Dani Alves, sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison for raping a young woman in Barcelona

The Barcelona Court has condemned the footballer Dani Alves to four years and a half in prison for raping a young woman in the bathroom of a booth at the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona on the night of December 30, 2022, forcing her will “with the use of violence.”

In the ruling, notified today, section 21 of the Barcelona Court condemns Alves for the crime of sexual assault, who has already been in preventive detention for just over a year, to four and a half years in prison, five of supervised release and nine of removal from the victim, to whom he must compensate with 150,000 euros, money that he has already posted as bail.

At the trial, which was held between February 5 and 7 past, the Prosecutor’s Office requested nine years in prison for Alves and the private prosecution, twelve, although the court finally set it at four and a half years by applying the mitigating circumstance of reparation for the damage and the Penal Code in force when He raped the victim, which was the initial “yes it means yes” law of former minister Irene Montero.

The room, which rejects The mitigating circumstance of drunkenness raised by the defense concludes that it has been proven that Alves, making “use of his greatest strength”, “suddenly” grabbed the victim, threw her to the ground and, preventing her from moving, raped her. , “despite the fact that the complainant said no, that she wanted to leave.”

According to the Courtwhen the victim found herself in a small bathroom with no possibility of exit, when Alves prevented her from doing so, and faced with the “violent attitude” that he showed, “she felt impressed and lacked the ability to react, coming to feel that she lacked the air given the situation of anguish and terror at what I was experiencing.

The room does not accommodate “no doubt” that the rape occurred and that Alves used “violence”, since the victim’s account of what happened inside the bathroom has been “coherent and especially persistent” and it is also supported by “sufficient” peripheral evidence, such as the injuries he suffered in one knee, for which he also imposes a fine of 9,000 euros on the footballer.

It also highlights the audience that The fact that Alves left the nightclub without saying goodbye to the victim or showing any interest in her, despite passing by a short distance away, shows that the footballer was aware that “he had acted against the victim’s will and had an interest in “Please leave the premises as soon as possible.”

The room points out that the credibility of the story of the victim of how the rape occurred is not affected by some “deficits” that they have detected in their statement about what happened before going to the bathroom, since there are aspects that do not coincide with what is seen in the security images of the nightclub.

«It is not appreciated in the chambers that the complainant and her friends are uncomfortable or that the complainant is not comfortable, does not accept or does not have the will to continue the party with the people she has just met,” the ruling states, which emphasizes that It is even appreciated that there is a “certain complicity” between the two.

For this reason, heThe Court does not see “reasonable” the victim’s version that she went to talk to Alves in the bathroom area for fear that after the club they might follow her or do something to her and her friends. “It looks more like a prior agreement to go one after the other,” she points out.

The room ends that the victim voluntarily went to the bathroom area with the purpose of being with Alves “in a more intimate space” and that from the place where he was he could know that he was going to a closed space.

However, states that the fact that the victim had danced in an “insinuating” manner with Alves or that she could hug him cannot lead them to assume that she gave her consent “to everything that could subsequently happen.”