The second session of the Dani Alves trial featured several witnesses who recounted the moments before and after the alleged sexual assault. Both the staff of the Sutton nightclub and the mossos d’esquadra who attended to the complainant confirmed that the young woman was in shock and was very afraid to report because, she said, no one was going to believe her, because her rapist was someone very important and I felt guilty.
“She constantly repeated that she felt guilty,” declared the first police officer who treated her, still in the nightclub. She “she suffered an anxiety attack. She was frankly affected. She collapsed a couple of times during the statement,” explained the police officer who questioned her two days later at the police station. The majority of witnesses supported the thesis of her rape by agreeing to describe the woman’s state of anguish and restlessness as soon as she left that bathroom and immediately wanted to go to her house, because she was terrified of the idea of ??reporting.
But witnesses, workers at Sutton, such as a room assistant who was in charge of treating the scratch on her leg, also testified, opening a crack in the credibility of the complainant’s story. Those who treated her told how she herself explained to them that she danced, hugged and kissed with the soccer player and that she voluntarily entered the bathroom after him. In fact, her own cousin the day before already declared that she was the one who encouraged the complainant to go behind that door but to talk to him because Alves got very close.
This story prior to accessing the bathroom where the events occurred calls into question part of the statement of the victim and the companions, who in turn insisted that the time they spent with the accused and his friend was in an atmosphere of “ terror and discomfort.”
The nightclub attendant stated that the complainant said, and he was able to hear, that she said that “she knew what she was going for” (when she entered after the soccer player) “but that she later regretted it. “These were his words,” he said. Sutton’s director, Robert Massanet, spoke in similar terms: “she told me that they were not going to believe her. That she had entered voluntarily, that then she wanted to leave and that she could no longer. She was quite affected.”
Alves’ lawyer, Inés Guardiola, surely takes advantage of these stories to question the word of the complainant and her companions and insist on her thesis that the relations in the bathroom, without cameras and without witnesses, were consensual.
In this trial, as in most processes for sexual crimes, the word of the complainant is settled against that of the accused. There are no images of what happened in the 16 minutes in which both remained in that bathroom in the early morning of December 31, 2022. But in this case there is a long list of witnesses who interacted with each other in the moments before and before to the facts being judged. And among these, the two police officers who went to Sutton after the activation of the sexual assault protocol and who were with the victim in those subsequent moments also stood out. Both were precise: “she was overwhelmed, in shock. She kept repeating that she didn’t want to testify, that no one was going to believe her. She felt guilty.”
A feeling of guilt that came to light during the session. Those first two police officers claimed that they tried to make her see that she should not feel responsible for anything.
One of them was a shift leader in the Sarrià Sant Gervasi district and he accidentally left the police station with the security camera on. That caused those first spontaneous statements to be accidentally recorded. “It was thought that it was her fault, we tried to calm her down and explained the procedure to her, she made reference to some kisses she gave, but we insisted that she did not have to feel guilty.” The police officer was recorded by his own camera referring to Alves as a “bastard and asshole.” Yesterday he justified it for the moment after having seen the young woman in that distressed situation.
The story of her partner, who entered the room in civilian clothes and also attended to the young woman, told the court how they found the complainant collapsed and without stopping reiterating that she felt guilty, that no one was going to believe her. “I don’t want money, I just want justice to be done,” she remembers her telling him.
The last to testify was the accused’s wife, the model Joana Sanz, who together with Alves’s friend, Bruno, and several of the colleagues who were with the accused that December 30, tried to give shape to the mitigating circumstance of drunkenness that the defense is looking for. . Everyone explained that the footballer drank a lot of alcohol that night. “He came home very drunk smelling of alcohol, when he entered the room, where we have several pieces of furniture, he collided with a small table that we have on the right and fell collapsed on the bed,” the woman said.
