Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spain’s soccer federation, was convicted on Thursday of sexual assault for forcibly kissing a member of the women’s national team on the lips after the team won the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Mr. Rubiales’s kiss of the player, Jennifer Hermoso, set off a national scandal, deepened debates about longstanding sexism in Spanish soccer and became a watershed moment in Spain’s #MeToo movement.
A Spanish court on Thursday cleared Mr. Rubiales of a separate charge of coercion. For the sexual assault conviction, it fined Mr. Rubiales 10,800 euros, about $11,270.
In delivering the ruling, Judge José Manuel Fernández-Prieto said that a kiss “is not the normal way of greeting people with whom one does not have an emotional relationship.” Mr. Rubiales was also ordered not to go within 200 meters, or about 650 feet, of Ms. Hermoso for one year. The court said he cannot contact Ms. Hermoso and must pay her 3,000 euros for “moral damage caused to her.”
Judge Fernández-Prieto said the sum was proportionate for the forcible kiss given the “time and place” — in full view of thousands of spectators in the stadium and many others watching the ceremony on television.
Mr. Rubiales’s forcible kiss, the judge said, was a “reprehensible act” that blighted “an unprecedented success in Spanish women’s football.”
There was no immediate response from Ms. Hermoso. She had said that the kiss was not consensual.
Ms. Hermoso said shortly after the episode that “at no time did I consent to the kiss that he gave me.”
“I couldn’t react — it was a thousandth of a second,” she later testified, adding that she had known immediately that the act was not normal.
“My boss was kissing me,” she said. “This should not happen.”
Mr. Rubiales plans to appeal the ruling, his lawyer, Olga Tubau, told the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.
He has denied doing anything wrong during the encounter with Ms. Hermoso. Speaking in a courtroom near Madrid earlier this month, he said, “You don’t win a World Cup every day,” and he added that he had kissed other players in celebratory moments.
Prosecutors had also argued that Mr. Rubiales had pressured Ms. Hermoso to drop her claim and play down the incident.
Three other men, including Jorge Vilda, the team’s coach at the World Cup, were also charged with coercion alongside Mr. Rubiales. All were acquitted of that charge, with the court saying that prosecutors had not proven that Ms. Hermoso was subject to any acts of violence and intimidation that would warrant coercion.
The kiss and the ensuing fallout prompted a moment of reckoning in Spain, where progress in gender equality — women’s soccer in particular — have run up against a culture of machismo.
Spain’s minister of equality, Ana Redondo, welcomed the ruling on Thursday.
“When there is no consent, there is aggression, and that is what the judge certifies in this sentence,” Ms. Redondo said on social media.
However, the Federation of Progressive Women, a nonprofit that advocates gender equality in Spain, said it was “deeply disappointed” by the sentence: Prosecutors had sought a two-and-a-half year prison term for Mr. Rubiales.
Thursday’s ruling “reinforces distrust in the judicial system and emboldens aggressors,” the nonprofit said on social media.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Mr. Rubiales offered a tepid apology. He resigned as head of the national soccer organization, the Royal Spanish Football Federation, after weeks of pressure and waning support.
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Publish date : 2025-02-20 08:47:00
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