Former FC Barcelona player Dani Alves assured this Monday before the judge that she is conducting the investigation against him for alleged sexual assault that the relationship he had with the young complainant, aged 23, at the Sutton nightclub it was consensual sex and therefore did not force it. In this way, he has responded to the DNA analysis of the remains of semen found inside the victim’s body and which revealed that she was penetrated, an extreme that was not explained or recognized by the Brazilian soccer player in his first and until today only statement, on January 20, the same day he entered jail.
Given the contradictions he incurred during that interrogation, he came to give up to three versions, and the evidence that has since been compiled, 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 she argued the preventive confinement of Alves that “there is much more than enough evidence” to consider that a rape took place in the disco and that the suspect was the author of it. The judicial resolution, later confirmed by the Barcelona Court, maintained that there was a risk of escape due to Alves’ economic capacity. It is not ruled out that the defense, exercised by the lawyer Cristóbal Martell, request freedom again.
The images of the disco
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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 at dawn on December 31. The videos show that, after engaging in a conversation for several minutes, the player went to the private bathroom and then the young woman followed him, when he insisted, according to her version. They remained 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, the woman explained in her complaint.
Since January, the court has been receiving the results of evidence against Alves, such as the police report of the fingerprints found in the disco’s bathroom and that corroborate the young woman’s version or the casual recording, through the camera carried by a mosso, of the state the young woman was in 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 and that has forced the player to give a new version of what happened.