The mystery that ended two Women’s World Cup dreams

VALENCIA – Aminata Diallo was being escorted from her foul-smelling holding cell to an interview room inside the police station in Versailles, France, when she heard the name Tonya Harding the first time.

Harding’s name is infamous in sport, of course. A decorated American figure skater, she was a central figure in the notorious case involving the assault of her biggest rival only weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics. The scandal – a sudden and violent attack by a mystery man, accusations and denials, tabloid headlines – led to worldwide attention and, years later, a feature-length movie about Harding. But to Diallo, a French footballer being led up a police station stairwell, the mention of her name – “Have you heard of Tonya Harding?” – produced only a blank stare.

Diallo would quickly learn, however, that police had reason to ask.

Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, had been attacked by a man who beat her on the legs in an attempt to keep her from competing.

Now, in France, a generation later, police suspected a similar motive in an attack on Kheira Hamraoui, Diallo’s teammate, at the French club Paris Saint-Germain. Hamraoui had been dragged out of Diallo’s car on a cold November night in 2021 and, like Kerrigan, beaten on her legs in a clear attempt to injure her.

It would take almost a year, and another spell in detention for Diallo, before the police officer’s offhand question became a formal accusation. Prosecutors in September charged Diallo with aggravated assault in the attack on Hamraoui.

Documents in the case and leaks to the French news media have accused Diallo of masterminding a premeditated attack. The goal, that theory goes, was to eliminate a rival of Diallo’s for a spot in the line-up at PSG, one of the best teams in women’s football, and in the French national team, who will be among the favourites at the Women’s World Cup, which begins on July 20.

“Lots of people would like it to be me, but that’s not the reality,” Diallo said in an interview in Spain, where she has been trying to resurrect her career. “Tonya Harding, she did it. I didn’t.”

It is no surprise that the case – with its parallels to a decades-old scandal, its themes of race and professional rivalry, and its unlikely cast of elite women’s athletes and shadowy characters – continues to draw interest, or that it has spawned competing documentary projects.

Diallo’s guilt or innocence is no clearer today than it was that morning in the police station in Versailles. A trial date is yet to be announced. But the consequences continue to ripple outwards.

Friendships have ended, as has at least one marriage. Two locker rooms were divided. Diallo was exiled from Paris. Hamraoui, too, became an exile in her own way, ostracised by some of her teammates and eventually forced out of her club.

The police’s case apparently rests on text messages sent by Diallo, some suspicious web searches and a claim by at least one of the men charged in the assault that he had been acting on behalf of Diallo, even though he admitted the order had not come directly from her.

Diallo and her legal team insist the charges are the actions of a desperate police force looking to secure convictions in a high-profile case, a case built on flimsy connections and untrustworthy sources.

Diallo said she views the documentary offers as a sort of compensation for everything that she has lost, such as the privacy and anonymity she once enjoyed as a stalwart, if unspectacular, football professional, but, more materially, for the new contract with PSG that she insists was all but certain before the attack changed the direction of her career and life.

“I think for them, it’s interesting whether I am guilty or not,” Diallo said of the filmmakers who have approached her.

The charges she faces – three counts of aggravated assault and criminal assault – came after her second stay in custody and were accompanied by an order not to enter Paris or engage with her former teammates at PSG. That was how she found herself in Spain this past spring, nibbling patatas bravas and garlic shrimp at a beachside restaurant in Valencia, her career saved only by a short-term deal to play for Levante, which has now ended.

Hamraoui has left PSG too. She was released at the end of the season after not being offered a new deal. Her departure was not a quiet one. On her way out, she accused the club of ostracising her by treating her differently from her teammates, of victimising her again.

“In addition to the trauma I suffered that night, I would face this indifference, this cruelty, not to say a form of abuse towards me,” Hamraoui wrote in a book published recently that has been serialised in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.

“The squad no longer speak to me, and PSG have only one objective – that I leave as quickly as possible,” Hamraoui wrote in a book published recently that has been serialised in the French sports newspaper L’Equipe. “They treat me like a plague victim.”

In Spain, Diallo’s life became a stripped-down version of what went before. Apart from training sessions, she spent most of her time alone at a rented apartment. (Qatar-owned PSG had provided a home and a car, the one involved in the attack.) She was not a standout for her new team and was often deployed as a substitute, a role she was grateful for and accepted.

Details of their case, paint Diallo as the driving force of the attack on Hamraoui. The men who have been charged with the assault are said to have told police that they believed they were acting on behalf of Diallo, who was driving the car when it was stopped and when Hamraoui was yanked out and beaten on her legs with an iron bar.

Text messages from Diallo disparaging Hamraoui were discovered after the police seized her cellphone and computer, as were online searches for phrases such as “breaking a kneecap” and “deadly cocktail of drugs”.

In a Paris interview in November, shortly after she was formally charged, Diallo offered explanations. Police had ignored all the positive comments about Hamraoui she had made to friends and associates, she said. The online searches were not unusual, she contended, for an athlete concerned with injuries and health.

But she also contends that her race and background – she is a black woman from a working-class neighbourhood in Grenoble – had led the police to jump to conclusions not only about her but also about others.

Among her protestations of innocence, Diallo pointed to messages sent by her former agent, Sonia Souid, who also represents Hamraoui. Diallo argued that those messages undermine police’s belief that she orchestrated the attack out of professional jealousy.

In one, a voice message sent about two weeks before the attack and played for a New York Times reporter, Souid told Diallo that she had met with PSG’s sporting director. The club were pleased with Diallo’s performances, Souid reported, and were eager to make an offer to extend her contract, which was about to expire, for two seasons.

Souid, who is one of the most influential agents in women’s football in France, said in an interview that although negotiations had not started, the club had made their intentions clear.

But weeks after the November 2021 attack, Souid’s relationship with Diallo ended in a tearful meeting. The player informed the agent that she could no longer be represented by her because of her ties to Hamraoui. In March 2022, Souid said she met with police investigators. She declined to reveal what she was asked but said the meeting had left her shaken.

“The questions they asked me made me think something very wrong has happened,” Souid said.

As the investigation continues, and as Diallo and Hamraoui – now both out of contract – await the next developments, the football world rumbles on towards what will be the biggest event in women’s football in 2023, the Women’s World Cup.

Diallo, 28, will not be there. She had been a fringe player in France’s national team at the time of the attack, and the notoriety of her case and her long layoff – not to mention the court orders to stay away from her former PSG teammates – effectively ended her international career.

Hamraoui, who appeared for France as recently as February, had held out hope of playing her way into the French team headed to Australia and New Zealand, even though her presence in the squad would not be universally welcomed by some, including a group of PSG players close to Diallo and still furious at her early insinuations that other players from the club might have been involved in her assault.

Souid, Hamraoui’s agent, had harbored similar optimism. “The Americans are several times World Cup champions, and all the players don’t like each other,” she said this past spring.

But when

France’s new coach, Herve Renard,

announced his preliminary squad for the tournament, the 33-year-old Hamraoui’s name was not in it.

For now, both players wait for clarity on who bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on that dark night in the narrow street, for the end of their association with the case and with Harding. Until then, Hamraoui will continue to pursue her football career. And Diallo will continue to defend her name.

“I’m not hiding,” Diallo said before departing for another evening in her silent apartment, alone with her thoughts and her furies. NYTIMES