The woman accusing Dani Alves testified yesterday at the first session of the trial against the footballer for sexual assault with penetration. The complainant confirmed that the ex-Barça player raped her in a bathroom in the reservation of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona on the morning of December 31, 2022. The testimony was carried out behind closed doors, without the public and the media could hear it. The recording of the test was with the voice distorted and the image pixelated to protect it from possible leaks when the document ends up in the hands of the parties once the trial is over. “She has been very brave to get here,” said her lawyer, Ester García, when she left the Palace of Justice.
Dani Alves appeared for the first time in public after a year in prison, despite the fact that a few months ago the images of the voluntary statement before the investigating judge were leaked. Yesterday, the accused remained seated in a chair, playing with his hands and appearing to be concentrating. During the first minutes at the beginning of the hearing, the court authorized the access of a group of graphic journalists to photograph and record him for a while. Just a few minutes in which he remained unperturbed.
After solving the previous questions, Alves listened behind a screen to the story of the complainant. His mother and one of his brothers went to the Courthouse and, despite the fact that they requested permission from the court to enter the room, Alves himself asked them not to, because he preferred that they be outside.
After the victim’s story, he touched the two young women accompanying the complainant, her friend and her cousin. From the chair that served as the dock, Alves saw and heard the testimony of the young women, who explained in first person how they experienced the moments before and after the alleged sexual assault. Both agreed to explain a fearful situation. During the investigation, the victim told the judge that, as the evening with Alves progressed, she felt “terror”. Yesterday, her friends explained that they felt uncomfortable, but that, despite this, they stayed at table 6 of the reservation, where the footballer and his friend Bruno invited them through a waiter. The cousin related how the complainant left the bathroom feeling strange and then, already heartbroken, crying and repeating that she was afraid that no one would believe her. “I had never seen her like this. He kept repeating: ‘I’m going home, they won’t believe me'”, they both agreed.
Of everything the victim said to them that night, there was one phrase that stuck out to them and that they both repeated yesterday literally: “He hurt me a lot, he hurt me a lot, he came inside”.
The friend recalled that on December 30, 2022, after having dinner at her house and stopping by a bar for drinks, the three of them decided to end the night at the Sutton. There, they were first invited to the VIP area by a couple of Mexicans, and then accepted Alves’ invitation to accompany them to table 6. The friend described the footballer as having “a ticklish attitude and I felt tense” just greeting him, and that the accused maintained an attitude with the complainant that he described as “obsessive”. In addition, she added that, when they came forward to kiss her twice, he put his hand on her back, and that he almost touched her ass. That’s why he decided to stand aside and stand on one side of the reservation. The cousin explained that the player danced very wildly and that he even put his hand in her private parts.
The footballer’s lawyer, Inés Guardiola, who has a difficult role after her client has explained up to five different versions of what happened, tried to combat the story of terror presented by the complainant and her companions asking if it was not it is true that the complainant and her client danced, hugged, rubbed and kissed each other before going to the bathroom. The friends responded with “I don’t remember”.
The defense is trying to weaken the credibility of the victim and her companions by calling into question the testimony about the moments before and after the alleged rape in order to raise doubts in court. He insists that what they explain does not correspond to what appears in the images of the security cameras in the room.
One of the witnesses remembered the moment when her cousin entered the bathroom after Alves, and that it was precisely she who, when she saw that the player “was very insistent”, told her to go and talk to he And precisely for that reason, he was not surprised that he followed him and entered the door that he thought was a place for smoking or another reserved one, but that he never imagined was a bathroom. “He insisted a lot and my cousin didn’t know how to do it, and I told her to talk to him.”
Inés Guardiola asked her that, if she was uncomfortable, why didn’t she leave the reserve or why did she let her cousin go with the footballer in the area behind the door. “I’ve been uncomfortable many times and I didn’t think something like this could happen. I was expecting a place to talk”, he declared.
“At one point, he goes towards some stairs and, shortly after, she goes there. And there I lose sight of them. Bruno, the cousin and I stayed there”, declared the other companion.
The complainant’s cousin, who had stayed in the reserve talking to Bruno, saw that something was wrong so she saw her cousin going out the door. “He told me he needed to go. We left from there. I had never seen him like this. “It hurt me a lot. It hurt me a lot’, he repeated. ‘He ran inside’. And then I decided to cry with her. We all started to cry.”
The girls went to the cloakroom to look for their jackets when they were intercepted by a Sutton porter who took an interest in the crying one. “I saw that she was crying like when your boyfriend leaves you. It didn’t seem like anything serious,” said the controller before the court yesterday.
Almost thirteen months after the incident, the victim is still suffering the consequences. “She is very unwell, she has lost weight, she is anxious. She used to be very funny, she had a circle of friends, and now she doesn’t trust anyone anymore. Anywhere we go, she thinks she’s being watched, that she’s going to be recorded, she’s not calm,” explained her cousin, who shares a flat with the young woman. A situation, he assured, that worsened with the dissemination that the player’s family made of personal images of the complainant on social networks. “He doesn’t sleep if he doesn’t take medication, he doesn’t work. We cry day and night. And he has started taking antidepressants.”
Guardiola emphasized the fact that the friend is a lawyer and even got her to admit, reluctantly, that, faced with the victim’s insistence that they would not believe her, she assured him: “As things stand, they will believe you”. And she asked him directly if he helped her prepare a plan to denounce Alves. All three assured that they did not remember.
