Jennifer Hermoso has said the kiss from Luis Rubiales, head of the Spanish soccer federation, at the women’s World Cup was not consensual. The scandal has grown into a reckoning over sexism.
The nonconsensual kiss that Luis Rubiales, the president of Spain’s soccer federation, pressed on Jennifer Hermoso has come to embody the generational fault line between a culture of machismo and more recent progressivism.
Luis Rubiales was denounced for his behavior toward Jennifer Hermoso, a member of the winning Spanish women’s soccer team, at an awards ceremony in Australia.
“Probably I made a mistake,” Luis Rubiales, the Spanish soccer federation chief, said after grabbing Jennifer Hermoso and planting a kiss full on her mouth, igniting howls of outrage on social media.