Former Celta Vigo captain Hugo Mallo has been sentenced to pay a fine of 6,000 euros for a crime of sexual abuse. On April 24, 2019, when he came onto the Espanyol pitch to play a league match, the footballer touched the breasts of a woman who was dressed as a parakeet, the mascot that is the symbol of the blue and white club. The sentence proves the touching and concludes that Mallo did it to “satisfy his lustful mood” and to “undermine the sexual integrity” of the woman, who was on the pitch with another teammate, who was also acting as a mascot, to greet and greet the players. When he reached the woman, Mallo “put his hands under the costume and touched her breasts,” according to the sentence, whose ruling has been announced Ace.
At the trial, Mallo – currently at Aris Thessaloniki – denied the facts and claimed that he merely shook the mascot’s hand. He added that he and his teammates were “very focused” because they were playing for “relegation” and that he did not even know that there was a woman under the parakeet costume. The judge considers his testimony to be, in general, firm, although he notes a “serious contradiction”: in one of the videos provided by the private prosecution, it can be seen with “sufficient clarity” how the player put his hand on the area of the “upper waist of the female mascot”. Despite saying that he had only shaken her hand, Mallo acknowledged that the hand was his.
The images, however, were not the basis of the conviction because none of them – neither those provided by the victim, nor the official ones from Mediapro and LaLiga – “determine whether there was touching,” admits the judge of the 19th criminal court of Barcelona, Salvador Roig, who bases the conviction on another indication: the testimony of the woman. Her statement was “firm, vehement and calm” and she described “something she experienced, something she suffered in her body,” the sentence states.
The woman explained that she had been working as the club’s mascot for years. She did it as hobby. That day, she noticed how the hands of one of the players (who she could not distinguish at that moment because of the costume) went to rest directly on her breasts. “What a bastard,” she thought, as she revealed in her statement. She added that everything happened very quickly. She was “stunned,” she stood back and stopped greeting other players. In the afternoon, she reported the events to her sister, who works at Espanyol, and then filed a complaint. The judge considers that the victim has no intention of harming Mallo (they did not know each other) and that she is not seeking any media benefit, since, furthermore, he is not a “media footballer.”
The prosecution and the private prosecution had requested the maximum sentence for this type of crime: 24 months of fine. The judge, however, considers that the abuse was “fleeting” and leaves the sentence at 20 months of fine. He also obliges the player to pay compensation of 1,000 euros to the woman for the moral damages caused. The sentence can be appealed before the Barcelona Court.
