On August 4, Ester García, lawyer for the victim of soccer player Dani Alves, presented a document in which she communicated the young woman’s decision to revoke the waiver of the civil action that she made in her statement on January 20.
In that judicial statement, the 23-year-old girl confirmed the rape complaint against the footballer that she made two days after the alleged attack in the Mossos d’Esquadra. During that long appearance, Judge Anna Marín Romance, who was acting as substitute for the incumbent Concepción Cantón, already warned the victim that she had the right to claim compensation. The victim was surprised: “Compensation?” The judge answered “yes”, that she had the right to claim for the damages caused. “No, I don’t want to,” the young woman responded. “In these cases, obviously not everything is repairable, but it is right,” the magistrate insisted. “No,” the young woman responded for the third time.
The latest legislative reform of the so-called “yes is yes” law provides that the victim can revoke the waiver of civil action if, for example, the consequences of the crime are more serious than those anticipated at the time of waiver. The only condition is to do so before the parties present their qualification briefs. And that’s just what the lawyer did. Submit the document in August.
In the document, to which La Vanguardia has had access, the lawyer warns that the victim waived compensation “at the beginning of the procedure”, when “he was not aware of the full consequences of the crime nor of the supervening circumstances that would prevent him, As outlined in the forensic medical report, the development of anxious-depressive symptomatology of overall moderate intensity and, therefore, a significant deterioration in various areas of daily functioning. The document was presented in the summer and today, the victim remains on sick leave and undergoing psychological treatment.
It didn’t take even twenty-four hours for the titular magistrate of Court 15, Concepción Cantón, in charge of investigating the case, to revoke the waiver of civil proceedings.
This decision by the victim was made in parallel with the beginning of conversations between Alves’ lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, and the victim’s lawyer, Ester García herself. Some meetings at the request of the player’s lawyer that were carried out with total discretion, that had the knowledge of the Prosecutor’s Office, and that up to four sources related to the accused and the public ministry have confirmed to La Vanguardia. Neither Martell nor García have responded to this newspaper regarding this issue.
Martell sought in the meetings what is known as a conformity agreement. An agreement between the parties, which had to have the approval of the prosecutor Elisabet Jiménez and by which Dani Alves had to admit that in the early morning of December 31, he penetrated the young woman he had met that morning at the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona. .
In that first attempt at an agreement, up to three meetings were held. In the last one, García delegated the conversations to a partner. A financial amount was put on the table, lower than that requested by the prosecution, and a three-year sentence was considered for the player, with the highly qualified mitigating circumstance of repairing the damage that allowed the sentence to be lowered one degree.
The agreement had to have the approval of the player, who offered to deliver more money than initially claimed by the victim, but refused to accept the facts. Coinciding with that moment, Alves decided to change lawyers. To Martell’s surprise, the lawyer Inés Guardiola assumed the defense and resumed negotiations with Ester García to reach the agreement. The talks are “stuck” again, according to several sources. The defense has placed on the table the first amount requested by the prosecution, but the victim is no longer satisfied with a sentence of less than four years in prison.
Compliance can come at any time, but before the trial. For now, the Court has already reserved a couple of weeks in February to hold a trial that each of the parties, for very different reasons, would prefer not to hold.
