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The French footballer and Real Madrid forward, Karim Benzema, will go to an appeal trial for the so-called ‘Valbuena case’. The athlete, sentenced this November 24 in the first instance to a year in prison exempt from compliance for complicity in blackmailing his former teammate with a sex video, will appeal the sentence, according to his lawyers.
The forward of the France and Real Madrid national team, Karim Benzema, will appeal after being found guilty in the ‘Valbuena case’, for a sex video.
The player was sentenced to one year in prison, exempt from compliance, and to pay a fine of 75,000 euros.
“Benzema will come on appeal to explain himself and the facts will be clarified,” announced his lawyer Antoine Vey, after hearing the opinion of the Criminal Court of Versailles, this Wednesday, November 24.
The athlete was found responsible for participating in an extortion attempt against Mathieu Valbuena, his partner in ‘Les Bleus’ in 2015. The blackmail would have been produced by a recording of a sexual video that is believed to have been stolen from Valbuena’s cell phone.
However, the footballer rejects the accusations against him and his lawyers reproach that he was convicted after being absent from the three days that the process lasted a month ago, for which they described the ruling as “unfair.”
BENZEMA 3
A Court in Versailles on Wednesday found France and Real Madrid forward Karim Benzema guilty of complicity in the attempted blackmail of former international team mate Mathieu Valbuena over a sex tape and sentenced him to a one-year suspended jail term. https://t.co/DJz3dZIMQt
– Reuters Sports (@ReutersSports) November 24, 2021
Vey assured that the Court had accepted the professional impediments that the forward justified about his absence, since the hearing took place between two important matches for his team.
Sylvain Cormier, another lawyer for the defense team, considered that Benzema “has been convicted without evidence, the sentence does not correspond to the reality of the facts,” he said.
The other damned
The alleged masterminds of the case, Axel Angot and Mustapha Zouaoui, were respectively sentenced to two years in prison and 30 months in prison and a fine of 3,000 euros.
One of the intermediaries, Younes Houass, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars and Karim Zenati, Karim Benzema’s childhood friend, will have to pay 15 months in prison and a fine of 3,000 euros.
According to the deliberations at the trial, Benzema would have incited Mathieu Valbuena to pay the group of alleged blackmailers in exchange for not revealing an intimate video of the player.
However, the court case is not expected to affect the career of the French athlete. The president of the French Football Federation (FFF), Noël Le Graët, declared in early November that “Benzema will not be excluded in relation to a possible judicial sanction.”
With AP, Reuters and EFE
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