The soccer player Dani Alves tried to convince the judge yesterday that what happened in one of the toilets of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona at dawn on December 31 was not a rape, but that it was a consensual sexual relationship between two adults who they had previously flirted. The former Barcelona player appeared on his own initiative before the head of court number 15 who is conducting an investigation into a sexual offense for which the Brazilian has been in jail for nearly three months. In a statement lasting just half an hour, in which the defendant responded to all parties, Alves admitted for the first time that there was vaginal penetration after fellatio, but that everything that happened between the two was consented to.
The day did not start well for the player. The management of Brians 2 did not receive the order from the court to release Alves on time and at half past ten in the morning, with all the protagonists prepared in court, the accused was still in his cell in module 13 of the prison.
The statement had to be delayed for two hours and the magistrate got to the point: “She has requested to testify again. Well, you will sayâ€. Earlier there was a tense brawl between the judge and Alves’ lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, who witnessed “outraged” how the magistrate wanted the player to remain handcuffed inside the room. Finally, the mossos who were guarding the footballer released him from the handcuffs.
At that moment, Alves began a story of about twenty minutes, without pauses, which he began by assuring that he is a man “respectful of women” and that he only takes the step of proposing a sexual relationship when he is very clear that the other person wants what he wants. same.
And that, he assured, is what happened that morning in the private room of the nightclub on Tusset Street. Alves explained that he came to Suttón with his friend Bruno Brasil and that they occupied the usual table, the six in the reserved one. That three young people came up and that the five of them were chatting and dancing animatedly. That he spoke with the complainant, that the context was one of complicity and that he immediately perceived a “sexual tension” on both sides that resulted in a consensual rapprochement. “I suggested that we continue in a bathroom that was right there and he said yes.”
Alves assured that everything he was telling at that moment was recorded by the room’s security cameras, which picked up the moment the man entered the bathroom, and that the woman did so two minutes later. In that cabin there are no cameras, but the defendant assured that nothing happened in there that the woman did not want to happen and that at no time did she oppose what was happening.
The victim’s lawyer, Ester GarcÃa, asked her if things had been so placid that way, why had her client denounced her. The defendant explained that he had spent a lot of time in prison thinking about precisely that and that he had come to the conclusion that by ending the relationship he had not been sufficiently courteous to the young woman. “Perhaps I was not attentive, I asked her to leave the bathroom separately and it is possible that she did not interpret that message correctly, that she felt offended or upset,” he said.
The prosecutor Elisabeth Jiménez questioned him about the injuries that the young woman had on one knee. And the man raised the possibility that he was harmed by the position during fellatio. Martell for his part insisted that the player specify that “sexual tension” prior to the meeting in the bathroom.
In the next few hours, the lawyer will present a letter requesting the release of Alves to court 15, accompanied by an extensive report that analyzes the images from the security cameras, as La Vanguardia advanced on Monday. A document accompanied by a compilation of the images of the room that have been processed and enlarged in the sequences in which the accused and the complainant interact in the private room and that, in the defense’s opinion, support the version that Alves made on Monday in court.
