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The article claims that this phone — which Mr. Strauss-Kahn lost that day, and which a hotel employee, on the advice of police, claimed to be returning to him at the airport when in fact it was the police coming to arrest him — never left the hotel, and had its GPS system disabled at 12:51 p.m., soon after Mr. Strauss-Kahn left for lunch with his daughter and her boyfriend.

Mr. Epstein’s article does not explicitly allege a plot, and concludes with only unanswered questions about how the case was handled, which he acknowledges could have innocent answers.

But the story’s implications were such that UMP party leader Jean-François Copé responded by calling the story “ridiculous.

“This plot argument is grotesque,” Mr. Copé said on French television.

“To imagine that what happened to Strauss-Kahn was the object of some sort of collusion by the UMP is stretching things a lot,” he said.

French popular opinion has long been skeptical of the Strauss-Kahn case, and polling shows belief in some kind of plot is common.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who at the time was the leading contender for the Socialist presidential nomination, spent six months on bail under house arrest before prosecutors dropped sexual assault charges.

Prosecutors said the complainant, Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old hotel maid, lied to a grand jury about the events around the alleged attack.

Mr. Epstein, an American investigative journalist known for his writing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and more recently the financial dealings of Hollywood moguls, said he had access to “Sofitel electronic key swipe records, time-stamped security camera videotapes, and records for a cell phone used on the day of May 14 by John Sheehan, a security employee of Accor, the company that owns the Sofitel hotel.”