Solskjaer ‘not fit to lead United’
Woman at centre of rape case in Norway hits out at manager’s handling of scandal involving one of his ex-players
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is unfit to manage Manchester United, the woman sitting opposite angrily proclaims. She is not referring to their results under Solskjaer, the type of football they have played, or even the quality of his January signings. She has no interest in those. In fact, she has no interest in the game at all.
No, the woman opposite says she was raped by one of his players, a player who has been accused of another three rapes and who is now a fugitive from justice – after Solskjaer had controversially continued playing him. But even that barely scratches the surface of an extraordinary saga that has already tarnished Solskjaer’s reputation in his homeland and is now threatening to do so globally.
The woman sitting opposite has agreed to meet at the offices of John Christian Elden, one of Norway’s most famous lawyers.
This is her first interview with United Kingdom media and English is not her native language. She is also recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder and tells me that she spent most of last summer in a trauma centre.
But she somehow still manages to exude clarity and a remarkable composure given all that has befallen her, only occasionally betraying her anger towards those she holds responsible for the trauma – including Solskjaer.
“I don’t think he has the values to manage a huge football club – or people at all,” she says. “You have to have good values to raise good players. These are people that are stars. They can do whatever. So, when you have that kind of person to look up to, I think you’re kind of f---ed.”
It is more than 2½ years since her world caved in, when she says she awoke one morning in May 2017 to find a man looming over her after an alcoholfuelled night of partying. That man was Molde midfielder Babacar Sarr. And Solskjaer was his manager.
When the police began to investigate, Solskjaer told local newspaper Romsdals Budstikke he saw “no reason” not to select one of his key players – one with whom he also shared an agent – because Sarr had been neither charged with an offence nor convicted.
It was not the first time the player had been accused of raping a sleeping woman. Solskjaer had signed him in 2016 only months after police investigated a complaint against him during former club Sogdnal’s end-ofseason trip to Stockholm.
No charges were brought in that case but, in March 2018, they were for the second complaint and a trial was ordered. Three months later, a third woman came forward claiming she had given birth to a child conceived when Sarr raped her while she slept in 2014.
The saga quickly became a major scandal in Norwegian football, with Molde confronted with “No Means No” banners and anti-rape chants at their matches for the rest of that season.
When Solskjaer was challenged, three days before Sarr’s August 2018 trial, over his decision to pick the player – who had captained the side on one occasion – he told online newspaper Nettavisen: “The club decides who is signed, who is eligible, so I take a team out of it. We’ll see when the case is over, but we’ve chosen to trust the player and make the choice we’ve made.”
Molde is a small town, to which Solskjaer – a national icon because of his exploits for United as a player – brought unprecedented footballing success during his first spell there from 2011 to 2014. Sarr’s accuser says she had already been made to feel like a liar in a town where “everybody knows everybody”. She adds of Solskjaer’s intervention: “When someone says that, if you’re Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or you’re the police or you’re whatever, it’s going to do something with the minds of people.”
Amid criticism of his comments and their potential impact on the trial, Solskjaer quickly sought to clarify he had not intended to imply Sarr’s innocence but to express “trust” in his ability to perform while indicted.
Sarr’s accuser says her father – himself a long-time Molde season ticket-holder – had also pleaded with the club to rule the midfield player ineligible for selection, even before he was formally charged.
She is more pragmatic, but says Solskjaer was wrong to pick him after that charge came. And even more so after the outcome of the trial, during which she cried when asked about Sarr captaining the
‘The club decides who is eligible and I take a team out of it’
side. At that trial, the prosecution was ruled not to have proved beyond reasonable doubt that Sarr had committed the crime of rape.
The case split the three judges presiding over it, with the professional judge disagreeing with the verdict of his two lay colleagues. In what was a joint criminal and civil trial, the same trio nevertheless ordered Sarr to pay his accuser compensation of 150,000 Norwegian kroner (around £12,500) after ruling in her favour on the balance of probabilities.
This outcome – which led to appeals from both sides – did not stop Solskjaer continuing to pick Sarr until the end of that season when, during a night out in Oslo after their final match in November, he allegedly raped another woman twice.
As with the other three rape accusations against him, the 28-year-old denied any wrongdoing.
The following month, Molde allowed Manchester United to appoint Solskjaer as their caretaker manager until the end of the Premier League club’s season – meaning he would miss the start of their own.
A month later, the club
announced the termination of Sarr’s contract by mutual consent, thanking him for his contribution “through a difficult time for the player as well as the club”.
His accuser says the club’s decision to highlight his suffering – which they had also done during the trial – merely compounded Solskjaer’s previous comments.
Releasing him also had the unfortunate effect of allowing Sarr to join a club outside of Norway ahead of the appeal hearing the following month. His accuser says she warned prosecutors of this risk, only to see him unveiled by a club in Russia – somewhere without an extradition treaty with Norway – the week before he was due to appear in court.
The appeal was postponed after a key prosecution witness, a former Molde team-mate of Sarr, chose to play a friendly match for his Danish club instead of attending the hearing.
Sarr then failed to show up for the rearranged hearing in June, a day after a club in Saudi Arabia – another country that has no extradition treaty with Norway – announced his signing.
An international arrest warrant was issued for him and he remains there as a fugitive, despite his contract having been terminated last month. Sarr’s moves to both Russia and Saudi Arabia were widely assumed to have been engineered by Jim Solbakken, Solskjaer’s long-time agent. In June, Solbakken was reported to have denied having represented Sarr since the player was at Molde.
However, the website Josimar published what purported to be leaked messages between the pair indicating otherwise. Solbakken did not respond to a request for comment by The Daily Telegraph.
In Sarr’s absence, a third appeal hearing has been postponed – this time until he returns to Norway – while his own challenge of the compensation award against him has been thrown out.
He has also been proven to have fathered the child allegedly conceived by rape in 2014.
The accuser in that case, too, is represented by Elden, who has succeeded in getting it reexamined after it had previously been closed, while Nettavisen reported last week that Sarr had been charged over the alleged
November 2018 rape. Court documents seen by The Telegraph indicate he is facing such a charge. But he cannot be prosecuted unless he returns to Norway, and the woman sitting opposite makes it clear she does not have too much hope that will ever happen.
She is almost 29 now and is trying to rebuild her life, having moved to Oslo in September. She says her ordeal has opened her eyes to how football – and other industries awash with cash – deals with those charged with serious crimes.
She says: “If I was a taxi driver and if there was a suspicion that I raped somebody, I would never go to work.
“It would be like, ‘OK, you have to wait until this is over.’ ”
She says she “would never live in Molde again” and that she could not walk around the town “without getting an anxiety attack”.
In addition, she could never countenance going to see Solskjaer’s team play. “When my friends want to watch Manchester United, I say, ‘No.’ ”
Responding to her criticisms of Solskjaer, a United spokesman said: “As manager of Molde at the time, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer fully respected the due process of the Norwegian legal system, which is still ongoing.”
Asked by the Telegraph at a press conference yesterday for his response to the criticism of him by Sarr’s accuser and others, Solskjaer echoed United’s statement, before adding: “You don’t want anyone to be in such a situation and every party involved in that case is... they don’t have a good time.”
Pressed on whether he had any regrets over his own handling of the matter, the manager replied: “No more questions.”
Sarr’s lawyer, Mette Yvonne Larsen, said: “Until this day, he has never been convicted of any crime. Under Norwegian law, one cannot terminate a person from a work contract until they are convicted. Mr Sarr and Molde terminated his contract after an agreement in January 2019.
“After that, Mr Sarr went to Russia to play football, and this happened in full transparency with the prosecutor.”
‘These are people that are stars. They can do whatever’