The Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema He faces as of this Wednesday in the Court of Versailles the trial for the alleged complicity in the blackmail of his former teammate in the selection Mathieu Valbuena in 2015, in which he can be sentenced to five years in prison and a € 75,000 fine.
The process that has overshadowed his image and that kept him absent from the national team for five years, in particular during Euro 2016 and the World Cup in Russia in which France was proclaimed champion, will take place in the attacker’s best sporting moment, cited as candidate to win the Ballon d’Or at the end of November.
The player’s lawyers do not confirm his presence at the hearing, amid a busy sports schedule, between a vital Champions League duel against Shakhtar Donetsk and an important classic against Barcelona.
Benzema could return to Versailles, the city where he spent a night in jail in November 2015, before being prosecuted for complicity in blackmail and association of criminals, a charge that was not upheld by the prosecution.
Since then, all attempts by his lawyers to remove him from a case have failed in which, according to his own testimony, he only acted of good will to help Valbuena, that he was being blackmailed.
The courts reproached him for having acted in favor of the blackmailers when on October 6, 2015, during a concentration of the national team in Clairefontaine, he offered his partner the help of an intermediary to get rid of the problem.
It was about Karim Zenati, childhood friend of Benzema, who had previously warned the Madrid forward of the existence of a sexual video in which Valbuena and his wife appeared.
That file had been obtained in July 2014 by Axel Angot, known to several players for his skills in the use of computers, whom Valbuena, then a Marseille footballer, had asked to rescue the data of a damaged mobile phone.
Sex video
The file ended up on Angot’s computer, which she kept in storage until months later she needed to pay off a debt. Next to Mustapha Zouaoui, Renowned for providing luxury goods to footballers and repeatedly convicted of blackmail, he devised a plan to obtain compensation from Valbuena.
The idea was to inform Marseille of the existence of the video through the former player Djibril Cisse and, at the same time, propose the help of Angot to erase it, something that should stimulate the generosity of the player.
But Valbuena He did not react, so they went to another footballer henchman, Younes Houass, who called him several times in June. Instead of accepting the blackmail, the Marseille player went to the police who, from that moment on, began to wiretap telephone conversations.
Childhood friend
This is how they learned that the alleged blackmailers came into contact with Zenati, who, in turn, requested the intervention of Benzema.
During the investigation of the case, the Madridista acknowledged having had that conversation in Clairefontaine, but affirmed that he did so with the sole intention of helping Valbuena, who interpreted it differently, as pressure to make him pay.
The subsequent telephone conversations of Benzema and Zenati, intervened by the police, leave the Madridista in a bad place, since they treated Valbuena as a “fag” and claimed that he had “swallowed” the pressure to which he had been subjected.
Benzema admitted during interrogations that he told Valbuena that he had seen the video himself, something he later denied, a lie that the prosecution interprets as an attempt to increase pressure to pay.
The trial will also serve to see the reunion between Benzema and Valbuena, separated since then, first by the precautionary measures imposed by the courts and, later, by a growing hostility.
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