There is a problem in the way Alexander Zverev is being written about now. It does not concern only Zverev, only Roland Garros, or even only the allegations that have followed him for years. It concerns an elementary principle: if guilt has not been established, you cannot behave as if it has.
This is not a defence of Zverev. It is not an acquittal. It is not an attempt to say that the allegations against him were false. It is a simpler question: defending the presumption of innocence means preventing an allegation, a closed investigation or a legal settlement from being turned, for narrative convenience, into a conviction.
That is exactly the point. Zverev cannot say, as he did in his interview with L’Équipe after winning Roland Garros, that his innocence was “proved” or that the allegations were “proved false”. That is not the case. The ATP investigation into Olga Sharypova’s allegations was closed because of insufficient evidence and without sanctions. That does not prove that the allegations were false. It shows, more simply, that the ATP did not find sufficient evidence to substantiate them and impose disciplinary action.
In the same way, the German proceedings relating to Brenda Patea did not end with a full acquittal on the merits. They ended with a settlement. Zverev agreed to pay €200,000, of which €150,000 went to the German state and the rest to non-profit organisations. The court closed the case without a guilty verdict and without any admission of liability.
Here too, both things have to be held together. That closure does not prove Zverev’s full innocence, but nor does it prove his guilt. A settlement is not a confession. It cannot be reported as if it were a conviction simply because it is a settlement.
That distinction ought to be enough. With Zverev, however, it often is not.
Part of the press seems to move as if the work has already been done: serious allegations, an unpopular figure, public unease, a Slam title difficult to celebrate. The result is a kind of implicit guilt. Not always stated, often left in the subtext. Zverev wins Roland Garros, but the victory is reported as an event that almost has to be sterilised, contained, kept at a distance. As if the problem were not remembering the allegations, which is legitimate, but allowing his victory to exist without a permanent frame of suspicion around it.
Ben Rothenberg has written a great deal about Zverev and has more standing than many to do so: he listened to Olga Sharypova, followed the case from the beginning and did the reporting. L’Équipe, for its part, chose not to separate the Paris title from the player’s public history. That too is journalistically understandable. Nobody is asking for the allegations to be erased from Zverev’s biography. Nobody is asking for his first Slam to be told as if nothing had ever happened.
But there is a threshold. Remembering the allegations is journalism. Treating them as a conviction is something else.
Tennis knows this perfectly well, because when it wants to be precise, it can be. It showed as much with Jannik Sinner. In the Sinner case, much of the press was able to distinguish between a positive test, an anti-doping procedure, a decision by the independent tribunal and a later agreement with WADA. The independent tribunal had found No Fault or Negligence. Later, Sinner accepted a three-month suspension in a case-resolution agreement with WADA.
But the legal point remains simple: a settlement is not a confession. It does not, in itself, contain an admission of guilt. It cannot be turned into a conviction simply because it is a settlement. You can report that there was an agreement. You can report that there was a suspension. You cannot use that agreement as if it were proof that Sinner was guilty.
With Zverev, however, that same precision seems less urgent. The Sinner case was read within its categories: positive test, anti-doping proceeding, independent tribunal decision, agreement with WADA, suspension. The Zverev case, by contrast, is often pushed outside its categories: no longer allegations, insufficient evidence, a settlement without admission of liability, absence of conviction, but a kind of public verdict suspended above his name.
They are different planes, of course. In Sinner’s case, we are talking about an anti-doping proceeding and the regulatory consequences of a positive test. In Zverev’s case, we are talking about criminal guilt, or at least allegations of a criminal and personal nature. For that very reason, one should be even more careful. If in doping cases we know how to distinguish between a decision, a settlement and a confession, then in the case of much more serious allegations that distinction should become even more necessary.
This is where habeas corpus comes in, in a broad sense. Not because Zverev is detained, of course. We are not in a courtroom and we are not talking about the physical deprivation of personal liberty. But the civic nerve is the same: before the power of the state can hold someone, it must prove that it has the right to do so; before public opinion keeps someone trapped inside a permanent presumption of guilt, it should at least acknowledge that this guilt has not been established.
Otherwise, the presumption of innocence becomes a formula reserved only for those we like.
And this is the weakest point in the reaction to Zverev. Not the fact that the allegations are remembered. Not the fact that questions are asked. On the contrary, when Zverev says that his innocence has been proved, the question is necessary. Because that sentence does not stand up. The closure of proceedings without a conviction is not a certificate of full innocence. But the reverse is also true: the absence of a certificate of full innocence is not a certificate of guilt.
Serious journalism should be able to remain there, in that uncomfortable space. It should be able to say that Zverev has won Roland Garros and that his name remains accompanied by serious allegations. It should be able to say that Zverev is wrong when he presents the matter as if everything had been proved false. But it should also avoid making the opposite mistake: behaving as if everything had been proved true.
If you do not prove guilt, you cannot treat it as proved.
That applies to Sinner, in his anti-doping case. It applies to Zverev, in the cases concerning him. It applies above all when applying it is uncomfortable, because that is when a principle stops being a decorative phrase and becomes something that matters.
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