Hey, it’s been a while since we last heard of Uncle Pat’. In truth, it was not worse, but hey… It turns out that the former captain of the French football team will be tried on Monday for homophobic insult at the police court in Paris, and incurs a fine for remarks targeting PSG and dating from 2019.
Former defender and captain of Manchester United, Patrice Evra was unleashed on social networks in March 2019 after a victory for the Mancunians against PSG in the Champions League, insulting the former Parisian player Jérôme Rothen then launching in particular “Paris, you are queers! Queers! Here, it is the men who speak”. The player, accustomed to insults in the media or social networks, then posted a new message to apologize, ensuring that he was not homophobic.
The player acknowledges the facts
The Mousse and Stop Homophobia associations, supported by the anti-homophobia collective Rouge Direct, had filed a complaint, and Patrice Evra was indicted for “public insult towards a group of people because of their sexual orientation”.
The player had admitted before the judge to have made the disputed remarks, evoking facts which would have taken place on March 15, 2019, “date of the birthday of footballer Paul Pogba”. In his order for remand dated May 5, the investigating judge considers that Patrice Evra “spoke in a private setting for the making of a video which was then published on Snapchat without his knowledge”.
The non-public insult retained by the investigating judge
“The comments were therefore made in a non-confidential, but not public manner”, and the former Monegasque “did not intend to make his words public”. The non-public insult causes Patrice Evra to incur a fine, in this case a fine of 1,500 euros. If the offense of public insult had been retained, Evra would then have appeared before the criminal court and would have been liable to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.
For Etienne Deshoulières, lawyer for the associations, “the use of this homophobic insult by a former captain of the France team is not trivial. This reinforces the climate of homophobia present in professional football. ” For Julien Pontes, spokesperson for the Rouge Direct collective, “this trial is an unmissable opportunity to affirm that the impunity of homophobia in football is over”, which would be, according to him, a strong signal. “a few weeks from the World Cup in Qatar”.