigators that “I fear that this man has a problem that, perhaps, made him unfit to lead an institution where women work under his command.” Maybe it was the moral laziness and social coziness that impel elites to protect their own. Maybe it was a belief that he alone could save the global economy. Maybe nothing short of jail is disqualifying for certain men in certain circles. 

But in any event, the arrest of Strauss-Kahn in New York City for allegedly trying to rape a hotel maid has ignited a fierce debate over sex, law, power and privilege. And it is only just beginning. The night of Strauss-Kahn’s arraignment, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted that the reason his wife Maria Shriver walked out earlier this year was the discovery that he had fathered a child more than a decade ago with a former member of the household staff. The two cases are far apart: only one man was hauled off to jail. But both suggest an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust. And both involve men whose long-standing reputations for behaving badly toward women did not derail their rise to power. Which raises the question: How can it be, in this ostensibly enlightened age, when men and women live and work as peers and are schooled regularly in what conduct is acceptable and what is actionable, that anyone with so little judgment, so little honor, could rise to such heights?

“When men have more opportunity, they tend to act on that opportunity,” says psychologist Mark Held, a private practitioner in the Denver area who specializes in male sexuality and the problems of overachievers. “The challenge becomes developing ways to control the impulses so you don’t get yourself into self-defeating situations.”

This article appears in May 17-23, 2011.