Oribe Peralta Extortion: Sister Act Ends As They Are Imprisoned After Blackmailing ‘El Hermoso’

Police in Santa Martha, Mexico have arrested Natividad Arlem Torres and Mercedes Torres, two sisters who are charged with blackmailing and extorting El Tri soccer star Oribe Peralta on Wednesday. According to police, the sisters took sexually compromising photos of the Mexican striker as well teammate Javier Aquino. The photos were taken in January at a party that both the Mexican national soccer team players were attending.

Peralta rose to fame during the qualifying stages of the World Cup, and at the tournament itself as he scored the game winning goal in Mexico’s 1-0 win against Cameroon in the first game of group play. Peralta, who helped win the Gold Medal for El Tri at the 2012 London Olympics, is one of the young stars on Mexico who is the face of the team, in addition to his fame through soccer and Club America in La Liga MX, Peralta is the face of Pepsi in Mexico and 5-hour Energy in Mexico and the United States.

Peralta told authorities last week that he was being extorted by two women whom he met at a party in January. He said that he exchanged phone numbers with one of the two women and that she took photos of him in compromising positions that made him “uncomfortable.” According to documents that have now been made public in Mexico, the woman in question and her sister, threatened to publish the photos in order to publicly humiliate Peralta unless he paid them half a million pesos or roughly, $38,000.

Peralta, who is married with two children smartly decided to alert authorities to the extortion attempt and go along with the sister’s plan in order to catch them in the act. Peralta gave his friend 250,000 pesos and told him to meet the young sisters at the pick-up location which was a bar in Mexico City. Mexico City police were waiting at the bar for the “drop” to take place and promptly arrested the Torres sisters and charged them with aggravated extortion.

According to Ricardo Sanchez Retana, the lawyer of the Torres sisters, the girls were set up by Peralta and the victims of an elaborate trap by Peralta in order to obtain the photographs and “take the girls out of the game”. Retana told Mexican newspaper, Reforma that Peralta merely pretended to be blackmailed and that there is no proof that the photos even exist. As of now, the infamous photographs in question have not been seen, but according to Peralta himself, the photos would have compromised his “moral integrity.”