Former defender and captain of Manchester United, Patrice Evra was unleashed on social networks in March 2019 after a victory for Mancunians against PSG in the Champions League. The former captain of the France football team will be tried for homophobic “insult” on Monday at the police court in Paris.
He incurs a fine for comments aimed at PSG. After the defeat of the Ile-de-France club, he insulted the former Parisian player Jérôme Rothen, notably launching “Paris, you are queers, you are PDs … Here, it’s the men who speak”.
The player, accustomed to insults in the media or on social networks, then posted a new message to apologize, ensuring that he was not homophobic. The Mousse and Stop Homophobia associations, supported by the anti-homophobia collective Rouge Direct, had filed a complaint, and Patrice Evra was indicted for “public insult towards a group of people because of their sexual orientation”.
The player had admitted before the judge to have made the disputed remarks, evoking facts which would have taken place on March 15, 2019, “date of the birthday of footballer Paul Pogba”. In his order for remand dated May 5, the investigating judge considers that Patrice Evra “spoke in a private setting for the making of a video which was then published on Snapchat without his knowledge”.
Evra incurs a fine of up to 1500 euros
“The comments were therefore made in a non-confidential, but not public manner”, and Patrice Evra “did not intend to make his words public”. The non-public insult caused Patrice Evra to incur a fine, in this case a fine of 1,500 euros, and earned him to appear Monday morning, October 17, before the Paris police court.
If the offense of public insult had been retained, Patrice Evra would have appeared before the criminal court and would have been liable to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros. Asked, his lawyer did not respond to AFP.
For Etienne Deshoulières, lawyer for the associations, “the use of this homophobic insult by a former captain of the France team is not trivial. This reinforces the climate of homophobia present in professional football. “This trial is an unmissable opportunity to affirm that the impunity of homophobia in football is over”, abounds Julien Pontes, spokesperson for the Collectif Rouge Direct. According to him, this would be a strong signal “a few weeks before the World Cup in Qatar”.
