Welcome to The Athletic Mini, a short format you will see in the coming weeks on some of our soccer coverage.
On November 4 2021, on the way home from a Paris Saint-Germain team dinner, Kheira Hamraoui and Aminata Diallo were stopped by two masked men. One hit Hamraoui with an iron bar, targeting her legs, and the other held Diallo to the steering wheel.
Ten months on, Diallo and five men were arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated assault and criminal conspiracy. According to a police report, Diallo instigated the attack on Hamraoui, her motive being “violent jealousy”. Diallo, now playing for Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia (employers of Cristiano Ronaldo), has always maintained she is innocent.
The Athletic’s Charlotte Harpur has spoken to those close to PSG, the players’ lawyers and the public prosecutor to unpick the tangled web of what has happened to the former PSG team-mates in the last two years.
Hamraoui, who joined Club America in Mexico in September, has written a book and is filming a documentary and it’s little surprise: this extraordinary web of claim and counter-claim has had ramifications far beyond PSG’s women’s team.
Have a read of Charlotte’s report but, if you don’t have time, here are the key things you should know:
- A leaked…
