Selima Sfar, a former Tunisian tennis player, says in a long interview with the sports daily L’Équipe that she was raped from the age of 12 and a half by her coach Regis de Camaret, sentenced in 2014 to ten years in prison for rape. “When I was 12 and a half, I was abused by Régis de Camaret”, for “almost three years”, she says daily.
Regis de Camaret was sentenced for aggravated rapes of two former underage students. Twenty-six other former players, including the former number 2 of French tennis Isabelle Demongeot, had testified to sexual assault and rape, prescribed facts.
On the way back from Bordeaux airport, coming from Tunis, “it was one o’clock in the morning, he stopped on the roadside and he started touching me,” says Selima Sfar. “At that moment, I didn’t even know what was going on, I didn’t understand at all.” “I was paralyzed, I couldn’t move. I guess it was a way to see if I was going to react or not. I was in shock, as if you were plugging a 220-volt computer into 550. You’re paralyzed,” she says.
“We continued on the road and we arrived at his house, late. Upstairs was her daughter and her bedroom, I slept on the sofa bed downstairs. I went to bed and an hour or two later I woke up to him touching me. Then it went from touching to rape, very quickly,” she explains.
She didn’t tell anyone about it for years, went to England and finally “decided not to have a coach anymore”. “It took me 25 years to admit it to myself, 35 years to say it publicly. Respect to Isabelle Demongeot and all the women who spoke. I understand that we do not speak, we have to do it when we feel it, ”she added. At the time of the Camaret trials, Selima Sfar claims to have “fallen into a real depression”.
“My parents and my relatives said to me: Fortunately, you, you are strong, you would not have let that happen. You have no idea the pain it made me every time I heard that, the shame I felt. It indirectly confirmed to me that I was cowardly and weak. I lived through this throughout the trial. Hell. I had dark thoughts, ”explains the former player, now 46 years old.
Selima Sfar, whose career spanned from 1993 to 2008, spoke for the first time about her trauma to her psychologist, and said that she “laid down on the sofa and stayed 48 hours in the dark crying”.
Sportingly, she reached the world top 100 of the WTA, the professional circuit, in 2001, but “every time I was about to win a big victory, I paralyzed myself”, she explains. Régis de Camaret or his entourage could not be reached by AFP.
