Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spain’s soccer federation, was convicted on Thursday of sexual assault for forcibly kissing a member of the women’s national team on the lips after the team won the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Mr. Rubiales’s kiss of the player, Jennifer Hermoso, set off a national scandal, deepened debates about longstanding sexism in Spanish soccer and became a watershed moment in Spain’s #MeToo movement.
A Spanish court on Thursday cleared Mr. Rubiales of a separate charge of coercion. For the sexual assault conviction, it fined Mr. Rubiales 10,800 euros, about $11,270.
In delivering the ruling, Judge José Manuel Fernández-Prieto said that a kiss “is not the normal way of greeting people with whom one does not have an emotional relationship.”
Mr. Rubiales was also ordered not to go within 200 meters, or about 650 feet, of Ms. Hermoso for one year. The court said he cannot contact Ms. Hermoso and must pay her 3,000 euros for “moral damage caused to her.”
Judge Fernández-Prieto said the sum was proportionate for the forcible kiss given the “time and place” — in full view of thousands of spectators in the stadium and many others watching the ceremony on television.
There was no immediate response from Ms. Hermoso. She had said that the kiss was not consensual.
Ms. Hermoso said shortly after the episode that “at no time did I consent to the kiss that he gave me.”
“I couldn’t react — it was a thousandth of a second,” she later testified, adding that she had known immediately that the act was not normal.
“My boss was kissing me,” she said. “This should not happen.”
Mr. Rubiales had denied doing anything wrong during the encounter with Ms. Hermoso. Speaking in a courtroom near Madrid earlier this month, he said, “You don’t win a World Cup every day,” and he added that he had kissed other players in celebratory moments.
Prosecutors had argued that the former soccer boss had pressured Ms. Hermoso to drop her claim and play down the incident.
Three other men, including Jorge Vilda, the team’s coach at the World Cup, were also charged with coercion alongside Mr. Rubiales. All were acquitted of that charge, with the court saying that prosecutors had not proven that Ms. Hermoso was subject to any acts of violence and intimidation that would warrant coercion.
