Patrice Evra: Former France star opens up about sexual abuse, says it only happened once
A former France international footballer who was repeatedly abused by a teammate has told how he was groomed and targeted by a senior French international footballer.
The revelations have been made by the footballer – who only realised his full extent of the crime nearly two years after the alleged abuse allegedly took place – to a French investigative magazine.
In a new interview with Sud-Ouest, the player, now 33, said that he felt ‘too exposed’ to go public before his alleged abuser, former France and Manchester United striker Olivier Giroud, was arrested.
But he has now decided to risk his career and potentially ruin his future, insisting, that in his own words, ‘I’m ashamed and it’s my fault. I’m not the victim’.
In the interview, written by journalist Pascal Guiot in French, the footballer, who lives near Paris, told of how he was ‘abused like a dog’ in Giroud’s Paris flat when he was 17.
He said: ‘I’ve never been so exposed, more like a dog, as if they were all looking at me’.
‘Olivier’s a good friend and he would never have done anything like this to me.
‘I still wake up sometimes in the night with the smell of lavender on me and I have to wash it out and everything else, because it’s still like that.
‘I’m ashamed and it’s my fault. I’m not the victim.’
The footballer said he would not go public on the details of the abuse until the player himself was ‘taken to a special place that is supposed to be safe’, after he was warned by a fellow footballer that it felt like his life was ‘on fire’.
But he said he was prepared to go
