The judge instructing the alleged sexual assault of the former FC Barcelona player Dani Alves a young woman at the Sutton nightclub in the Catalan capital has summoned the footballer to testify again for next Monday at the request of his defense lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, as EL PERIÓDICO has learned. It will be the second time that the Brazilian appears in court to explain what happened in the early morning of December 31 at the entertainment venue. The first, on January 20, did not end well for him.
Given the contradictions he incurred during his interrogation, he came to give up to three versions, and the evidence, the substitute magistrate who was in charge of the investigation at the time, ordered his imprisonment due to the risk of flight. The togada wrote in the prison order in which it motivated the preventive confinement of Alves that “there are much more than enough indications” to consider that a rape took place in the disco and that the suspect was the author of it. The togada left that assessment before emphasizing that the instruction has just begun.
The images captured by the nightclub’s security cameras showed the meeting that the player had with the victim and some friends in the VIP area of the nightclub. The videos show that, after engaging in a conversation for several minutes, the player went to the private bathroom and then her young woman, when he insisted, according to her. They were in the bathroom for 16 minutes. There are no recordings of what happens inside that space. The woman assures that as soon as she saw that it was a bathroom –with a toilet and a sink– she wanted to leave, but she affirms that Alves closed the door and prevented her from doing so. He slapped her and raped her, according to the complaint.
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Since January, the court has been receiving the results of evidence that plays against Alves, such as the police report of the fingerprints found in the disco’s sink and that corroborate the young woman’s version or the casual recording through the camera that a mosso from the state in which the young woman was found was carrying minutes after the alleged sexual assault.
But the most compelling proof is the analysis of the remains of semen that were collected from the victim’s intravaginal samples. The DNA matches that of the footballer. In other words, they corroborate that there was penetration, when none of the three versions offered by the player had mentioned it. Alves explained first that he did not know the young woman, then that she had entered the bathroom when he was inside her and, finally, that the woman gave him fellatio and that he “let himself be done by her”. How will the Brazilian player explain the remains of his semen in the woman’s body? Next Monday will leave doubts.