MADRID — Spain’s High Court found former football federation president Luis Rubiales guilty of sexual assault on Thursday for kissing player Jenni Hermoso without her consent during the medals ceremony of the 2023 Women’s World Cup final in Sydney. The case that overshadowed Spain’s first women’s world title now has its verdict: a fine of €10,800, a ban on coming within 200 metres of Hermoso or contacting her for a year — and no prison.
Judge José Manuel Fernández-Prieto wrote that he believed Hermoso’s testimony that the kiss was not consensual, and that she had no motive to harm Rubiales. He spared the former federation chief a custodial sentence, he said, because the act — a kiss rather than a graver assault, without violence or intimidation — was of minor intensity, though “always reproachable”. Prosecutors had asked for prison. Rubiales was acquitted of a separate coercion charge, as were three other former federation figures — ex-coach Jorge Vilda, Albert Luque and Rubén Rivera — accused of pressuring Hermoso to defend him publicly. Rubiales told Reuters he would appeal: “I am going to keep fighting.”
In court, Hermoso had described how the kiss and everything that followed “tainted one of the happiest days of my life”. Teammates testified that she was left overwhelmed and in tears in the hours after the ceremony. What began as a celebration ended as a two-year public argument about consent, power and who gets believed in Spanish football — and beyond it.
The legal backdrop mattered. Spain’s 2022 “only yes is yes” law had already removed the old distinction between harassment and assault, making any non-consensual sexual act an offence. The verdict applied that logic to the most watched kiss in Spanish sport. Equality Minister Ana Redondo put the government’s reading plainly: when there is no consent, there is assault, and the victim’s word is honoured and should not be questioned. The players’ union AFE, a private prosecutor in the case, called the ruling a significant step for women’s rights and for a sport free of abuse.
Others heard a different message in the sentence. FIFPRO, the world players’ union, said punishment in such cases must send a stronger signal about the imbalance of power between a federation boss and a player. A fine of €20 a day is not nothing; it is also not what many women who flooded Spanish streets in 2023 had in mind.
An appeal will now take the case upward, and Spain’s argument with itself will continue regardless of what the next court decides. The World Cup trophy is in the cabinet. What the country is still contesting is what happened in the minute after it was lifted — and what that minute was worth.
