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Dominique Strauss-Kahn leaves Paris' courthouse after a hearing Tuesday on a tell-all penned by an ex-lover.

French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn lost his bid to have a court ban a kiss-and-tell book by an ex-lover who has described him as a sex-obsessed "half-man, half-pig" -- but he will collect damages.

In a ruling late Tuesday, a judge green-lighted publication of "Beauty and Beast" by Marcelle Iacub, a lawyer and columnist who had a seven-month affair with the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Le Monde reported.

The court agreed to Strauss-Kahn's demand that a disclaimer declaring his privacy had been invaded be included in every copy. It also ordered the author, the publisher and a magazine that printed excerpts to pay him $98,000, the newspaper said.

Hours before his partial victory, Strauss-Kahn appeared in a Paris courtroom to complain of the "horror" of having his love life exposed, The Guardian reported.

Christian Hartmann / Reuters

"Belle et Bete" ("Beauty and Beast") by Marcela Iacub details her seven-month affair with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Is anything allowed in order to make money?" he asked, branding the book a cheap shot against "a man already down on the ground."

The affair chronicled in the book unfolded while Strauss-Kahn was embroiled in scandal over allegations he sexually assaulted a hotel maid in New York. Criminal charges were dropped by prosecutors who questioned the woman's credibility; Strauss-Kahn later settled a civil claim out of court.

Iacub's book, which is due to go on sale Wednesday, doesn't name Strauss-Kahn, but she has said it's about him. Excerpts published in Le Nouvel Observateur -- accompanied by an interview in which she referred to him as "half-man, half-pig" -- are decidedly unflattering.

"You were old, you were fat, you were short and you were ugly," the 48-year-old former mistress wrote, according to the Guardian. "You were macho, you were vulgar, you were insensitive and you were stingy. You were selfish, you were brutal and you had no culture. And I was mad about you."

Strauss-Kahn's lawyers contend he was seduced into a money-making trap and they tried to persuade the court with an email in which Iacub purportedly confessed the romance was a plot cooked up by her co-workers.

Iacub said she didn't remember the email, disavowed its contents and issued a warning to the Socialist leader once touted as presidential material before scandal doomed his career.

"I don't think it's in [Strauss-Kahn's] best interest for me to start searching through my emails," she said, according to London's Daily Telegraph.

Strauss-Kahn, who is under investigation in connection with a French sex ring, had asked for a disclaimer to be printed in every copy of "Beauty and Beast" already distributed, a ban on more copies being printed, and $130,000 in damages. 

As he left the courthouse, he said there was one more thing on his wish-list: "To be left alone."

PARIS -- Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been released from a French police station after nearly two days of questioning over a suspected hotel prostitution ring.

Judicial officials say Strauss-Kahn, a one-time French presidential hopeful whose political aspirations were derailed by a May 2001 sexual assault accusation in New York City, will be summoned again next month by three judges who will decide if there is enough evidence to file charges in a case centering on the alleged prostitution ring in France and Belgium.

Strauss-Kahn held in French prostitution ring

French TV footage showed police restraining reporters behind metal barriers as a tinted-window sedan carrying Strauss-Kahn left the police station in northern city of Lille.

The investigation is focused on a prostitution ring that allegedly supplied clients of Lille's luxury Carlton Hotel. Police want to establish whether Strauss-Kahn knew that women at parties he attended in Paris and Washington were prostitutes.

Strauss-Kahn believed he was participating in swingers' parties and had no reason to suspect that the women were prostitutes, his lawyer Henri Leclerc has said previously. Consorting with prostitutes is legal in France; however, Strauss-Kahn could be charged for benefiting from misappropriated company funds if investigators conclude he attended sex sessions with prostitutes that company executives paid for out of expense accounts, according to Britain's The Guardian.

Sex scandal
Strauss-Kahn's job as head of the International Monetary Fund, as well as his presidential ambitions, came to an end last spring when he was accused of trying to rape a Guinean chambermaid in a Manhattan hotel suite. Criminal charges were later dropped when it emerged that the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, was an unreliable witness. Diallo is now pursuing him in a civil action.

Separate attempted-rape accusations by a Parisian writer also were shelved by French police on October 13 -- three days before Strauss-Kahn's name surfaced again in the Lille investigation.

Nancy Ing from NBC News and Reuters contributed to this report.

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