On Tuesday, July 9, the former Manchester United star was hit with a one-year jail sentence in France after a two-year, one-month period where he did not pay child support, on top of past missed payments, cumulatively adding up to just shy of one million in unpaid alimony.
Evra retired in 2019, long before this most recent Euro Cup, which saw France crash out of the tournament against Spain in the semifinals.
French judges in the Nanterre suburb of Paris ruled on the case, with Evra’s lawyers immediately moving to appeal. Evra’s lawyer, Jérôme Boursican, argued, ‘The facts are disputed,” said Boruscian. “Mr. Patrice Evra appealed, knowing that he provided his wife with an apartment, a house with a swimming pool in the south of France and that he lent her almost two million euros for her daily life.”
Sandra Evra, the footballer’s wife, and her legal counsel, Nathalie Dubois, stated, “I hope that thanks to this decision, Patrice Evra will finally understand that he is not above the law and that we cannot abandon our wife and children overnight.” said Dubois “Even more so when they met at the age of 15 and she followed him all over the world to support his football career.”
The couple were married in 2007 and had been together for 25 years when Mr. Evra filed for divorce in 2020.
Sandra Evra, in a 2020 interview, expanded on the circumstances under which her husband left. “We had a wonderful family Christmas, an amazing holiday in the Maldives together, and at New Year we kissed and cuddled together after spending a night as a family with our son and daughter.” Said Sandra Evra “Two days later, he left our home in Paris to go to work in London, saying he would be back two weeks later. And I have never spoken to him since. He has tried to cut me out of my life.
Patrice Evra has not to date commented on the situation aside from an interview in August 2020, when he stated that the couple “only saw each other at family events” and “no longer lived under the same roof.”
