Kimi Raikkonen alleges that he is being blackmailed, and according to the latest reports, he’s fighting back.
The story revolves around the Finnish racing driver and a cocktail waitress in Montreal, where Kimi and the rest of the circus are set to arrive this weekend for the Canadian GP. At 38 years, Raikkonen is one of the oldest drivers on the grid. He’s won 20 races, and the world championship in 2007 with Ferrari. He’s also been known to drink and party pretty hard.
According to Autosport, the woman alleges that Raikkonen and an unidentified friend sexually assaulted her while she was working at a bar they visited after the race in 2016. She alleges that Kimi touched her breast while his friend put his hand down the front of her pants.
After two years of remaining silent, she reportedly sent Raikkonen a letter a couple of weeks ago, demanding she pay him a “huge” amount of money or she would go public. Rather than pay the woman, Raikkonen’s lawyers filed a complaint with the local police.
“The idea of settling this, either with an opportunity to hear his version, sitting down in person or via video conference, meeting his camp, even money on the table – these are all things that we would have discussed,” the woman’s lawyer told Autosport. He insisted that “this is not gangsterism, where you have to feel threatened that there’s going to be this disproportionate negotiating table”.
The situation strikes us as a case of he said/she said, coming to light in the wake of the #metoo campaign against sexual misconduct. We’ll have to wait to see how it all shakes out, but something tells us we haven’t heard the last of this.