Immediately after the kiss that cost him his job, Luis Rubiales called his critics “idiots and stupid people”.
On Tuesday the former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation told a judge that he was “totally sure” that the striker Jenni Hermoso consented to a kiss on her mouth, an act for which he is on trial facing two and a half years in prison.
Prosecutors are seeking a year for alleged sexual assault and 18 months for allegedly coercing the footballer to play down the incident, which overshadowed Spain’s triumph over England at the Women’s World Cup final in Sydney in August 2023.
Rubiales, 47, told the court in Madrid that during the medal ceremony: “She squeezed me very tightly under my armpits, she lifted me, and when I came down I asked her if I can give you a kiss, and she said ‘OK’, that’s what happened.”
Admitting he made an error of judgment on the podium and that his behaviour was “not appropriate”, Rubiales said: “I screwed up. I should have had a more institutional role.”
Just before the kiss Rubiales, standing next to Queen Letizia of Spain, grabbed his crotch in an exuberant display of celebration.
But he insisted that the kiss was consensual and that he has kissed male footballers in similar moments to celebrate “situations of extraordinary joy”.
Rubiales told the prosecuting lawyer: “I’ve kissed a lot of footballers. If one of them had missed a penalty and we had won a World Cup, then it would have been a possibility.”Hermoso had failed to score from the penalty spot during the final.
He said that, when he played for the Spanish club Levante he kissed a team-mate after beating Real Madrid at the Bernabéu stadium, which he called “a beastly feat”.
His own lawyer asked him: “Did you take advantage of that moment of euphoria to satisfy a sexual desire?” He replied: “For God’s sake … Never.”
A lip-reading expert who preceded Rubiales in court said that “without a margin of doubt” Rubiales had asked Hermoso “Can I give you a kiss?”, based upon video he analysed in which the star striker’s face could not be seen.
In his evidence to the court, Rubiales insisted that “Mrs Hermoso knows that she told me ‘OK’,” in reply to his request for a kiss. “She left laughing [after the kiss] and patting me several times on the side,” he added.
“The question and the answer were simultaneous,” he said. “And then came the kiss. When we finished giving each other the hug, my hands stayed on her shoulders.” Asked by the prosecutor why he grabbed Hermoso by the head, he said: “It was something spontaneous.”
“Do you usually greet her by kissing her on the lips?” Marta Durántez, for the prosecution, asked. He said: “You don’t win a World Cup every day. Normality cannot be applied to a totally extraordinary event.”
Last week Hermoso, 34, told the opening day of the trial that she felt “disrespected” after a non-consensual kiss that “should not happen in any social or work setting”.
Rubiales defied calls for his resignation at an emergency federation meeting in August 2023, railing against “false feminism”. But the following month he was forced to stand down after Fifa suspended him and prosecutors opened an investigation into alleged sexual assault.
The case has divided opinion in Spain. “This affair has nothing to do with the kiss on the lips of the player by her boss, but with the public emergence of a macho arrogance that is at the heart of male power in Spanish football,” Jordi Gracia wrote in the left-leaning El Pais.
Fernando Palmero, writing in the centre-right El Mundo, said: “The entire judicial machinery of the country and hundreds of national and foreign media dedicated to finding out whether a kiss was stolen or not … we are facing the symptom of how Spanish institutions have been intoxicated with the pernicious gender ideology introduced by the progressive coalition government.”
