Monday, July 27, 2009

Tennis ace’s kiss ends in lawsuit

A French tennis player who tested positive for cocaine is being sued for defamation by a woman he blamed for “contaminating” him with kisses in a nightclub. The woman, identified only as Pamela, denies taking drugs and is suing Richard Gasquet, a Wimbledon semi-finalist two years ago, for spreading a false image of her in the French press.

“I am not a drug addict or an easy woman who goes gaga when she sees a star,” she said last week. “I have been with the same boy for 11 years . . . even if he knows that I do not take drugs, he was disturbed by these stories of kisses.”

Gasquet, 23, escaped with a 2½ month suspension after an International Tennis Federation tribunal accepted his claim that he had ingested the drug through “French kisses” with 29-year-old Pamela at a nightclub in Miami in March. Her lawyers argue that although she was not identified at the hearing, Gasquet’s evidence gave enough detail for her to be recognised.



The tribunal, which met at the end of June, said: “We conclude that it is more likely than not that the cocaine detected in the player’s urine sample entered by means of kissing between about 2am and 5am that morning.” According to Pamela’s first public comments on the case, however, there was less kissing than Gasquet had maintained. “He thrust me against the wall in a stairwell and kissed me,” she said. “I was surprised and let him know that he was not my type.”

Pamela and Francesca Antoniotti, a friend who was present at the Set club, have been questioned by police in Paris about how Gasquet could have ingested the drug. Antoniotti, a former reality TV star, denied offering cocaine to the player or taking any herself.

Yassine Bouzrou, Pamela’s lawyer, described the idea that Gasquet had ingested cocaine through kissing his client as “ridiculous”. “If you presented such a defence in a normal court of law you would be laughed at,” he said. It is now up to the court to prove that Pamela took drugs that night, he added. Otherwise it must find in her favour.

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