A few days before the publication of his book, the former French international comes out of silence on the abuses he suffered.
“I’m not ashamed to say that I felt like a coward.” For years, Patrice Évra refused to talk about what he had suffered. Ahead of the UK release of his autobiography I Love This Game (release in France scheduled for early January 2022), the retired footballer gave a daily interview The Times. He looks back on the abuse he suffered at the age of 13, a subject he tackles for the first time in his book. While he still lives in Les Ulis en Essonne, he is accommodated three nights a week by the director of the establishment where he is educated. And this “Professor, who embodied an authority figure supposed to protect those in his charge, used his power to force his way into Évra’s room” British media journalist Alyson Rudd explains. He suffered several sexual assaults and rape.
In his book, the former Manchester United player looks back on this defining period of his adolescence. An important story but difficult to deliver. “He hadn’t planned on revealing so much when he started writing”, says Alyson Rudd. Before his book project, he hadn’t told his mother. Two weeks before his interview with the British daily, he told her what had happened.
Silenced by “Toxic masculinity”
When he was 24, the police contacted him as part of an investigation into the teacher who had assaulted him. At this time, the Monaco player is still in denial, and does not speak. But by not speaking, Patrice Évra feels guilty and feels cowardly, “I couldn’t express myself. It was something that oppressed me ”, he explains. A silence that he also explains by the pressure of “Toxic masculinity”, in a world where men do not have to show their weaknesses.
Faced with what he has gone through, the footballer feels ashamed. And it is for this reason that in the first version of his book, he does not tell “all the story”. When he revealed it to his mother, she answers him: “You don’t have to put it in your book, it’s private Patrice.” But the former defender of the France team does not back down: “I don’t do it for myself, I do it for the other kids.”
Article written in collaboration with 6medias