LILLE, France:: A French court acquitted former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of pimping charges Friday, drawing a line under four years of legal woes over his sexual escapades that torpedoed his career.

The 66-year-old economist merely nodded his head to acknowledge the verdict, the finale of a colorful trial which dragged intimate details of his private life into the public eye.

One of Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers, Richard Malka, said the case had collapsed “like a house of cards” after even the prosecutor called for him to be let off due to lack of evidence that he had organized or profited from prostitution.

The trial was the latest in a long series of high-profile corruption and sexual scandals that have landed Strauss-Kahn in the dock in the past 16 years, only to fizzle out.

Most recently, Strauss-Kahn saw his high-flying career at the head of the International Monetary Fund — and his French presidential prospects — implode when a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault in 2011.

Not long after those criminal charges were dropped and the case settled in a civil suit, his name cropped up in a probe into an alleged prostitution ring in northern France, which provided sex workers for orgies he attended.

In France, while prostitution is legal, procuring and benefiting from it is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The courtroom in the northern city of Lille heard details of the case, as his lawyers accused the court of putting his morals, and prostitution itself, on trial.

Strauss-Kahn said he was unaware any of the women attending soirees in Paris, Brussels and Washington, had been paid to be there.

Judge Lemaire said there had been several inconsistencies in the testimony of former prostitutes who attended the parties and gave dramatic accounts of events.

They said Strauss-Kahn would have been “naive” to be unaware of their role and recounted brutal scenes of sodomy, angering the accused who said he was not on trial for “deviant practices.”

The verdict comes after prosecutor Frederic Fevre called for Strauss-Kahn to be acquitted, saying that “neither the judicial enquiry nor the hearing have established that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty.”

The two ex-prostitutes who testified dropped a civil lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn, with their lawyers conceding they lacked enough proof to win the case.

“We put a man’s private life on show, with no respect for him, with no dignity, with no usefulness, and that is what this verdict means,” lawyer Malka said.

Strauss-Kahn was in the dock alongside a colorful cast of 13 characters — including hoteliers and police officers — accused of taking part in a prostitution ring.

Strauss-Kahn’s case overlapped with that known as the “Carlton affair” as he was friends with some of the other accused, who admitted bringing prostitutes to sex parties to curry favor with him.