When on January 20, 2023, former footballer
Dani Alves
- who is being tried for rape - appeared at a
Barcelona
police station , he underestimated the reason for his summons.
They had told him that a young woman accused him of groping her at a disco, but he had already sent a video to a TV channel saying: "I don't know who that lady is, I don't know her."
From that statement - from Mexico, where he played for the Pumas club, and while he was still free -
Alves did not stop contradicting himself
.
He did so in person or through various writings that were presented by his defense attorneys on duty.
He has been in preventive detention for more than a year and, between January 2023 and today, he already had three lawyers.
What really happened that early morning of December 31, 2022 in the VIP bathroom of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona?
According to the young woman who reported the former soccer player, she entered without knowing it was a bathroom.
Alves locked the door, groped her, hit her, insulted her and finally sexually assaulted her
.
The girl, who is now 24 years old, declared on Monday during the first day of the trial that she could sentence the former Barça player to
a sentence of between 9 and 12 years in prison
.
Her testimony is still that of the first day.
She never contradicted herself.
Alves, for his part, was “editing” his version of that night.
He began with “I have never seen her in my life,” which was what he said in the first days of January of last year.
According to the manager of the nightclub, who testified in court as a witness on Monday, when he found the girl, “she was crying and thought maybe it was a misunderstanding with her boyfriend.
Mr. Alves looked forward.
“Alves passed at one and a half or two meters.”
In a second attempt to mitigate the scandal, the former Brazilian soccer player said that they had crossed paths in the club's bathroom.
Without even touching, he hinted
.
But Sutton's security cameras, although they do not record all the movements in the booth, denied that they had not been together.
She also revealed that genetic samples had been collected in the bathroom and on the young woman's clothes.
And that the girl's fingerprints were tattooed on the bathroom mirror and in the sink, which would confirm the young woman's version when she said that
the former soccer player forced her to face the mirror
before lifting her dress and raping her. .
The case would include a report from the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona that would have treated the young woman after the sexual assault she reported.
It was then that
Alves' defense
chose to make him say something similar to the fact that, in reality, the girl had jumped on him and had performed oral sex on him.
“She came out crying and told me that I had hurt her a lot,” the young woman's friend declared on Monday, before the court in room 21 of the Barcelona Court, where the trial against Alves is being held.
The latest version of the accused acknowledges having had sex with the complainant.
According to Alves, there was nothing forced.
He was spoiled.
But he, he assured,
lied and avoided confessing it so as not to harm his wife
, the Canarian model Joana Sanz.
“I had an obsession that was to protect my marriage, to protect the woman I love,” Alves said.
This Tuesday, the second day of the trial, the model is scheduled to testify among the 22 witnesses who will go through the Barcelona Court.
María Lucía Alves, mother of the former player, will also testify.
The complaint
The then 23-year-old girl who reported him took a couple of days to make the decision.
“You're not going to believe me,” the girl said to a friend of hers and her cousin, who had been with her at the Sutton disco.
He finally did it on January 2, 2023. That day, Alves flew from Spain to Mexico to meet up with his team, Pumas, and resume training.
But ten days later,
the death of his mother-in-law brought him back to Spain
.
It was there when the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan police, summoned him to give a statement.
They wanted to prevent the complaint from being leaked while the then Pumas player was outside Spain since, if he took refuge in his country - Brazil - it would have been impossible to extradite him.
Brazil does not hand over its citizens to other countries, even if they are accused of having committed crimes abroad.
“Only she and I know what happened.”
In June of last year, when he had been in preventive detention for five months, Dani Alves gave a single interview to the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia.
“I forgive her
,” Alves said about the complainant in that talk.
“I still don't know why she did all this, but I forgive her,” he added.
There he told how he left Sutton in the early hours of December 31, 2022: “When I left the nightclub I knew that I passed close to the woman who is already crying.
I did not see her.
“If I had seen her crying she would have stopped me to ask,” she said.
“And if at that moment someone in charge of the nightclub had asked me to wait because a young woman said that I had sexually assaulted her, I am not going home, I am going to the police station to clarify what happened.
I left calmly.
“I didn't run from anything or anyone,” he said in that interview.
“Only she and I know what happened and what did not happen in that bathroom, those 20 minutes.
No one else,” she added.
On Monday, the former soccer player's current lawyer, Inés Guardiola, wanted to disable before the court the idea that
her client gave five different versions
of what happened.
She argued that, in reality, Alves testified only twice before the judges.
His latest strategy aims to demonstrate that the former defender was
totally drunk
that New Year's Eve morning in Sutton.
He is betting that alcohol will be a mitigating factor when sentencing Alves, if the court that is trying him decides so.