Bruno Martini case: "I am not a pedophile", assures the former president of the NHL

 Bruno Martini case: "I am not a pedophile", assures the former president of the NHL

Bruno Martini broke the silence in a long interview published this Tuesday by L'Equipe. The resigning former president of the National Handball League (NHL) was sentenced on January 25 for "corruption of a minor over the age of 15, acquisition and possession of the image of a minor presenting a pornographic character". He admitted the facts and accepted a 12-month suspended prison sentence, accompanied by a fine of 2,500 euros and a five-year ban on carrying out an activity involving contact with minors proposed by the Paris prosecutor's office.

"I'm not a pedophile," says the 52-year-old former international goalkeeper. “That the kid was 13 years old, it is indisputable. But I did not know it, ”he continues, indicating that the teenager had contacted him on Snapchat in the spring of 2020, at the end of the confinement linked to the Covid. “We exchanged nude photos, on which he showed me parts of his face, not his whole face, detailed the double world champion. The judicial police officer acknowledged that in the photos he appeared to be a young adult. »

Then, regarding the images, the police conducted a two and a half year investigation, he says. She came to search my Parisian home on January 23, as well as my former home in Hérault, where my ex-wife and my daughter live. The police recovered computers, there for a good ten years, telephones, USB keys… And they found nothing. Obviously. »

The teenager would have gone downstairs from Martini's Parisian home with an Uber paid for by the fifty-year-old, before asking to leave, by the same means, without ever having met the former handball player.

Sex to escape emptiness and depression
The latter assured to have gone through "" in 2019-2020 "" the worst moments of [his] life, in terms of depression. “The Covid has locked me in on myself even more. During the confinement, I lived alone, in Paris. “Martini would then have multiplied the meetings on the Internet, after having registered with a pseudonym “on all the dating sites that exist”.

“I could have descended into violence, alcohol or drugs. All these forms of destruction which come under the order of the death drive and which engender deadly behaviors. For me, sex was a pretext. The former general manager of PSG handball evokes sexual relations with "a dozen men and women aged 20 to 40".

His guilty plea, "a social suicide"
Martini confides his "shame" and apologizes to the victim, his family, but "especially" to his ex-wife and his children. He also regrets having "accepted the guilty plea to [se] get rid of this story as quickly as possible". This legal process "accentuates the image showing that I am guilty" and is similar, according to him, to "social suicide". “I could have physically committed suicide. I don't know which is best, after all. What is certain is that my life ended on January 23, 2023.