This article has been updated to reflect the one-year suspended prison sentence handed to Karim Benzema on November 24. Benzema will appeal that sentence, which also includes a €75k fine.
Just for a moment, Karim Benzema was worried.
Towards the second day of his blackmail trial in Versailles, which he chose not to attend, prosecutors laid out the punishments that they were demanding for the Real Madrid striker and his four co-defendants. One enterprising media organisation jumped the gun and announced, erroneously, that they were the definitive verdicts. A 10-month suspended prison sentence for Benzema and a €75,000 fine.
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Seeing the news story, Benzema fired off a message to his lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, who quickly put his mind at ease. These were the prosecution’s recommended sentences, not the final judgments. It had been rumoured throughout the three-day trial that the presiding judge, Christophe Morgan, might hand down his verdicts at the end of the final day. Instead, he revealed that following a period of deliberation, the final sentences would be announced in front of the same court on November 24. The case that has hung over Benzema’s head for the last six years hung over his head for a little while longer.
In reality, the outcome was worse. Benzema was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a €75k fine. Crucially, for the striker, Benzema will appeal, will not have to stop playing for Real Madrid and should be able to continue his France career.
The presiding judge said that although Benzema was not aware of all the blackmail’s details, he did take part in the scheme, using deceit to attempt to achieve the goal while being encouraged by the co-conspirators.
If Benzema had to wait, then Mathieu Valbuena did too. Valbuena is his former France team-mate and the man whose stolen sex tape lies at the heart of the whole sorry affair. Both players’ international careers were halted when news of the story first broke and while Benzema made a belated comeback earlier this year after more than five years in the wilderness, Valbuena’s days in a France shirt have gone forever.
The long-awaited trial at the Versailles judicial court allowed both men to finally put their sides of the story across, albeit in Benzema’s case, through the mouths of his two lawyers.
The tale that unfolded crisscrossed Europe — Marseille, Moscow, Paris, Athens, Madrid — and presented the world of football at its venal, murky worst. There was rage, defiance, recrimination and sadness — and by way of a sub-plot, the very public breakdown in the relationship between two players who had seemed destined to play international football together for years to come. For the gaggle of journalists and onlookers present inside the modern, pink-tiled courtroom, a stone’s throw from the glittering golden gates of the Palace of Versailles, it made for compelling — if occasionally discomfiting — viewing.
At the trial’s conclusion, lawyers for both Benzema and Valbuena welcomed the judge’s decision to give himself a full month to consider his verdicts. The case that has simultaneously cast them apart and bound them together may finally be over, but it took some time to get here.
The tangled roots of the affair stretch back to July 2014, when Valbuena asked Axel Angot, a computing expert who operated as a fixer for Marseille’s players, to recover some data from his phone. The procedure obliged Angot to transfer photographs and videos from Valbuena’s phone to his own personal computer and while browsing through the files, he stumbled across a video that showed Valbuena engaging in sexual acts with a female partner.
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Months later, in March 2015, Angot showed the video to his associate Mustapha Zouaoui, a petty criminal from Marseille known as “Sata” who specialised in sourcing luxury items for professional players and who investigators identified as the mastermind behind the attempted blackmail. Zouaoui and Angot were in debt to a former footballer called Nicolas Marin to the tune of €25,000 after contriving to lose a collection of luxury watches that they had pledged to sell on his behalf. Angot confessed during the trial that the two men saw the sex tape as a means of settling that debt, believing that with the 2016 European Championship — hosted by France — just around the corner, Valbuena would be desperate to make the matter go away as quickly as possible.
Zouaoui and Angot went first to Djibril Cisse, the former Liverpool and France striker, who had become acquainted with both of them during his spell at Marseille (and who was himself the victim of a blackmail attempt over a sex tape in 2008). Cisse warned Valbuena about the video in May 2015, but the midfielder did not react. Seeking another means of contacting Valbuena via a third party, Zouaoui turned to Younes Houass, another of the enterprising odd-job men who swarmed around Marseille’s La Commanderie training centre. On June 3, 2015, Houass anonymously called Valbuena, who was on France duty at the Clairefontaine national football centre south west of Paris, and allegedly threatened to release the footage that had been lifted from his phone. Five days later, Valbuena called the police.
The would-be blackmailers were soon contacted by a man calling himself “Lukas”, who presented himself as a friend of Valbuena’s but who was in fact an undercover police officer called Yann Bessette. All the while, the movements and phone conversations of the alleged conspirators were being closely monitored.
It was at this point that Zouaoui established contact with Benzema and Karim Zenati, a childhood friend of the star who has served time in prison for armed robbery and drug trafficking. In August 2015, Zouaoui met Benzema and Zenati over lunch in Madrid. In Zouaoui’s account, he brazenly ambushed the pair — who he did not know — in order to present Benzema with a Louis Vuitton cushion customised with the initials of his daughter, Melia, in the hope that it might open up future business opportunities with the player and his super-rich Real Madrid team-mates (his ultimate target being Cristiano Ronaldo). Shortly afterwards, Benzema posted a picture of himself with the cushion on his account.
According to prosecutors, the lunch in Madrid marked the moment when the footballer’s role in the blackmail plot was set in motion.
On October 6, 2015, with France preparing to play Armenia in a friendly match in Nice, Benzema invited Valbuena into his room at Clairefontaine and told him that he could introduce him to someone — Zenati — who would help him to resolve the matter. Valbuena was by now playing for Lyon, Benzema’s former club, having returned to France after a spell at Dynamo Moscow.
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“When I had that conversation, I came out of the room and I was shocked,” Valbuena told the trial. “I felt that he was being insistent that I should meet a friend of his who would act as an intermediary, a person he trusted. He was very insistent. We don’t live in the world of the Care Bears — I knew that if I met this person, it wasn’t just to hand over some match tickets (in exchange for the deletion of the video). In my view, he (Benzema) didn’t want to help me. He didn’t talk about money, but he was insistent. He was saying the situation was hot, that Euro 2016 was just around the corner…”
Shortly after 10 o’clock that evening, Benzema called Zenati to fill him in. Unbeknown to the pair, police investigators were taping the call. “I said to him, ‘If you want the video to be destroyed, my friend will come to see you in Lyon’,” Benzema said on the tape, which was played in court. “’No police, no lawyer. If you want the video to be destroyed, you see my friend. If you don’t, it’s your life’. I told him: ‘You know that Cisse had the same trouble. What did he do? He paid’.”
The tone of the call was light-hearted and Benzema seemed amused by his team-mate’s distress. “He went all white,” the striker said. Valbuena had asked him about the content of the video, whether it was possible to identify him from his tattoos. “You see everything,” Benzema had replied. There was also what prosecutors sought to portray as a warning from Benzema to Zenati. “I don’t think he’s taking us seriously.”
A week later, Zouaoui, Angot, Houass and Cisse were detained by police. Cisse was freed (Valbuena has publicly absolved him of blame), but the other three were indicted for “blackmail and participation in a criminal association” and remanded in custody. Zenati and Benzema were taken into custody in early November 2015. After being indicted over his alleged role in the affair, the Real Madrid star was freed under judicial supervision.
Days later, French radio station Europe 1 and sports newspaper L’Equipe published transcripts of the October 6 phone conversation between Benzema and Zenati. Its casual, sneering tone shocked the French public. Benzema was provisionally suspended by the French Football Federation and in April 2016, it was announced that FFF president Noel Le Graet and France coach Didier Deschamps had decided that he would not be selected for Euro 2016. Valbuena was left out as well.
All along, the alleged ringleaders of the plot — Zouaoui, Angot and Houass — fell back on the defence that at no point had they specified what they supposedly wanted in return for the deletion of the video. Their lawyers queried the role of “Lukas”, the undercover police officer, accusing him of single-handedly reviving the affair by instigating contact with the conspirators — specifically Houass — at a time when they were no longer actively pursuing the matter. For his part, Benzema claimed that all he had wanted to do was warn Valbuena about the existence of the video.
In July 2017, France’s Court of Cassation invalidated the Versailles Court of Appeal’s decision to approve the police enquiry, citing concerns over the conduct of “Lukas”. But in November 2018, that move was overturned by the Court of Appeal in Paris, paving the way for the case to finally come to court, albeit after further delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facing a charge of “complicity in attempted blackmail”, Benzema elected to skip the trial. According to his lawyers, it was for “professional reasons”, the court proceedings falling between two important Real Madrid games against Shakhtar Donetsk and Barcelona.
Valbuena’s lawyers gave Benzema’s excuses short shrift, accusing him of failing to show the court the respect it deserved. His absence allowed the other defendants, all aged in their 30s and 40s, to take centre stage; unfamiliar names that had popped up in press stories about the case over the last six years now made flesh between the pine-coloured benches of Courtroom C.
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Angot, the computer expert who first unearthed the video, arrived first to every session of the proceedings, sitting patiently as the court filled up around him. He spoke quickly and quietly with his arms tightly folded across his chest. Zouaoui, the alleged mastermind, he of the doctored Louis Vuitton merchandise, relished his moment in the spotlight. Stocky and confident, he bobbed about on the witness stand in tracksuit and white trainers, peppering his Marseille-accented speech with crude language and seedy anecdotes.
The thickset and bespectacled Houass, the middle man summarily picked up and then ditched by Angot and Zouaoui, perpetually tied himself in knots, his high-pitched voice betraying his exasperation. And then there was Zenati, the childhood friend with whom Benzema grew up in the Lyon suburb of Bron. Tall and trim, all in black, leaning forward over the cylindrical steel bar of the stand, he frequently challenged those quizzing him and had to be becalmed more than once by his lawyer, who warily paced around his client whenever Zenati spoke to the court as if worried he might suddenly fly off the handle.
They all blamed each other. Houass said he had been manipulated by Zouaoui and Angot and claimed to have acted purely out of concern for Valbuena. (“Stop trying to make us believe that you’re Mother Teresa,” chided Morgan, the presiding judge.) Rather than blackmail, Houass said Angot’s plan had been to sell the video to an English newspaper for €18,000. Zouaoui and Angot said their only intention had been to make it look like they were doing Valbuena a favour so that he might in some way reward them. Zenati branded Zouaoui a “parasite” and said he had only agreed to broach the subject of the sex tape with Benzema because he and Zouaoui had established a business partnership.
Benzema, his lawyers explained, was simply looking out for his team-mate and had been unfairly singled out in the case on account of his fame.
Prosecutors requested a four-year prison sentence and a €15,000 fine for Zouaoui, the alleged ringleader; an 18-month prison sentence and a €15,000 fine for Angot, his alleged accomplice; an 18-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine for Houass; a two-year prison sentence and a €5,000 fine for Zenati, reflecting the conditions of his previous convictions; and a 10-month suspended sentence and €75,000 fine for Benzema. (The judge can theoretically impose harsher sentences, but Benzema seems unlikely to go to prison.)
While Angot has admitted guilt, his four co-defendants all maintain their innocence.
Quite apart from its legal ramifications, the trial shone an unforgiving light onto the seamy world of the fixers, chancers and wannabe gangsters who lurk on the fringes of top-level football in France. In their taped conversations, the defendants referred to each other using nicknames worthy of a mafia film. Zouaoui and Angot were “Les Marseillais”, Houass “The Moroccan”.
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There was talk during the trial of sex tapes, sex parties, even an off-hand allegation of underage girls being trafficked for sex in Greece. The footballers dragged into the affair were portrayed as callous and self-serving, happy to pay whatever the price for whichever thing they wanted. Angot said that he had once been paid €3,500 just to deliver a USB cable to a player in Croatia. “I’ve seen players spend €50,000 in seconds right in front of me,” he said.
Innocent or guilty, it is an unedifying matter for Benzema to have become tangled up in. In January 2014, he and his former France team-mate Franck Ribery were acquitted of having had sex with an underage prostitute, Zahia Dehar, in what became known as L’affaire Zahia.
The verdicts of November 24 have now defined what kind of trace is left by L’affaire de la sextape.
Frozen out by France ever since news of the blackmail case first broke in 2015, Benzema made a dramatic return to the international scene in May when he was unexpectedly named in Deschamps’s 26-man squad for Euro 2020. He was one of the few France players to emerge with any credit from a disappointing tournament that concluded with a shock elimination on penalties by Switzerland in the last 16.
Although his hotly anticipated association with Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann failed to live up to expectations, Benzema finished as France’s top scorer at the tournament with four goals. “I can’t get back the lost time,” the 33-year-old told L’Equipe. “But I want to do with Les Bleus what I do with Real.”
He was an even more central figure at the UEFA Nations League finals earlier this month. France fell behind in both their semi-final against Belgium and the final against Spain but on both occasions, Benzema scored the goals that paved the way to victory. The team’s 2-1 triumph over Spain, his adopted homeland, in the final in Milan allowed him to taste success in his country’s colours for the first time since he, Hatem Ben Arfa, Samir Nasri and Jeremy Menez inspired France to victory at the Under-17 European Championship in 2004.
His successful return to international football has coincided with his most spectacular start to a season with Madrid, for whom he has scored 11 goals and provided eight assists in his first 11 appearances. Allied to his remarkable goalscoring record over the first three seasons of the post-Cristiano Ronaldo era (87 goals in 147 appearances), it has fuelled calls for him to be awarded the Ballon d’Or.
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Benzema was named on France Football’s 30-player shortlist for the award and has received assiduous public backing in recent weeks from Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti and Bernabeu greats Ronaldo (the Brazilian), Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane. With voting in the Ballon d’Or due to close on Sunday, time will tell whether or not the lurid details of the sex tape trial have scotched his chances of winning football’s ultimate individual prize for the first time.
While Benzema resumes the pursuit of his soaring late-career trajectory, Valbuena can perhaps begin to anticipate a horizon free of clouds. For the diminutive playmaker, nicknamed Le Petit Velo (“The Little Bicycle”), the long-awaited trial was clearly an ordeal.
Present for the first two days of proceedings, he sat alone in front of the lawyers representing him and was never more than 10 feet away from the four men he held responsible — along with the absent Benzema — for trying to ruin his life. At times, when called to react to elements of their testimonies by the presiding judge, he would find himself standing side by side with one of his alleged tormentors at the witness stand.
All the while, intimate details of his life were being spilled across the court in front of an audience that included his mother, Brigitte, and elder sister, Aurelie. The cocksure Zouaoui repeatedly mocked him, deriding his physical appearance and saying the video at the centre of the case had been widely circulated among the footballers in his social circle.
Zouaoui described Valbuena’s home as a “shagodrome”, where friends and associates openly had sex with a rotating cast of women. If he had wanted to film the player in a compromising situation, he said, he could have done so “20 times”. Benzema’s two lawyers, meanwhile, repeatedly turned their fire on him from the benches across the courtroom.
Why, Valbuena was asked, if he felt so threatened by his conversation with Benzema at Clairefontaine, had he not immediately reported it to the police officers with whom he was already in regular contact? “I wanted to protect myself, the France team and Karim Benzema,” Valbuena replied. “What mattered to me was making sure that that conversation never left the room.” At one point during the trial, Valbuena was reminded by one of Benzema’s lawyers that he had referred to his former team-mate as “a mate” during pre-trial testimony. Was that not evidence that Benzema had actually been looking out for him? “For me, when you do something like that, you’re not a mate,” Valbuena replied bitterly.
The cruel irony of the affair, for Valbuena, was that the one thing he desperately wanted to avoid — losing his place in the France squad ahead of Euro 2016 — was exactly what came to pass. Having succeeded in establishing himself as a first-team regular under Deschamps, Valbuena has not played for his country since a 12-minute run-out in a 2-1 friendly win against Denmark in Copenhagen in October 2015, five days after his fateful tete-a-tete with Benzema at Clairefontaine. In his absence, his former team-mates reached the final at Euro 2016 before going on to win the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Whereas Benzema has been allowed to resurrect his international career, at 37 Valbuena will never get an opportunity to add to his 52 caps.
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He remains nonetheless a key player for Olympiakos, where he has played to great acclaim since arriving from Fenerbahce in 2019, winning back-to-back Greek Super League titles. He enjoys life in Athens, has a good relationship with the Olympiakos fans and says that the club has allowed him to live “a second youth”. Six years on from the beginning of the sex tape affair, he has had his day in court. And for all that those six years may have taken from him, he will soon, finally, be able to turn the page.
(Top photo: Xavier Laine/Getty Images)