It will soon be a month since the name of Kylian Mbappé came out in the Swedish press in a case of alleged rape, committed at the Bank hotel in Stockholm, the establishment where the Real Madrid player resided in early October, without we still know if he is officially indicted. If The evening paper et The Expressthe two main newspapers in Sweden, as well as the television channel TV4 News, staunchly maintain that it is indeed Mbappé who is accused by the complainant, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Marina Chirakova, has not let anything of this filter ultra sensitive matter.
A well-kept secret which, from a Franco-French point of view, is surprising. It is rare for us that all the elements of such a file are protected for so long from lolling tongues and well-stretched ears. “I can understand that this surprises you. But there was still a first leak since Mbappé's name came out in the media, recalls Me Pernilla Dahlrot Cabouillet, lawyer and member of the bar in Paris and Sweden. It could come from the police, the alleged victim and people around him, we don't know. But it is true that since then, the file has been kept secret. »
To investigate happily, let's investigate hidden
And it is not the daily phone calls from our Swedish colleagues to Marina Chirakova's office, or the visits from the French media to the door of her office, which change anything. While this may seem surprising from home, it is “nothing extraordinary” for the Swedish lawyer. “It just means that the people in charge of this case, and in particular the prosecutor, are doing their job well and respecting their duty of confidentiality. And even if I have other files in which the police leaked information to the press, which clearly proves that it can happen in our country, the level of morality is still very high in our country. »
Journalist for The evening paper from France, where she has lived for many years, Johanna Franden confirms to us that “no more information has come out” since October 15. “We obtained the testimony of one of the girls present at the evening but the others do not want to talk. I have the impression that everyone is a little afraid because you don't know what you risk by accusing a star like that, surrounded by lawyers, explains our colleague. It's such a sensitive issue that everyone is very careful. This is often the case in rape cases, but even more so if we are talking about a player of Mbappé's notoriety. »
Mbappé's name may never come out
As for the duration of the investigations, our interlocutors are not surprised there either. Such a case takes time, even though the prosecutor would like not to drag on too much given the media coverage of the case. After a police search at the Bank Hotel in Stockholm, belongings of the alleged victim were collected and sent to the laboratory for DNA analysis, the results of which are still unknown.
It is also necessary to interview potential witnesses and, if applicable, the alleged attacker. Here again, it is impossible to know if Kylian Mbappé has already been heard by the Swedish police. All we know is that prosecutor Marina Chirakova is renowned for being a respected, rigorous and very professional magistrate, and that she has already had to handle big cases of this scale.
Everything is now in his hands, as Me Dahlrot Cabouillet confirms to us. “According to Swedish law, the investigation must remain confidential until the prosecutor decides either to pursue the investigation further or to close the case. In the first scenario, she must be relatively convinced of being able to obtain a conviction. A priori, she has not yet decided. We may never even know if it was indeed Kylian Mbappé who was accused, in the event that the prosecutor judges that there was not enough evidence to incriminate and she decides to close this case. »
Hasty communication from the Mbappé clan?
Moreover, this affair would have remained much more secret if the player himself had not fed the media machine by talking about “fake news” and shouting conspiracy about X, after the publication of the first articles in the French press . Or by sending his lawyer to the fire on the 8 p.m. set of TF1 in the first hours of a barely emerging affair, where she will question the probity ofThe evening paperwho had published the photo of the player leaving his hotel before releasing the rape case.
« The evening paper has a lot of resources for investigation and does not publish anything without being sure of its information, assures our colleague. Each paper passes through the hands of what is called an ethical editor, to be sure not to publish anything that could be defamatory. Everything is ok, well done. If we decided to release Mbappé's name, it's because the player reacted on Twitter. Without that, we wouldn't have done it. »
Sidelined by Didier Deschamps in the French team and no longer putting one foot in front of the other at Real, the former child prodigy of French football knows that part of his future lies thousands of kilometers further north, in a strange country which does not joke with the secrets of judicial investigation.
