Dani Alves defended his innocence this Wednesday in the trial for the rape of a 23-year-old girl at the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona. In a statement lasting just 20 minutes, in which he answered only his lawyer's questions, the former FC Barcelona footballer assured that the sexual relationship in the toilets of the VIP area was consensual and that the young woman at no time told him. to stop or wanted to leave, but rather took the initiative.
—Did the complainant tell you that she did not want to have sex, did she push him away, did she make any gesture to indicate that she did not give her consent?—asked the lawyer, Inés Guardiola.
—No, at no time did he say anything to me. We were both enjoying it there and that's it, nothing more.
Alves's account of what happened in Sutton's tiny bathroom differs completely from that defended by the victim. The young woman has maintained, in all her statements, that she entered the bathroom without knowing where she was going, that Alves forced her to perform fellatio on him (which she resisted), that he then slapped her and insulted her and that, with great violence and Against her will, he penetrated her vaginally until he ejaculated inside her.
The footballer has denied all these extremes and has stressed that there was consent. When the three girls (the victim, a friend and her cousin) accepted the invitation to go up to the VIP area, Alves and the complainant began to talk and dance. She maintains that she felt uncomfortable and that the soccer player initiated the approach; he maintains the opposite. “We started dancing a little closer. We spent a while interacting, having a good time. She started rubbing her parts with mine, a typical disco dance. She started to twerk“Excuse the word, and we will begin to become intimate,” he said in his statement, which he interrupted slightly due to some sudden crying.
In her statement, on Monday behind closed doors, the victim maintained that Alves held her hand on two occasions and, when he put it at the height of his penis, she pushed it away. The Brazilian full-back, on the other hand, has said that she began the sexual approach. “She put her hand behind her and started touching my parts. “I thought there was a sexual attraction there,” the accused said. For this reason, he invited him to have sexual relations in the suite room from Sutton, a small adjoining room to which only customers at table 6, where Alves and his friend Bruno were, have access. The girl agreed to this, always according to Alves, who declares as the accused and, therefore, has the right to lie. Alves entered the bathroom and waited. “I stayed there for a while thinking that I wasn't going to come anymore, that I didn't want to come. But when I open the door, I practically find it.”
Opposite narrative
Alves's account of what happened in the bathroom, where there were no other witnesses or surveillance cameras, is diametrically opposed to that of the victim. “We started kissing, I helped her take down my pants, I sat on the toilet bowl, she got on her knees in front of me and started giving me fellatio.” Afterwards, always according to his story, the girl got on top of him and they had a sexual relationship with penetration. “I turned to cum out of her pussy and told her that she was returning to the booth, I didn't want them to see us together coming out of the bathroom.” Using the chair from which he testified as if it were Sutton's toilet, Alves has reproduced some of the positions in which they were supposedly in the bathroom.
Lawyer Guardiola, who has stated in her report that Sutton's cameras support the existence of a mutual “sexual game”, has asked him insistently about consent. According to Alves, the victim never told him that she wanted to leave, nor did he stop her from leaving. He has also denied that he slapped her, said obscenities to her or violently grabbed her by the hair and head. “Not at all, I am not a violent man.” When leaving the bathroom, he claims that he was in the VIP area for a while until he decided to leave. In the exit hallway, he passed by the victim, her friend, and her cousin, but he claims he did not see them. At that moment, the girl was saying that she had been the victim of a sexual assault and, a few minutes later, she identified the perpetrator: Dani Alves.
Alves has been in provisional prison since January 20, 2023. That day, he was arrested and taken before the investigating judge, where he gave up to three different versions of what happened, as the evidence became clear to him: first he said that He did not know the victim, then he knew her but nothing happened and, finally, he performed fellatio on her. Later, in April, he admitted for the first time that he had penetrated her vaginally (the biological remains indicated this) but he said, like this Wednesday, that it was consensual sex.
The prosecutor's reply
The prosecutor in the case, Elisabet Jiménez, has taken advantage of these manifest contradictions to attack the accused in her final report of the trial. “All this battery of versions is because it was considered totally unpunished. “He came to the court supremely calm.” Faced with the player's spins, the prosecutor has stressed that the victim's story is “absolutely credible.” She “She has been very brave throughout the entire process, she is a very strong woman.” Her story is solid enough to issue a sentence, but there are other elements that corroborate her version of events, according to the prosecutor, who asks for nine years in prison for the player.
The defense maintains that the victim's account of what happened in the VIP area does not correspond to what the surveillance images show. The prosecutor has replied that “judging the victim for dancing and for having agreed to go up to the booth” is “tremendously unfair.” “She was not looking for a traumatic situation, to the point that a year later she is still on sick leave. “Just because a woman accepts a drink or goes up to a booth does not imply that she has sexual interest.” Contrary to what Alves stated, the prosecutor has insisted that the victim never gave her consent, hence the player had to use force. Everyone who treated the victim saw her “completely devastated and affected.”
These consequences have also been highlighted by the victim's lawyer, Ester García, who has downplayed possible gaps in the story. “The complainant can never be required to relate the facts with a photographic memory.” García recalled that the victim did not even want to report the facts for fear of not being believed and that her personal data would be disseminated. And she has revealed part of what she said in her closed-door statement on Monday: “I was happy. I loved my job. “I reported it unfortunately.”
In his final report, Guardiola has asked the judges to be “brave” and issue an acquittal sentence despite the media coverage of the case. The lawyer has insisted that the girl gave her consent and she never expressly revoked it. “Any other person in the same position as Alves would have understood exactly the same thing as him.” The only explanation that the defense sees for the young woman's complaint, perhaps, is that she “was angry with herself for having become sexually disinhibited and for having had a sporadic sexual encounter to which she was not accustomed.” The lawyer has requested Alves' release before the sentence is handed down, a request that will be
resolved by the court in the coming weeks.
Telephone 016 assists victims of sexist violence – all forms of violence, from physical to sexual, psychological or economic -, their families and their environment 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 languages different. The number is not registered on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. You can also contact via email [email protected] and by WhatsApp at the number 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency situation, you can call 112 or the National Police telephone numbers (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you cannot call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
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