French footballer Benjamin Mendy was found not guilty of rape and attempted rape on Friday July 14 by a British court, six months after being acquitted of six other rape charges and one of sexual assault.
The jury delivered its verdict after three hours of deliberation. Benjamin Mendy, 28, had been retried since the end of June in Chester (north-west England) on two charges, for which the jury had not reached a verdict at the end of the first trial. He was charged with the rape of a 24-year-old woman in October 2020 and the attempted rape of a 29-year-old woman in 2018 – charges he strongly contested.
“Benjamin Mendy wants to thank the members of the jury [composed of six women and six men] for focusing on the evidence in this trial rather than the rumors and innuendo that have accompanied this case,” his lawyers said.
Dark suit and ocher overcoat, Benjamin Mendy did not speak and refused to answer questions from journalists.
During the hearing, the prosecutor, Benjamin Aina, described Benjamin Mendy as a man whose fame and wealth mean that he is not used to women saying no to him. The footballer, meanwhile, assured that “never” he would force a woman.
Seven different accusers
At the first trial, after four months of hearings, the jury – four women and eight men – retired to deliberate on December 5. But the discussions had been interrupted several times due to cases of Covid-19, then for a long-planned break, before a truce for the end of the year holidays.
Winner, as a substitute, of the 2018 World Cup with the France team, Benjamin Mendy was imprisoned in August 2021 and spent more than four months in pre-trial detention. The police had just indicted him for four rapes and a sexual assault. His club, Manchester City, had suspended him in stride.
These first indictments then snowballed. Several new women had filed a complaint against him. In total, Benjamin Mendy had been indicted ten times, for eight rapes, an attempted rape and a sexual assault, against seven different women, between 2018 and 2021. Released at the beginning of January 2022, he had been placed under surveillance court pending trial.
Trained in Le Havre, revealed in Marseille and spent by Monaco for a season, Benjamin Mendy became the most expensive defender in history in 2017, when Manchester City paid 52 million pounds (about 61.4 million euros) to secure his services.