Former French Minister Roselyne Bachelot, will have to compensate with 10,000 euros (about 12,000 dollars) to the Spanish Rafael Nadal for having hinted that the tennis player was doped, the Paris Correctional Court determined today.
Bachelot was convicted of defamation and in addition to the 10,000 euros in damages, she must bear another 2,000 of the court costs. Likewise, he was imposed a fine of 500 euros suspended, which he will only have to pay in the event of a repeat offense.
The figure is a tenth of what Nadal had demanded, who demanded a penalty of 100,000 euros.
Bachelot, Minister of Health and Sports in France between 2007 and 2010, questioned Nadal’s cleanliness by ensuring that the seven months that the Spanish was without competing between 2012 and 2013 were not due to a knee injury.
“(In tennis) positive controls are not disclosed, penalties are not disclosed. You just find out that a tennis player has an injury that keeps this person off the court for several months, “said Bachelot in March 2016, when she was no longer serving as minister, in the program TV Grand 8.
“It is known, for example, that the famous injury of Rafael Nadal, who had a competition break of seven months, had to do very surely with a positive control,” added the French.
The Spaniard suffered many injuries throughout his career and one of the most serious was in mid-2012, when the patellar tendon in his left knee said enough and took him seven months off the court. Upon his return in February 2013, he won ten titles that season and regained world number one.