PARIS – Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke his silence four months after a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault, calling his encounter with the woman a “moral failing” he deeply regrets, but insisting in an interview on French television Sunday that no violence was involved.

Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and a one-time top presidential contender in his native France, also denied using violence against a French writer who claims he tried to rape her in a 2003 incident.

Throughout what appeared to be a heavily scripted 20-minute-long interview with French broadcaster TF1, Strauss-Kahn managed to come off as contrite even as the Socialist politician insisted he hadn’t forced himself on either of the women.

He said his May 14 sexual encounter with Nafissatou Diallo, an African immigrant who claimed that he attacked her when she entered his room in Manhattan’s Sofitel hotel to clean it, “did not involve violence, constraint or aggression.”

Still, he acknowledged, it “was a moral failing and I am not proud of it. I regret it infinitely. I have regretted it every day for the past four months, and I think I’m not done regretting it.”

It “was not only an inappropriate relationship, but more than that, it was a failing … a failing vis-a-vis my wife, my children and my friends but also a failing vis-a-vis the French people, who had vested their hopes for change in me.”

Strauss-Kahn resigned from the IMF’s top job in the wake of the scandal. Though he didn’t rule out a future return to politics, the man once widely regarded as the Socialist party’s best hope at beating France’s incumbent conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy said he needed to take time to think about his future.

Strauss-Kahn, who had a long-standing reputation as a man with a weakness for sex and women, said the Diallo imbroglio had profoundly changed him.

“I’ve seen the pain that I caused around me and I thought, I thought a lot,” he said. “That lightness, I’ve lost it for good.”

The interview, however, was more than an extended mea culpa. Strauss-Kahn lashed out both at Diallo and, more broadly, at the U.S. justice system, which, by allowing him to be paraded handcuffed before cameras, had irreparably tarnished his image, he said.

“When you are snatched up by the jaws of that machine, you have the impression that it can crush you,” he said. “I felt that I was trampled on, humiliated, even before I had the chance to say a word.”

Under French law, it’s illegal to show suspects in handcuffs.

He added he suspected financial motives might have been behind Diallo’s accusations. She has filed a lawsuit against him, but Strauss-Kahn insisted Sunday that he wouldn’t negotiate a settlement.