Barcelona, Spain, Feb 5 (EFE).- The 23-year-old woman who accuses Dani Alves of sexual assault ratified on Monday before the court that the footballer raped her in a bathroom of a nightclub in Barcelona and that she feared not being believed if she made a report.
The trial against the Brazilian soccer star began Monday in the 21st section of the Barcelona court and is scheduled to last until Wednesday.
Alves is accused of raping a woman in the tiny bathroom of a private room of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona in December 2022, and the prosecution is seeking nine years in prison while the victim’s private prosecution is pushing for twelve.
The defense of the former Barcelona FC player seeks his acquittal on the grounds that the sex was consensual, but cites drunkenness and the fact that he has already paid 150,000 euros in compensation as mitigating factors.
The defense tried in vain to prevent the hearing from taking place, arguing before the court that the defendant’s rights had been violated by a “parallel trial” in the media and social networks, where his presumption of innocence had been compromised, and by the fact that the police had been investigating him “behind his back” for weeks.
The court rejected these claims after ruling out any “anomaly” in the defendant’s right to defense, although it did agree to the request that the footballer testify at the end of the trial, once witnesses and experts have testified and all the evidence against him is known.
Thus, the victim was the first to testify in the trial. The interrogation lasted just over an hour and was conducted behind closed doors and with extreme measures to protect her identity and to prevent a visual confrontation with Alves.
The victim’s identity had been kept secret by court order, but in January Alves’ mother made a post on her social media that revealed the victim’s identity (showing a video of her and including her personal information) and accused her of wanting fame and money.
During Monday’s statement, the victim reiterated before the Barcelona court the account she had given throughout the trial: that Alves had sexually assaulted her with violence and a contemptuous attitude, after urging her to go with him into the narrow bathroom of the private room of the Sutton nightclub.
She also confirmed, as she did during the preliminary investigation, that she had initially been reluctant to file a complaint against the footballer, convinced that “no one would believe her”.
The version of the victim, who according to sources maintained her composure during the interrogation despite the fact that at times she could not avoid crying, was corroborated by the two young women who accompanied her to the Sutton on the night of Dec. 30, 2022, who also testified in tears.
The witnesses, a friend and a cousin of the victim, detailed that since they met him, Alves had been touching them with a “creepy” attitude that made them feel “uncomfortable”, although they did not imagine that this could lead to rape.
According to both witnesses, the three girls agreed to enter the room where Alves was with a friend after he invited them twice through a waiter to have a drink with him in the club’s VIP area.
Both stated that they saw the footballer go through the door – they did not know it was a toilet -, that her friend followed shortly after, and that a quarter of an hour later Alves came out and two minutes later the victim came out with a “grim face” and urged them to go home.
According to her friends, the young woman was “crying desperately ” and said that the soccer player had “hurt her”, but initially she was reluctant to report him saying: “I just want to go home, they won’t believe me”.
In the days following the events, the young woman remained in shock, still did not want to denounce, and currently still suffers from anxiety, hardly leaves the house, feels watched and has lost the “joy” that characterized her, as she becomes obsessive “over everything”.
Alves’ lawyer used the cross-examination to discredit the testimony of the two friends, asking them if the defendant and the alleged victim were dancing “very closely” before going to the bathroom, if they smiled at each other and if their attitude was flirtatious, to which the witnesses answered evasively.
Afterwards, two waiters who served Alves, a regular customer of Sutton’s private rooms, denied that the player behaved as if he was under the influence of alcohol, which would be a mitigating circumstance that would allow him to reduce his possible sentence.
And the club’s doorman testified that the accuser told him that she had a problem “with someone important” and described how, when Alves left the premises, he passed very close to the alleged victim and her two friends, looking straight ahead, without greeting them.
The trial is set to continue on Tuesday afternoon with the testimony of around twenty witnesses, including the footballer’s wife, model Joana Sanz, the staff of the nightclub and the Mossos d’Esquadra who investigated the case. EFE
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