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Serving as the mascot for a sports team can be a fairly thankless job that requires you to spend hours inside a sweltering costume while dealing with people who don’t really respect the person inside it—including one Spanish soccer player who’s been hit with a significant fine for groping a woman dressed up as a parakeet before a game.
I’m going to assume most people reading this aren’t intimately familiar with Hugo Mallo, a 33-year-old defender who currently plays for Aris of Greece’s Super League but spent the bulk of his professional career as a member of Celta Vigo, which was promoted to La Liga a few years after he made his debut with the soccer club in 2009.
On April 24, 2019, Celta headed to Catalonia to face off against Espanyol, a team that boasts a pair of male and female parakeet mascots dubbed Perico and Perica.
According to Diario AS, Mallo found himself at the center of an investigation that was launched in the wake of that match when a woman who donned the Perica outfit accused the then-captain of grabbing her breasts when he approached her after making his way through the pregame handshake line.
The case was initially dismissed after a complaint was filed in the wake of the incident, but the woman (who was identified only as “Ana”) appealed the ruling before a court ruled there was enough evidence to hold another trial concerning the sexual abuse charges Mallo was hit with (he maintained his innocence and asserted he was unaware of the gender of the person inside the mascot costume).
It took a few years for the case to make its way through the legal system, but The Guardian reports a judge has ruled in the woman’s favor while ordering Mallo to pay a €6,000 (~$6,220) fine in addition to €1,000 (~$1,100) in interest on top of the legal fees he’s being forced to cover.
Mallo responded to the development in an Instagram post where he pledged to appeal while posting the video he asserts attests to his innocence, although the angle makes it pretty hard to determine what actually transpired.