ALBAWABA - 35 years later, former Tunisian tennis player Selima Sfar finally broke her silence on what she counts for being a traumatic incident she suffered as a child. Sfar accused her former French tennis coach, Régis de Camaret, of raping her when she was only 12 years old.
The Tunisian says she decided to become a professional tennis player when she was 12 years old. She tried out at Roland Garros before leaving Tunisia to attend Regis de Camaret's tennis school in Biarritz.
On one of Sfar's journeys from Tunis to Bordeaux, De Camaret came to pick her up at the airport, just a few months after she had started at the school.
Sfar recalled the traumatic event saying: "In the middle of the trip, it was one o'clock in the morning, he stopped on the side of the road and started touching me, doing things to me".
"At the time I didn't even know what was happening, I didn't understand anything. Thirty-five years ago, 12 years is not 12 years now. All I knew was that he was one of the best coaches in the world, a little 'God' of tennis in France and, if I really wanted to become a champion, I needed him," Sfar added.
Sfar said that she remembered that once they arrived at the coach's house, he went to his room and she stayed on the sofa bed.
"An hour or two later I woke up and he touched me. Then he went from touching to raping, very quickly. Each time it was the same, I was paralyzed. It lasted almost three years," she added.
a couple of years later, Sfar said that she couldn't take it anymore and decided to go solo without a coach, that was when she moved to London. I trained alone six hours a day. I was disciplined and made it to the top 100".
