The press has a hard time with Kylian Mbappé. Even though he is one of the most famous football players in the world right now, he has kept his personal life out of the public eye on purpose. At least some of that changed when he went on the French TV show Clique TV and said he had been in love before, adding, in what seemed like careful language, that he hoped to be in love again. It wasn’t much. It was enough to make people dig, though.
Something they found, or rather something that came up again, was an old rumor that Mbappé was dating Ines Rau, a French model, actress, and writer whose own story is much more interesting than most football players’ love lives.
Rau was born in Paris in 1990. His family is from France and North Africa. She changed her gender and had surgery to confirm it when she was 16. She was inspired by the story of Caroline “Tula” Cossey, an English model who came out as gay and then appeared in Playboy decades earlier. It’s possible that Rau recognized and was inspired by a theme in Cossey’s story: the idea that being seen, even if it hurts at first, can change things for those who come after you.
She was dancing for DJs in Ibiza when she was 18. In that world of late nights and big crowds in Europe in the summer, she met David Guetta and became friends with him. In 2013, not long after coming out as transgender, she posed with Tyson Beckford for the French luxury magazine OOB. It wasn’t a timid start in the business.
In 2014, she was in Playboy’s “A-Z” issue, in a spread called “Evolution.” It was done on purpose; Playboy wanted to show that it accepted a wider range of gender identities. After Cossey in 1981, she was the only other transgender woman the magazine had ever written about. Rau came out on his own, which was different. That difference is more important than it might seem at first.
Then November 2017 came along. Cooper Hefner, the son of WWE founder Hugh Hefner, said that Rau would be Playmate of the Month. She would be the first openly transgender woman to hold that title. Hefner is said to have said that the choice was like his dad’s choice in 1965 to cast Jennifer Jackson as the first African-American Playmate. You can argue about whether that parallel fully holds up, but the point was made clear.
Rau’s career has been going strong ever since. Nicole Miller, Alexis Bittar, and Barneys New York are some of the people she has worked with. She has been on the cover of Vogue Italia and in ads for Balmain. In 2020, she was hired as a brand ambassador for L’Oréal Paris as the first transgender woman. She still has that job today. It’s hard not to notice that she keeps getting firsts without the big celebrations they probably deserve.
The rumored link to Mbappé was never confirmed by either team. By then, he was well-known. At only 19, he was the youngest French player to score at a World Cup in 2018. He signed a five-year deal with Real Madrid in July of last year that was said to be worth over $16 million. This was widely seen as the most expensive free transfer in the history of football. He’s thought to be seeing model Stephanie Rose Bertram right now. The Ines Rau chapter has not been proven, if it ever really existed.
After seeing all of this, it seems like the rumor keeps coming up not because of Mbappé but because of Rau. She really is an important person because she made a career for herself in a field that wasn’t exactly waiting for her. The football player got some attention. That’s not enough attention for the woman who started the rumor.
