The trial in which former Barcelona and Juventus footballer Dani Alves is accused of rape begins in Barcelona. Accused of sexual violence against a young woman in the bathroom of a nightclub in the Catalan capital in December 2022. For the former footballer, the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for a 9-year prison sentence and the payment of 150,000 euros in damages, a request which the civil party increases to 12 years, the maximum sentence.
Section 12 of the Court of Barcelona has reserved three days for trial for the Brazilian who has been held in preventive detention since 1 January 2023. The arrest occurred after a twenty-three-year-old girl accused him of sexually and violently assaulting her on the night of 30 December 2022. The Brazilian changed his version of events on several occasions, first denying the facts and then claiming that it was a consensual sexual relationship.
The lawyers defending the footballer, Ines Guardiola and Miraida Puente Wilson, ask for Alves’ acquittal, arguing that it was not rape and that the relationship was consensual and, in the event of conviction, mitigating circumstances for the footballer’s state of intoxication in addition to compensation of the damage, having already paid 150,000 euros imposed by the investigating judge as a deposit for the compensation. A plea bargaining of the sentence cannot be ruled out.
According to the public prosecutor, who gives complete truth to the complainant’s version, Dani Alves invited the young woman and her friends to drink champagne in a private room of the nightclub and, after chatting and dancing, around 3.20 in the morning he invited the victim in a private bathroom where “he began to touch her with a lascivious spirit and the clear intention of satisfying his sexual desire”. Faced with the girl’s denial and her pleas to let her go, he slapped her and raped her. The trial is at the center of great media anticipation, with over 270 accredited journalists. The images, on internal circuit, cannot be disseminated, with the exception of those of the player in the dock in the moments before the start of the trial