The defense of the former Barcelona player Dani Alves has presented an appeal to the Barcelona Court in which he requests his provisional release, ruling out any escape option. The lawyers Cristóbal Martell and Arnau Xumetra assure that it is “unthinkable” that the defendant tries to flee, since he has a “life project” in Barcelona and has recently enrolled his two children in school and registered in Esplugues de Llobregat, where years ago the family has a home.
The appeal against the third section has been filed against the decision of the investigating judge of Barcelona court 15 to keep him in pretrial detention, where he was admitted on January 20 accused of raping a young woman in the reserved bathroom. Sutton’s nightclub. A text in which Martell considerably raises the tone of his statements to reduce the credibility of the victim, comparing his statements in court with the images captured by the security cameras of the Sutton nightclub, scene of the denounced events.
On April 20, the footballer appeared at his own request before the investigating magistrate and there he offered a new version of what happened that morning of December 31. The defendant insisted that he had sex with the complainant that both consented to and justified the previous versions of him by the fear that he had of admitting infidelity to his then partner, the model Joana Sanz.
The Brazilian’s lawyers reiterate in the appeal an argument that they already used in their previous request for freedom and that is that the flight risk is “non-existent” since they understand that the evidence in the case provides a “solid perspective and muscle” for the defense. “Dani Alves can and wants to defend himself and will not evade the process,” the letter reiterates.
The appeal also refutes the arguments of the private prosecution, which argues that Alves’ flight risk has increased after his wife announced last month through social networks her intention to separate after eight years of marriage. An announcement on Instagram that the woman, for the moment, has not executed, even instructing her family lawyer to keep the process paralyzed. So much so that the lawyers have provided the Barcelona Court with a screenshot of the footballer’s judicial files, which does not contain any divorce petition filed by his wife.
The bulk of the appeal focuses on questioning the version of the victim and her two companions in the preamble to the access of the young woman and the soccer player to the private bathroom, where she assures that she was raped. “Whoever is capable of distorting the events that occurred in the preliminaries (…), is also capable of doing so in the story of the nuclear moment of the accusation, which occurred in the solitude of the couple in that tiny bathroom,” says the lawyer. To advance the central axis of what will be his defense, focus the debate on two contradictory versions “the word of one against the other.”
In the appeal, the defense reproduces some fragments of the 200-page report submitted after the player’s last statement to request his release. A document accompanied by a twelve-minute video and prepared by a detective agency with professionals who have and manage the necessary computer programs to “enlarge, slow down and speed up the images” from security cameras, “without manipulation.” The defense assures that according to the images, the victim maintains an “openly sexualized conduct” with the player that morning and makes him ugly for “distorting reality” in court.
The letter insists on questioning the story of the victim, who according to the defense is “dragged by a precipitation of events”, after which he “flees ahead” to justify the reasons why he entered the bathroom with the footballer. And it reproduces the fragment of the woman’s statement before the magistrate in which she described the fear she felt at that moment and how she practically forced herself to go to the bathroom. “I remember that I went because I felt very intimidated, very harassed, I really have to go,” the victim declared.
The defense describes that the young woman “was outlined, rubbing the buttocks” on Alves, “to the rhythm of the music”, in a gesture that for the footballer’s defense is contrary to a climate of “terror”. “If at any time he felt bewildered and uneasy, for two minutes he had his trusted friends to get rid of that mood swing,” the lawyers write, given that the victim entered the bathroom two minutes after the soccer player where the incident happened. alleged assault and declared in court that he could not speak with his companions at any time.
According to the lawyers, the fact that the young woman collapsed and asked for help when leaving the bathroom is not proof of anything: “crying does not necessarily derive from an inconsensual sexual act (we can think of a thousand reasons other than assault for a young woman to 23-year-old who has had sex with a 40-year-old man in a bathroom burst into tears)”, they argue. The defense adds once again that no vaginal lesions compatible with sexual assault were found on the victim, beyond a 2cm scratch on the knee.
And Martell insists on valuing Alves’ last statement in court, during which he maintained, he assures, a story “with solvency, linearity, without breaks of contradiction and offering a version covered with rationality.”
