2023-08-29 13:19:20
Selima Sfar, the first woman in the history of Tunisian tennis to have entered the top 100 of the WTA, gave a poignant testimony Monday in the daily L’Équipe: she affirms that the French coach Régis de Camaret repeatedly raped as a teenager. The Frenchman has already been convicted in the past for similar facts.
Published on: 08/29/2023 – 15:19
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“Today, at 46, I can speak because I have worked on myself a lot and been helped. The shame is gone.” Selima Sfar, the former Tunisian tennis star, gave a long interview to the sports daily L’Équipe in which she reveals that she was raped from the age of 12 and a half by her trainer Regis de Camaret, sentenced in 2014 to ten years in prison for rape.
“When I was 12 and a half, I was abused by Régis de Camaret”, for “almost three years”, she testifies.
“It took me 25 years to admit it to myself”
On the way back from Bordeaux airport, coming from Tunis, “it was one o’clock in the morning, he stopped on the roadside and he started touching me”, says Selima Sfar. “At that moment, I didn’t even know what was going on, I didn’t understand at all.”
“I was paralyzed, I mightn’t move. I guess it was a way to see if I was going to react or not. I was in shock, like plugging a 220 volt computer into 550. You are paralyzed,” she says.
“We continued on the road and we arrived at his house, late. Upstairs, there was his daughter and his room, I was sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs. I went to bed and an hour or two later , I woke up while he was touching me. Then it went from touching to rape, very quickly,” she explains.
She didn’t tell anyone regarding it for years, went to England and finally “decided not to have a coach anymore”.
“It took me 25 years to admit it to myself, 35 years to say it publicly. Respect to Isabelle Demongeot and all the women who spoke. I understand that we don’t speak, we have to do it when we do. feels,” she added.
Selima Sfar, whose career spans from 1993 to 2008, spoke for the first time regarding her trauma to her psychologist, and recounts having “lyed on the sofa and having remained 48 hours in the dark crying”.
Régis de Camaret already sentenced
Regis de Camaret was sentenced for aggravated rapes of two former underage students. Twenty-six other former players, including the former number 2 of French tennis Isabelle Demongeot, had testified to sexual assault and rape, prescribed facts.
At the time of the trials, Selima Sfar claims to have “fallen into a real depression”.
“My parents and relatives used to tell me: ‘Fortunately, you are strong, you wouldn’t have let that happen.’ You have no idea the pain it caused me every time I heard that, the shame I felt. It indirectly confirmed to me that I was cowardly and weak. I lived through that throughout the trial. Hell. I had dark thoughts,” said the former player, now 46.
Sportingly, she reached the world top 100 of the WTA, the professional circuit, in 2001, but “every time I was regarding to win a big victory, I paralyzed myself”, she explains.
Régis de Camaret or his entourage might not be reached either by L’Équipe or by AFP.
With AFP
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