Patrice Evra: ‘I don’t want kids to live the way I lived for so many years’
For decades, Patrice Evra could not cry. When he watched sad films, the former Manchester United and France captain would not feel much. When friends and relatives died, his eyes were dry. If something amazing happened, such as winning the Champions League, he would be outwardly grinning, but inside, he was numb. “I was a robot,” he says.
When others showed emotion, he wasn’t sympathetic. One day, while playing for Juventus in about 2015, he recalls seeing a teammate well up.
“I walked past him and was like: ‘What’s happened?’ It wasn’t like he’d received bad news about someone dying,” Evra says. “I said, ‘Why are you crying?’ and he said: ‘I’ve watched this movie four times and every time I watch it I cry.’ I was like: ‘Wow.’”
Evra told a teammate, who announced it to the rest of the players. “Everyone laughed. I regretted that,” he says.
Since then, the 41-year-old has grown up – and let himself break down. Last year he spoke publicly for the first time about being sexually abused as a child.
Evra was 13 and living at his headteacher’s house because his own home was too far from his new school. The teacher would force his way into his bedroom at night and, believing he had gone to sleep, try to touch him under the covers. “I knew what he was doing was wrong, so I tried to push him away and punch him,” Evra wrote in his autobiography, I Love This Game, published in October. “There were no words spoken in the dark, but he was touching himself and getting sexually excited by what was happening … On the last night at that man’s house, when he knew that I was going back to my family, he finally succeeded. He put my penis in his mouth.” He added: “I didn’t tell anybody. I was too ashamed to speak to my mother and I didn’t know if anyone else would believe me.”
This week the footballer will speak at the #ENDviolence conference, a UNsponsored event aimed at ensuring children around the world are better protected against abuse.
Alongside speakers including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the actor Ashton Kutcher, Evra will talk publicly about his experiences and call for action from global leaders.
Speaking via Zoom from a hotel room before the conference on Tuesday, he is thoughtful and candid. He wants to speak about abuse because it matters to him. He wants governments around the world to legislate to ensure children are better protected. “We need to reach the top people,” he says. “It’s easy to do a campaign but we need to have laws.”
Consulting notes he has prepared in advance, he adds: “I was so in shock to see that banning smacking in England … we didn’t do that yet. But in Wales they did it, in Scotland they did it. All around the world kids deserve to be protected. So that for me is my purpose in life. I want to do it. I want to change things.”
For Evra, born in Senegal and raised in France, the journey from football “robot” to speaking openly about his private traumas has been bumpy.
In the last few years he has got engaged and welcomed a child, Lilas, now aged one. His partner, the Danish model Margaux Alexandra, whom he describes as “the woman of my life”, has helped him to open up by making him feel “safe”, he says.
But he isn’t sure he would have been so vulnerable had he still been in the football world. Among teammates, speaking about emotion and tough times was not a sign of strength. “It’s that toxic masculinity,” Evra says. “People are not open-minded. And as soon as you show you’re a human being, that’s when they’re like: ‘Oh, we can’t go to war with this guy.’”
Before going public about his abuse, Evra was nervous that people’s perception of him would shift. He also felt guilty. Years earlier, aged 24, he received a call from police asking whether he had been abused by the headteacher, but, fearing the consequences, he did not want to admit that he had.
“Some kids had complained about this man and the police wanted to know if he’d ever tried to do something to me,” he wrote in his book. “Because I was famous and worried about the reaction, I lied and said no. They asked me if I was sure and I assured them I