French sex tape blackmail

Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema has gone on trial in France accused of complicity in an attempt to blackmail fellow footballer Mathieu Valbuena over a sex tape found on his phone.

Karim Benzema has ridiculed the charge against him as a “masquerade” and did not appear at the court in Versailles.

According to the BBC, the case dates back to June 2015, when the two footballers were at a France training camp.

The saga rocked French football and both players lost their team places. Karim Benzema, 33, has since returned to the France team and scored in Real Madrid’s victory in Kyiv on Tuesday in the Uefa Champions League. His lawyer put his absence down to “professional” reasons.

He is on trial with four other men accused of trying to blackmail Valbuena, who told the court on Wednesday that football was his life.

The sextape case began in 2015 when Mr Valbuena, now 37, asked a man in Marseille, Axel Angot, to upload the contents of his mobile phone to a new device.

Angot found sexually explicit material on the phone, and he and another defendant in the trial, Mustapha Zouaoui, are then accused of trying to blackmail Valbuena by threatening to make the tape public.

Zouaoui told reporters he had shared the tape, but there had never been an attempt to extort money.

Mathieu Valbuena described being approached by another defendant, Younes Houass, who then told the court the player was acting as if nothing was wrong and he had warned him of the seriousness of the issue, without asking for money.

When the footballer went to the police, they set up a sting operation with an undercover agent named Luka, who was given the task of acting as his intermediary.

Another defendant was allegedly brought into the scam – Karim Zenati, who is a childhood friend of Benzema. He is then accused of getting the footballer involved, to act as a “middleman” with Valbuena.

In October 2015, Benzema approached his fellow France player in his room at the national team’s training camp.

Giving evidence at the start of the trial, Mathieu Valbuena said he had never considered handing over money to stop the video getting out.

The defence lawyers have already argued that police were wrong to use an undercover agent and that the agent pushed the defendants to demand money. But French courts overruled the lawyers’ objections to police methods in 2018.

The trial will continue until the end of the week, with four defendants facing charges of attempted blackmail and Karim Benzema accused of complicity.

French sex tape blackmail

The maximum sentence for complicity in attempted blackmail is five years in jail and a €75,000 (£63,000) fine.

Unlike his former team-mate, Mathieu Valbuena has never played for France since the sextape affair emerged. He now plays for Olympiacos in Greece.