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 Régis de Camaret, sentenced in 2014 to ten years in prison for rape. “When I was 12 and a half years old, I was abused by Régis de Camaret”, for “practically three years”, she says daily.
Régis de Camaret was sentenced for aggravated rapes of two former underage students. Twenty-six other former players, including former French tennis number 2 Isabelle Demongeot, had testified to sexual assault and rape, prescribed facts.
“We drove on and got to his place, 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 fondling to rape, very quickly,” she explains.
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 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”, explains she.
