On Ribery and Benzema: What their prostitution scandal means

So some interesting news came across the wire last night: French national players Karim Benzema and Franck Ribery (pictured above) have been arrested by a special magistrate in Paris for paying an underaged sex worker for...well, sex.

Now before we go any further, we need to put this in a cultural context, after all, this is France we're talking about. Prostitution is legal in France but only if the sex worker is 18, this young woman was 16 at the time of the alleged incidents. However, there are a number of appendixes and stuff, like the person has to "look like a minor, say they're a minor, or the client has to know that they are." All of which Ribery's lawyer is claiming "was not the case." So in a sense, because of France's loose mores about this kind of thing, Ribery and Benzema probably won't recieve the 40,000 dollar fine and or 4 years in prison that they might if they had done this in Singapore. However, there are still implications we need to discuss.

This girl has come out and said repeatedly that they had no idea, but she also knows that she could have just damned one of the most popular footballers on the modern stage, Ribery. She can come out and say on record all she wants, but somehow I don't think that Ribery or Benzema were completely oblivious to her age. They also paid top dollar for her, so that tells you something. Benzema met her in a night club and paid for her services, and Ribery flew her out in a hotel in Germany as a birthday present to himself.

Now, let's talk about what this means to me and world football. In this case, I feel like Benzema is at least moderately forgivable. He's still young, he's still enjoying the delights of being a young kid just signed to Real Madrid, so in that sense I guess he's sort of off the hook.

Ribery, on the other hand, has a huge reputation as not only being a modest man with a very happy marriage, but he's also been around the block a few times. He made one of the bravest recoveries in the history of sports when he resumed playing football after a massive car accident nearly killed him and left a huge scar on his right cheek. He's always been one of the cleanest, most sporting players on earth and has a huge amount of respect wherever he goes. What I'm saying is, it really makes you think when a guy like Ribery gets caught doing stuff like this. There was an episode of South Park recently about rich men cheating on their wives in lou of Tiger Woods, and the gyst of the episode was that we shouldn't act all surprised when it happens. But I think that needs to stop. At one point do we lower our standards so low for men, and still expect a woman to be monogamous, that we become an uncivilized, moraless society? And even without that, would we not expect better of some of our most idolized and respected figures of said society?

I don't know, I know I expected better from Ribery. It'd be one thing if this was Ronaldo, who has allegedly had sex with hundreds of women. But it's frickin' Ribery. He may have to come off my favorite player list.