Guilty or innocent?: What was Dani Alves’ situation after the sexual abuse trial?

Dani AlveHe will know, possibly by the end of the month, what his sentence will be.

He has just attended a three-day oral trial against him, accused of raping a 23-year-old girl in the bathroom of a club in Barcelona in the early morning of December 31, 2022. For this reason he has been in pre-trial detention for more than a year.

The Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecution maintain their request for conviction: The prosecutor asks for 9 years. For the lawyer defending the plaintiff it should be 12.

Alves’ defense asked for acquittal. Or a one-year sentence, for civil liability.

The former footballer was the last to testify at the trial. There he insisted that the sex he had had with the young woman had been consensual, he cried and said she was financially bankrupt.

“The world fell on me”the former Barça defender said in Spanish with a Portuguese accent in front of the court which, before the sentence, will have to decide whether or not to grant him the provisional freedom requested by his defender until the sentence is known.

During the three days of the trial, almost thirty witnesses passed through the Barcelona court where the public hearings took place. The last one, Wednesday 7 February, ended at ten in the evening.

From the statements and evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, by the defense of the girl who reported Alves and by the Brazilian’s defense lawyer, it is clear that it will not be easy for the court to make a decision.

The Alves case is the first media trial in Spain for a sexual crime that will be tried under the new law on sexual freedom. The law, known as the “yes is yes law,” places consent at the center of the debate over whether sexual behavior is criminal or not. But that “yes” that the law considers indispensable in every physical contact must also be explicit, clear and voluntary.

This is perhaps the most controversial aspect to clarify.

“He started dancing next to me, rubbing his parts with mine.. And then he started, pardon the expression, twerking and getting more intimate,” Alves said in his statement.

“He put his hand on me and started touching my parts. I thought there was sexual attraction and I talked to her to see if she wanted to go to the bathroom. “She said yes, I didn’t have to insist at all,” Alves said in response to questions from his defense lawyer, who underlined two aspects of his strategy: verify that the former footballer had drunk too much that night and that at no time did he force the will of the girl who had reported him.

Alves’ wife, model Joana Sanz, also testified, saying that her husband had come home completely drunk that morning.

Tears and mimicry

Dani Alves, during his testimony, cried and did not spare a photo of the chair he was sitting on, a position which, according to him, he adopted during the almost 20 minutes in which he remained locked in the bathroom with the young woman.

The girl, 24, gave a statement on the first day of the trial. She did it separated by a screen from Alves, so as not to exchange a glance with the accused, and the recording that the public makes as normal procedure distorted her voice and pixelated her face.

The “law of yes only means yes” underlines that the victim’s anonymity must be protected, even if Alves’ entourage has released videos and the young woman’s full name.

In his statement, The girl further said that she had been attacked, insulted, beaten and raped by the former footballer.. She admitted to having crossed the door that separates the bathroom from the booth where she was dancing with Alves and companions without knowing what was on the other side. And when he wanted to leave, the former player locked the door and abused her.

His story has never changed. This was confirmed by her cousin and a friend who were with her that night.

“He had a slimy attitude” they declared of Alves.

The staff of the nightclub, the agents of Mossos d’Esquadra – the Catalan police -, the doctors and experts who treated her in the early hours of 31 December 2022 and in the hours following the attack reported by the young woman confirmed what was told by the complainant. .

This was reported by the Catalan policethe videos – recorded by them as soon as they were called to the disco like the images from the bowling cameras -, They “totally” endorse what emerges from the young woman’s complaint and which he repeated during the trial.

“The symptoms agreed with what the victim reported,” said the doctors, forensics and psychologists who treated the girl at the Hospital Cliníc in Barcelona early on the morning she reported Alves’ attack.

They reported that, in the following months, he would suffer from sleep disorders and deterioration of his social connections, among others. “I also had symptoms of guilt and shame. One of the indicators is guilt,” she said.

However, the psychiatrist consulted by the former player’s defense stated that “an anxiety disorder has been confused with post-traumatic stress disorder”.

“Furthermore, they gave him 0.25 milligrams of Tranquimazín, the lowest dose of this drug, while due to what he had experienced he should have received stronger drugs,” he criticized.

Without traces of violence: the expertise that favors the footballer

Other forensic experts indicated they found no signs of physical violence in the young woman. Only a blow to the knee which had the appearance, according to the clinical point of view, of a scratch caused by “rubbing”, alluding without saying it in words to the possible coming and going of sexual intercourse.

“There are no vaginal lesions,” they said. “The physical and gynecological examination was carried out with utmost precision and there is not a single ecchymosis (bruise) anywhere, even though he said it hurt her a lot,” they added. The result of the objective examination of the forensic report does not coincide with the victim’s story, because nowhere are there any injuries or irritations.”

“There are no signs that there was an abusive relationship. It makes me think that the relationship wasn’t that traumatic after all,” said another specialist presented by the former footballer’s defence.

On Wednesday night, as he was being transferred in handcuffs from the courtroom to the cells of the Barcelona Courthouse, his mother saw him pass and began to cry.

40 kilometers from the Sutton nightclub where he was a VIP customer, Dani Alves awaits his sentence in the sex offenders wing of Brians 2 Correctional Centre.