Until ten in the morning today, February 5, the defense and the prosecution in the process against Dani Alves for sexual assault with penetration have had time to reach a compliance agreement that avoids holding the trial. It has been an intense and discreet weekend for two parties, the accused and the victim, who from the first moment valued the option of an agreement that involves the unconditional recognition of the facts, the payment of a much higher civil liability to the 150,000 euros that the investigating judge set at the time and the non-suspension of a sentence that should not be less than four years.
On January 20, 2023, the former international soccer star was taken to Brians 2 prison, where he has been for the past year, in his cell in module 13, intended for prisoners convicted of sexual crimes in minors A year during which the Brazilian has managed to go unnoticed after the first weeks of anticipation in which the rest of the inmates were queuing up to have T-shirts or soccer balls signed.
Rested from the euphoria of the first weeks, the footballer maintains the routine of the gym, football matches in the courtyard of the module and almost daily visits from his lawyer and lifelong friend, Miraida Puente, in addition to those from Bruno Brasil, the chef , bodyguard and all-terrain boy who accompanied him on the morning of December 31, 2022 at the Sutton and who will be one of the thirty witnesses who will testify at the Barcelona Court.
It will be a hearing that will be held in section 21 of the old Palau de Justice in Barcelona’s Passeig de Lluís Companys and for which journalists from half the world have been accredited, where football is something more than a sport. The communication cabinet of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia closed the accreditation period on Friday at three in the afternoon with a count of 270 professionals, 40 foreigners, from 70 media, 23 from outside Spain. The press managers have enabled rooms throughout the building to accommodate as many reporters as possible.
The three parties, prosecution, prosecution and defence, requested the three magistrates of the court to hold the trial behind closed doors. Finally, an intermediate measure has been chosen (public hearing, except when the victim declares), but it has not avoided the complaint of the College of Journalists of Catalonia, for having limited the work of the informants.
It goes ahead that the reservation of the identity of the victim was not only guaranteed during the trial, but it has been so during the year of investigation, as it cannot be in any other way. The defendant’s statement is different, during the investigation he had no problem giving an interview, precisely to La Vanguardia, in which he explained his version of what happened in the bathroom and that it will be the same one he will give today, if there is has seen The court’s agreement, expressed in an interlocutory order, prohibits the dissemination of the statements, not only of the accused, but also of the thirty witnesses that the parties call to testify on the court.
They will go through the room to be questioned, from the Sutton staff who worked that morning and who attended to Alves in the reserve, to the people who attended to the victim later, who went out that night accompanied by a friend and a cousin . Bruno Brasil will also testify, who was with Alves that night and who, hours after the events, already outside the Sutton, exchanged private Instagram messages with one of the complainant’s friends, and the police officers who served the young woman in the discotheque: the first patrolman and the shift leader of the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district who tried to calm her down and who, unwittingly, recorded the young woman with the security camera she had activated since she left the police station . The doctors from the Clínic hospital who visited her that morning when she was taken by ambulance from Sutton will also be questioned.
Victim and accused will testify separately and the court will ensure that there is no eye contact.
In any case, Alves’ lawyer, Inés Guardiola, has informed her client that there is room to obtain an acquittal and that she will refer doubts about the victim’s version to the court. Part of the interrogation will focus on the young woman’s decision to access the reserved bathroom. He will not question the fact of entering, but he will state to the magistrates that during the investigation the young woman stated that she crossed the door, not knowing where she was driving and afraid of what could happen to her and her friends. The Brazilian’s defense will warn that the images from the nightclub’s cameras show how the complainant stays in the reservation for ten minutes, talking to one of her friends, without showing any fear at the decision to follow in the player’s footsteps until at the door where he was waiting.
During the investigation, the two investigating judges who dealt with the case, as well as the magistrates of the Barcelona Court who denied the defendant’s repeated requests for freedom, always valued “the veracity of the story” of the victim, in the face of the changes in the defendant’s version.
