Samuel Eto’o has not changed. He continues to be impervious to the consequences that his behavior causes in others, in this case, his own children. The former FC Barcelona footballer has several legal proceedings open, in Spain and abroad, due to repeated failure to fulfill his obligations as a father: Erika, Etienne and Annie, the three recognized by a court ruling as his children, continue to be ignored. by the Cameroonian. Now, the young Italian Annie Eto’o Barranca has decided to go one step further and file a criminal action against him: she has tried many times and in different ways to get to know her father; Assuming that it is an impossible task, she does not renounce the right that the law confers on her.
Annie was born in August 2002 and two years later, the Court of First Instance of Palma de Mallorca ruled that she was the daughter of Samuel Eto’o. A subsequent ruling, also of a civil nature, indicated alimony for his daughter: since 2012, Eto’o has been obliged to pay 10,000 euros per month, a ruling that an appeal court confirmed in a final ruling in February 2015. Although Anna Barranca She exhausted her strength by filing one and another lawsuit, she has only obtained small embargoes for her daughter through execution orders; Eto’o has never paid on his own initiative as he is obliged to. Seeing that a three-month prison sentence handed down in 2019 by the Cagliari court was completely foreign to her, it is now Annie herself who has decided to take matters into her own hands by filing a complaint on her own behalf.
Daniele Vianello, Annie Barranca’s lawyer, explains to this newspaper what this new legal action against the former footballer consists of: “We have presented a complaint to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office in which Annie requests that her father be convicted of having committed the crime of rape. of family care obligations, punishable by up to one year in prison. A crime that dates back to nothing less than her birth and also with the aggravating factor of recidivism, since he has already been convicted of this same crime. The lawyer says that although Annie has tried to contact her father on several occasions, some of them through her own mediation, it has never been possible.
Annie, a Marketing and Communication student in Milan, has only spoken to her father once. It was in 2020. This is how he remembers it for La Vanguardia: “My mother’s insistence managed to get her on the phone while she was under judicial behavioral surveillance [precautionary measure taken in the previous criminal procedure to control whether she was complying with her duties] and finally I was able to exchange some phrase. “He proposed meeting us in London, but they were just words: when his contract in Qatar ended, that phone number was blocked and he never appeared again.” She had a little more luck with her half-sisters: “A year ago I was able to locate Sienna thanks to Instagram, we saw each other a few times but she suddenly walked away from her without giving me any explanations. And last month, I coincidentally ran into his wife, Georgette. She recognized me from seeing me in photos, and she was really very kind to come up and greet me, she seemed like a very sweet woman. But nothing else”.
Even when forced to turn to justice, Annie’s generosity towards the man who never acted like the father he was has no limits. She continues to harbor some timid possibility that in the future she will look like the boy who made her mother fall in love with her: “I never lose hope of being able to look my father in the eyes. I have suffered a lot from his lack and his rejection, things that a girl cannot understand, although if I tell you the truth, now that I am older I don’t understand it either… Samuel is often heard talking about how important the value of family and children, so I can’t understand it. My mother assured me that when she met him, he was a kind and good boy, perhaps her career changed him.”
Samuel Eto’o has several cases open for this same reason, the repeated failure to comply with his filial obligations even with convictions involved. How is it possible that with so many sentences against him, handed down by courts in different places, that he continues to deceive justice? “Perhaps he mistakenly believes that he is above the law and does not have to follow it,” laments lawyer Vianello. The option of seizure of assets is very complex, since in Italy there are no known assets; Thus, they are trying to trap him in Cameroon through an international network of lawyers. That first sentence is today suspended, explains Vianello, but if he were to be convicted again with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism… “We could request the revocation of the suspension and obtain an international arrest warrant for him. Jail? It is not ruled out that he would end up in prison, even ending up in prison if there were no alternative measures to his detention,” reflects lawyer Daniele Vianello.
Annie ends the interview with this reflection: “I understand perfectly that children in Africa suffer much more difficult fates and that although I am the daughter of an African man, my life is not terrible. I am aware. But everything has its perspective depending on where you live and for me it has always been very difficult to explain to my colleagues and friends the reason why my father was never on my birthdays.”
