Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
FRANCE ACE GUILTY OF SEX TAPE EXTORTION
£10m-a-year Madrid star helped four friends blackmail footballer
He will be in court for the appeal to explain himself
REAL Madrid star Karim Benzema has been found guilty of conspiring to blackmail a fellow French footballer with a sex tape.
The £10million-a-year striker was given a one-year suspended term for helping four others attempt to extort Mathieu Valbuena.
Benzema, 33, was also fined £63,000.
He is to appeal the judgment.
At a French training camp in 2015, he put pressure on Valbuena, 37, to pay off the blackmailers.
Lawyers said Benzema had conspired to act as an intermediary.
He stayed away from Versailles Criminal Court yesterday ahead of Real Madrid’s Champions League game against Sheriff Tiraspol last night.
But his lawyer Antoine Vey said: “He will be in court for the appeal to explain himself.”
The four co-accused, Younes Houass, Moustapha Zouaoui, Axel Angot and Karim Zenati, were also found guilty of attempted blackmail following a trial last month. They received jail terms ranging from 18 months suspended to two and a half years in prison.
All were said to have threatened to publish a video in the English media of plot victim Valbuena having “intimate relations” with a partner. Valbuena, who plays for Olympiacos, was not in court either. He was today preparing for a Europa League match against Fenerbahce. Benzema called the charges “absurd”. He and Valbuena were dropped by France before their 2018 World Cup win.
The Madrid player was finally reinstalled in Les Bleus’ first team this season. The court heard Valbuena contacted police in June 2015 after being called by an unknown person about the sex tape, which had been taken from his phone. Officers posed as pals of the victim to lure the blackmailers into a trap.