Soccer Star Jennifer Hermoso Didn't Like Some Creep Kissing Her Without Consent. Here's What She's Doing About It.
No, Woody Allen, nobody wants to hear it.
Spanish soccer star Jennifer Hermoso had just helped her team La Roja win its first Women’s World Cup title last month in Sydney when Royal Spanish Football Federation President Luis Rubiales forcibly kissed her.
Rubiales, 46, claimed the kiss was “mutual, euphoric and consensual.” Usually, when “consensual” is listed last, that means it wasn’t, and Hermoso, 33, has made it clear that she didn’t approve of Rubiales slobbering all over her. She said afterward in a video, “I didn’t like it, but what can I do?” Those words should haunt anyone with a human soul.
The International Federation of Association Football suspended Rubiales for an initial period of 90 days, pending an investigation, and Hermoso and her 22 teammates have said they won’t play for the national team until Rubiales resigns.
Although the Spanish Court of Arbitration in Sport (TAD) agreed to open a case against Rubiales last week, it rejected the government’s argument that his offenses were “very serious.” What is serious, though, is the official complaint Hermoso filed Wednesday against Rubiales over the unwanted kiss, which the non-creep demographic considers sexual assault.
“Yesterday, Ms. Jennifer Hermoso submitted a complaint for the events of which you are all aware,” a spokesperson for the Spanish prosecutor’s office told CNN. “The national court’s prosecutor’s office will file a complaint as soon as possible,” the spokesman said. The statement was made at the office of the state attorney general to protect the privacy of the victim, the spokesperson added.
Rubiales stole Hermoso’s big moment and made it all about him. A better person might’ve apologized without qualification, but Rubiales kept climbing Asshole Mountain, from where he gave a pouty speech last month about the “unjust” campaign against him. He resisted calls to resign, instead vowing he’d “fight to the end.” He also grossly suggested that the backlash he’d received was all “social assassination” and even “fake feminism,” because he apparently thinks “real feminism” supports the public molestation of women.
Woody Allen, another feminist icon, also weighed in on the situation. We don’t know why, either. A simple “no comment” would’ve sufficed. Or an honest “Look, I exist in a hermetically sealed bubble and have no idea how normal humans live, as you can tell from my last 30 films.”
“The kiss on the soccer player was wrong, but it did not burn down a school,” Allen said during an interview with Spanish-language magazine El Mundo. “He has the duty to apologize and go ahead ... They didn’t hide, nor did he kiss her in a dark alley.”
Maybe say the “soccer player’s” actual name when minimizing Hermoso’s experience.
“He wasn’t raping her. It was just a kiss and she was a friend. What’s wrong with that?”
So, Allen apparently restricts the very bad type of sexual assault to “dark alley rape.” Everything else is fair game while George Gershwin music plays in the background.
Do I really need to explain what’s wrong with forcibly kissing anyone (friend, colleague, close personal hair stylist) to the guy who married his ex-girlfriend’s daughter and his own kids’ sister? Oh, yeah, I probably do. This is the same filmmaker who wrote two separate movies about a man who kills his mistress when she becomes inconvenient and gets away with it. We should expect that he’d consider it some grand existential dilemma if men can’t kiss women whenever they want.
“In any case, it is difficult to understand that a person can lose their job and be penalized in that way for kissing someone,” he added.
Really? You’d lose your job at Hardee’s if you randomly kissed another employee or a customer. If more than a dozen people planned to see Allen’s upcoming (and likely final) movie, his horrific comments would’ve tanked this publicity tour.
Seventy percent of US women who’ve survived rape or sexual assault state the assailant was an intimate, other relative, a friend or an acquaintance. I doubt it’s significantly different in Spain. That is the rape culture Rubiales inflicted on Hermoso, and why it’s brave and badass that Hermoso is holding him accountable.
“I didn’t like it, but what can I do?” she’d said. Well, now she’s showing both Luis Rubiales and the world.
[CNN / Evening Standard]
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Fuck Woody Allen and fuck Luis Rubiales. Pure garbage humans.
Couldn't they have talked to literally anyone other than Woody Allen? Like you would just not believe the amount of people out there who are not Woody Allen, it's shocking, really