2023-08-08 12:28:09
He had so far decided not to comment on this “Galtier affair”. For the first time, Julien Fournier, the former football director of OGC Nice, spoke on the famous email where he accuses the technician of racist and discriminatory remarks at the origin of this resounding affair.
In an interview with Nice-Matin, Julien Fournier assures him: he is not at the origin of the leak of this writing last April, which he describes as “disgusting in form and timing”. “Sportingly, it was a pivotal period for the OGCN, the day before a quarter-final of the European Cup, against Basel, he explains. I was pained for the club, the players, Didier (Digard), the staff”.
“What people don’t know is why I wrote this email,” he continues. It was written in May 2022, well before, therefore, its disclosure in the media. Some people at the club, who had known about everything that had happened, had criticized me for covering up such things. For once, I had been in total opposition on these subjects (with Christophe Galtier) throughout the season ”.
In this email, Julien Fournier related a scene dating according to him from August 9, 2021. “He arrived in my office and greeted his son who said to me: You can check with my father what I told you (the son and agent of Christophe Galtier had reported his father’s criticisms to Fournier). Once his agent/son left (…) I asked him if all this was true. He then replied that yes and that I had to take into account the reality of the city and that indeed we could not have so many blacks and Muslims in the team. »
“I am not Malcolm X”
Julien Fournier indicates that he wrote this email to Dave Brailsford, the sports director of Ineos, solely for the purpose of protecting himself. “In a private setting, I sent this email to one person and wrote down everything he already knew,” he explains. It was a way to protect myself and to avoid being accused, wrongly, of having put the handkerchief on all that ”. And concludes: “In writing this email, I did not denounce but I protected myself because I was attacked”.
Exit therefore the role of “whistleblower” that some observers have lent him. “I never looked for recognition or any kind of support,” he continues. I don’t play politics, I’m not Malcolm X, an advocate, or a whistleblower. I just consider that the sport in which I evolve for more than 25 years is perhaps the only environment where there are no differences of race and religion. »
Since the start of the case, the former Paris Saint-Germain coach has denied these accusations. These words “shock me to the depths of my humanity. I cannot accept that my name and my family are soiled in this way, ”he said at a press conference last April. Heard by investigators at the end of June under police custody, Christophe Galtier will be tried on December 15 for moral harassment and discrimination. He for his part filed a complaint for death threats and defamation against Julien Fournier and two journalists who distributed the email in question.
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