The three members of the court of section 21 of the Provincial Court of Barcelona, ??who on Wednesday night ended the trial of Dani Alves for the rape of a 23-year-old woman at the Sutton nightclub on the morning of December 31, have work. of 2022. Now it is their turn to review and contrast what has been declared and seen in this room during the three days that the hearing has lasted. Three intense sessions for a trial that has been at the level of the extraordinary relevance of a case that, beyond being the protagonist of a particularly famous character, has raised some interesting interventions regarding consent and credibility.
Before going into these elements, it is worth highlighting the work of the four judicial professionals. Judge Isabel Delgado, president of the court, led the hearing by intervening as fair and necessary. He did not accept requests to hold the hearing behind closed doors and allowed the media to watch and take notes of the interrogations, except for the complainant, who was known through references from lawyers, and who could not be heard his version of events.
The possibility, as the defense had hoped, of being able to see the videos he presented from the nightclub’s security cameras and of which each party made their interpretations, completely disparate, was missing.
The prosecutor Elisabet Jiménez was particularly outstanding in her final report. He maintained the request of nine years and did not need more than 45 minutes to defend his position insisting on two elements: the lack of credibility of the detainee and the lack of consent of the complainant during the 16 minutes they were in that toilet, behind closed doors
Without frills, to the point, with an orderly sequence and introducing elements of the statement Alves had made minutes earlier, the prosecutor criticized the different previous versions. And he spared no harshness when he remembered the day the defendant appeared in the court of inquiry, having just been arrested by the Mossos d’Esquadra, on January 20 of last year. “Mr. Alves has given so many statements that we have already lost our way. Today he entered that he was drunk. I honestly think that all this battery of versions is because he felt unpunished. He came to court very calmly.” And he further aggravated the gap of contradictions by explaining, jokingly, how, while Joana Sanz testified that her husband arrived home that morning drunk and tripping over the furniture in the room, the accused said that he he got into bed and that his wife was already asleep. “They haven’t even agreed on that,” he warned.
Ester García, a lawyer specializing in sexual violence and who assumed the defense of the complainant from the very beginning, was encouraged in her final report. He also maintained the request for a maximum sentence of twelve years and focused on the non-consent of the young woman in that bathroom. She was particularly graphic when she warned, raising her voice: “I don’t care if she was perreando or if she stopped her buttocks, when she said no it’s no. And that’s precisely why the law was changed.” And he recalled that it had cost the complainant “a lot” to get to the trial, while insisting that her story has remained solid, consistent and unchanged over time.
Inés Guardiola closed the trial with her final report. The lawyer, who asked for a pardon from the penalty taker Cristóbal Martell in the middle of the investigation, built her defense trying to break the credibility of the victim and her companions. I had no more room. That is why in his report he stopped to list the different fragments of the nightclub’s security cameras that recorded the accused and the complainant, before they both went to the toilet.
Where Guardiola interprets that it is the complainant who repeatedly places her hand on Alves’ private parts, the prosecutor and the prosecution see just the opposite. Alves taking the young woman’s hand to bring it closer to his crotch. And they are the same images. The same happens with several fragments that the victim and his companions described as an atmosphere of “terror”, “discomfort” and “drooling” behavior of the player. The same as Alves and his friend Bruno defined as being “having a good time” and dancing hooked and intimate.
Guardiola referred to consent and assured that the complainant’s previous behavior in the toilet could only be interpreted as a yes to maintaining a subsequent intimate encounter. “And he could have later revoked this consent, but he didn’t.”
Now it’s up to the court to interpret and pass judgment.
