Soccer Stars Are at Center of Paris Prostitution Case
|
Version 0 of 1. PARIS — President François Hollande may have been at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Northern Ireland on Tuesday discussing the future of the world economy, but much of France was transfixed by the far more salacious proceedings at home concerning two star athletes and an underage prostitute. None of the three main protagonists appeared in a court here on Tuesday, and proceedings began and were quickly postponed to deal with a constitutional challenge on a case over events in 2008 and 2009. Still, the French public and the news media were closely following the case against the soccer players, Franck Ribéry and Karim Benzema, which revealed a tawdry world of wealth and prostitution centered on a cafe off the Champs-Élysées. The accusations that the players had paid an underage girl for sex damaged the reputation of the French team just before the 2010 World Cup, and they have proved as revealing to the French as the charges surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former government minister and head of the International Monetary Fund. He lost his chance at the French presidency after a sexual encounter with a New York hotel maid and subsequent disclosures that he had participated in numerous orgies worldwide with women he said he did not know were prostitutes and did not himself pay. Mr. Ribéry, 30, and Mr. Benzema, 25, continue to play soccer at the highest level, for Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, respectively. This year, Bayern Munich became the first team to win the Bundesliga, the European Cup and the German Cup in the same season. The young woman in question, Zahia Dehar, now 21, has made a whole new career out of her notoriety, and has more than 55,000 followers on Twitter. Algerian-born, she came to France at the age of 10, and she has transferred her dyed blond hair and pneumatic figure into fashion, opening her own line of luxury lingerie featuring the color pink and what could be considered a postmodern take on the Barbie doll. While it is not clear who her investors are, and she refuses to say, her line is reportedly successful, and she has been taken up by the German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Mr. Lagerfeld has compared Ms. Dehar to Diane de Poitiers, who was for years the favorite of King Henry II, but who was also renowned for her political acuity and influence on the king. “I find her fascinating,” he has said, calling her “a luxury product.” Ms. Dehar lives in a vast apartment, with a cook and a maid, in the 16th Arrondissement in Paris, and has a huge showroom in the 8th; her collections include rose garters, bras in pleated blue organza and nightgowns with cupcake paper pleats around the bodice. The French news media praise her for making some of her products in France and suggest that she is the muse of a Chinese investor from Hong Kong. The prosecution alleges that Mr. Benzema paid 500 euros, or almost $670, in May 2008 to have sex with Ms. Dehar, then 16, in a Paris hotel. He has denied having any sexual encounter with her. For his part, Mr. Ribéry has admitted that he flew her from Paris to Munich in 2009 for his 26th birthday party in a hotel, that the two had sex and that he paid her 200 euros for taxi fare. The prosecution accused him of paying her 700 euros, or about $936, for sex, plus her expenses. But Mr. Ribéry, a married man famous for his facial scars from a childhood car accident and for his conversion to Islam, has denied knowing Ms. Dehar was under age. His lawyer, Carlo-Alberto Brusa, has said his client is innocent. “In French law, it’s not forbidden to make love to a woman and even to pay her for it. What is forbidden is to do it with a minor,” he told Reuters. “When a woman travels around Europe by plane, can you imagine thinking for one second that she’s a minor?” Ms. Dehar, according to court documents, became a prostitute at age 15 or 16, but would tell clients that she was 18. She has said she told the soccer players the same lie. She told the police she was 16 when she had sex with Mr. Benzema and 17 when she had sex with Mr. Ribéry. The age of consent for sex in France is 15, but it is illegal to pay anyone for sex who is under 18. Prostitution is legal in France, but soliciting is not. Prosecutors had been reluctant to pursue a case against the two soccer players and Mr. Ribéry’s brother-in-law, but the investigating judge, André Dando, pressed on with the case, arguing that the men must have known her real age. If found guilty of soliciting the services of an underage prostitute, the men could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and fined 45,000 euros, more than $60,000. The trial also involves charges against other men, who were accused of involvement in a prostitution ring around the Zaman Cafe, a nightclub frequented by many sports stars and now closed by court order. The police raided it in April 2010 and rounded up 18 prostitutes. The players were called as witnesses after the women were interrogated. The brothers who owned the cafe are among the accused, as is Abou Sofiane Moustaïd, a former star on reality television who allegedly acted as a pimp to the stars, introducing them to Ms. Dehar. The sudden constitutional challenge to the court case will need to be resolved by another court before the trial can continue, and that could take several months. |