Do we like them?

Do we like Alexander Zverev?

Our score: 4 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up, but unresolved abuse allegations and little verified good work keep him in the middle.

Alexander Zverev is a German tennis player who spent years knocking on the door of a major. In June 2026 he finally got through it, beating Flavio Cobolli in five sets to win the French Open. It should have been a victory lap.

Instead the win got a muted reception in France. L'Equipe gave it a small front-page mention beside an editorial about the domestic violence accusations against him. When its reporter raised them, Zverev said “my innocence has been proven” and the interview ended, reportedly with his agent stepping in.

Here is what a court actually did. Prosecutors alleged he pushed a woman against a wall and choked her during an argument in Berlin in May 2020. He denied it and challenged a 2023 penalty order of 450,000 euros. The trial ended in June 2024 with him agreeing to pay 150,000 euros to the state and 50,000 to charities. The judge said it was not a verdict, and a court spokeswoman said “It remains unclear what happened.” His lawyers say he is still considered innocent and agreed only to shorten the proceedings.

The second set of allegations came from a woman who accused him publicly in 2020 and 2021 of abuse, including an alleged assault in Shanghai. He denied all of it. The ATP's independent investigation found “insufficient evidence” and took no disciplinary action. That is not the same as a finding of innocence, and the tour said it could revisit the matter if new evidence emerged.

On the harm test, I found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ people, women's rights, migrants or the planet. I found no conspiracy-theory slide and no run of dodgy collaborators either. To be straight about it, my searches on those topics came back thin, so this is an absence of evidence rather than a glowing reference.

The good-person side is a close call, and where you land depends on how you read the record. One reading is that a settlement with no verdict and a probe with insufficient evidence leave the allegations unproven. The other is that two separate sets of allegations are hard to wave away. I couldn't verify charity work from a page I could open, so there is little to weigh against it.