The defense strategy of the player Dani Alves goes through ensuring that the relationship with the complainant of the sexual assault in a bathroom in a private room at the Sutton nightclub was consented and dismantling the victim’s version. For this, he has filed an appeal in which he requests his release from provisional prison, in which he has been admitted for 10 days, since he considers that the images from the security camera of the premises “refute in the most radical way the climate of terror that the complainant describes”.
The appeal, presented by Alves’ lawyers, indicates that the complainant, her cousin, and a friend entered this private area, known as ‘La Suite’ at around 3:20 in the morning and that for 20 minutes they were “chatting in a way playful and festive” with the player and his companion “surrounded by a lot of people in an open space”. For the lawyers, this environment “is far from being the context and scene of environmental intimidation” that the courts mark to “bend the capacity of the victim.”
In addition, the lawyers question the statement of the complainant that Alves “closed the door” of the bathroom after she entered, since at around 3:42 the player is seen in the images accessing the bathroom and two minutes later the complainant comes after speaking with the two friends and the waiter without the player “giving him the way or opening the door. The images speak for themselves.”
“And this is the moment prior to the sexual encounter in the tiny cubicle or bathroom in which one entered first and then the other. And that the complainant describes and expresses as lived in a climate of terror, fear or microcosm of domination, a scenario that the images deny them in the most radical way,” says the resource. For this reason, the lawyers emphasize that there is a doubt about whether the sexual relations were consented or forced: “The images that are observed conflict and conflict and contradict the description made by the complainant” as well as her “report of what happened in the solitude of the couple in the den of the bathroom” since it can “also be adorned with identical elements of narrative distortion”.
In his appeal, with such a release from provisional prison, Alves’ lawyers offer to deliver the player’s Brazilian and Spanish passports, that he wear a telematic bracelet, that he pay the necessary bail, without specifying the amount, that he be at a distance and without communicating with the victim or appear daily in court.
They assure that there is no risk of flight on which the judge relied to send him to prison without bail on January 20, given that Alves voluntarily went to testify before the Mossos and no longer has the “economic muscle of periodic income” that the instructor attributed. This is how they remember that he was fired from the Mexican Pumas in which he played for his accusation of rape.
The lawyers recall that the Brazilian player voluntarily appeared to testify before the Mossos d’Esquadra when he already knew that a complaint for a sexual offense weighed on him and it had been published that he was going to be arrested. That is why they believe that “it is obvious, going to the appeal is the opposite of fleeing” to indicate that this risk of fleeing does not exist. They also point out that he went to the police appointment in Barcelona after the burial of his mother-in-law in Santa Cruz de Tenerife instead of going directly to Mexico since his team was waiting for him at the time.
Alves made an appointment with the Mossos d’Esquadra in his lawyer’s office on January 20 and was arrested for sexual assault. It is also recalled that the player resides in Esplugues de Llobregat (Barcelona) and that he has personal, family, social and business roots in the Catalan capital and that is why he is not going to escape.
The appeal disgraces the judge who also justified the pretrial detention to prevent Alves from reacting violently against the victim, since “this prognosis cannot be affirmed without any element that suggests his concurrence, however slight it may be.”
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