2023-09-12 22:54:14
London Too much noise for nothing. And above all, nothing new. The much more controversial British journalist Piers Morgan has found in the toxic and already former president of the Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales a way to try to fatten the audience of his program, Uncensored, very thin after more than a year on the air on Talk TV, an opinion channel in the wake of Fox News that belongs to Rupert Murdoch. But the interview, pre-recorded and broadcast at 8 p.m. this Tuesday, local time in the United Kingdom, did not offer any news in relation to the data that is already known about the case. Rubiales has not apologized to Jenni Hermoso, and has maintained that her version, that of the consensual kiss, “is the truth”.
Two days after he announced his resignation in a tweet with a clip from the interview on the show, Morgan began by asking the former RFEF president “why did he give this interview?” And Rubiales, who spoke in Spanish most of the time, switching from time to time to English, replied: “Because it’s an opportunity, because you’re an opinion leader…”. Rubiales lied, at least partially, when he stated in the first five minutes of the interview that “it is clear that I was wrong, and I said so from the beginning.” Not then, though. Not in the video he recorded on a layover on the return flight, but he did throughout the interview. However, he has insisted again on the set that it was a joint act, therefore consented. “We were both very excited.” He has denied that the kiss had any sexual character, and has once again given a kiss to his daughters as an example of innocence.
Rubiales has rejected the many opportunities that Morgan has given him to apologize directly to Jenni Hermoso for what happened, little more than “an anecdote”: “I was there, there. What happened was a moment of joy. Since from the beginning I have kept one version. What happened was a spontaneous act, consented by both, motivated by joy. Everything that happened was motivated by joy. I have my version, if other people change the his…”
Once again, Rubiales has regretted the gesture made in the market, when he touched his genitals – “of which I feel much more ashamed” than the kiss, he said -, an action on which, on repeated occasions, has insisted that it was consented. “Is Jenni Hermoso lying?” Morgan asked her. “I heard what I heard,” he replied. “I made a mistake, and I’m sorry, and I’ve asked for forgiveness, but under no circumstances was it an assault, nor was it any sexual harassment,” he added. And he continued: “What matters most to me is the truth. Now I have to focus on the process, because when you are in front of the judge what you have to do is try.” Rubiales has recalled that he is a lawyer, and has assured “one hundred percent”, that he has “never” pressured anyone.
The former president, who has described himself as a “good person”, has rejected the comment of the men’s national team players, who in a late statement described Rubiales’ attitude as “sexist”.
As for the reactions of the Federation staff closest to him so far, Rubiales has read a message he received three days after the final. “It was sent to me by a woman, a person from thestaffgiving me support”, which later resigned and showed the maximum rejection of both the kiss and his reaction. An example, in his opinion, of how the trout has turned as a result of the “spurious forces” that have ended up causing his downfall.
After almost an hour, Morgan and Rubiales ended the interview with a handshake. And Morgan’s tone and facial expression was almost one of solidarity for all that Rubiales is experiencing as a result of his action. The journalist has not shied away from the most obvious questions, but he has made a fool of himself when he told his guest about the mother’s hunger strike or when he asked her if she thought she might end up in prison. Rubiales has ruled it out.
Warming up engines
Already on Monday night, with the tone that characterizes him, frivolous disguised as transcendent but always banal and populist, Piers Morgan took to his program Uncensored three women to decide whether the “pico” was or was not a “sexual assault”. He surrounded himself with the columnist of the Daily Mail Sarah Vine of regular network contributor Esther Krakue and writer Grace Blakeley and asked them, “Is this what we all saw?” Sarah Vine wanted to desexualize the kiss, arguing that everyone was kissing. He did criticize the gesture from the box of putting his hand on his testicles. And at this point Piers Morgan commented, very implicitly, that Rubiales had apologized openly.
Piers Morgan – a character with an extremely controversial record of journalistic services, since he was directing The Sun, aged 28, in 1994 – used some footage recorded on mobile phones by the players of the Spanish national team to openly question the version of “sexual assault” that the kiss entailed. “Looking at the images, and the chants of ‘kiss!, kiss!’, and ‘presi!, presi!’, it doesn’t seem like they were all traumatised”, he says ironically, although he later admits that “to be fair to Jenni Hermoso, “he later said he didn’t like it.”
Morgan has proposed the interview with Rubiales as part of the usual culture war that he carries out from the media. And the episode allows him to maintain a personal agenda that, for example, charges a lot against the rights of trans people, and in the case of Rubiales he wonders if “we are dealing with a criminal act”. Looking for balance, however, he points out that Rubiales “behaved in a ridiculous way”, especially considering his position as president of the Federation. Grace Blakeley is the one who emphasized the fact that, beyond the desire or lack of desire for the kiss, the moment has a relationship “with power”, an aspect that has been touched upon very briefly in the interview.
Morgan, who started his show with an interview with Trump in June last year, and who has since brought Cristiano Ronaldo on his set, and who has also had boxer Andrew Tate, famous for sexist, homophobic comments, and now accused of rape and human trafficking, he won’t even have broken audience records on YouTube, the only channel where he occasionally exceeds a hundred thousand viewers, because on the Murdoch channel the audience is counted, only, by tens of thousands.
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