Luis Rubiales, the previous head of Spain’s soccer federation, was convicted on Thursday of sexual assault for forcibly kissing a member of the ladies’s nationwide group on the lips after the group gained the 2023 Ladies’s World Cup.
Mr. Rubiales’s kiss of the participant, Jennifer Hermoso, set off a nationwide scandal, deepened debates about longstanding sexism in Spanish soccer and have become a watershed second in Spain’s #MeToo motion.
A Spanish courtroom on Thursday cleared Mr. Rubiales of a separate cost of coercion. For the sexual assault conviction, it fined Mr. Rubiales 10,800 euros, about $11,270.
In delivering the ruling, Choose José Manuel Fernández-Prieto stated {that a} kiss “is just not the traditional approach of greeting folks with whom one doesn’t have an emotional relationship.” Mr. Rubiales was additionally ordered to not go inside 200 meters, or about 650 toes, of Ms. Hermoso for one 12 months. The courtroom stated he can not contact Ms. Hermoso and should pay her 3,000 euros for “ethical injury precipitated to her.”
Choose Fernández-Prieto stated the sum was proportionate for the forcible kiss given the “time and place” — in full view of 1000’s of spectators within the stadium and plenty of others watching the ceremony on tv.
Mr. Rubiales’s forcible kiss, the decide stated, was a “reprehensible act” that blighted “an unprecedented success in Spanish ladies’s soccer.”
There was no speedy response from Ms. Hermoso. She had stated that the kiss was not consensual.
Ms. Hermoso stated 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, including that she had identified instantly that the act was not regular.
“My boss was kissing me,” she stated. “This could not occur.”
Mr. Rubiales plans to attraction the ruling, his lawyer, Olga Tubau, instructed the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.
He has denied doing something unsuitable in the course of the encounter with Ms. Hermoso. Talking in a courtroom close to Madrid earlier this month, he stated, “You don’t win a World Cup each day,” and he added that he had kissed different gamers in celebratory moments.
Prosecutors had additionally argued that Mr. Rubiales had pressured Ms. Hermoso to drop her declare and play down the incident.
Three different males, together with Jorge Vilda, the group’s coach on the World Cup, had been additionally charged with coercion alongside Mr. Rubiales. All had been acquitted of that cost, with the courtroom saying that prosecutors had not confirmed that Ms. Hermoso was topic to any acts of violence and intimidation that might warrant coercion.
The kiss and the following fallout prompted a second of reckoning in Spain, the place progress in gender equality — ladies’s soccer particularly — has run up in opposition to a tradition of machismo.
Spain’s minister of equality, Ana Redondo, welcomed the ruling on Thursday.
“When there isn’t any consent, there’s aggression, and that’s what the decide certifies on this sentence,” Ms. Redondo stated on social media.
Nonetheless, the Federation of Progressive Ladies, a nonprofit that advocates gender equality in Spain, stated it was “deeply disenchanted” by the sentence: Prosecutors had sought a two-and-a-half-year jail time period for Mr. Rubiales.
Thursday’s ruling “reinforces mistrust within the judicial system and emboldens aggressors,” the nonprofit stated on social media.
Within the speedy aftermath of the incident, Mr. Rubiales supplied a tepid apology. He resigned as head of the nationwide soccer group, the Royal Spanish Soccer Federation, after weeks of strain and waning assist.
