Former Barcelona star Dani Alves has been cleared on appeal of raping a woman at a Catalan nightclub.
The Brazilian footballer, 41, was handed a four and half year prison sentence in February last year after three judges convicted him of the sex attack following a three-day trial.
Public prosecutors appealed and called for him to be jailed for nine years. Private prosecutors acting on behalf of the woman who accused him of raping her at Sutton Nightclub in Barcelona on January 30, 2022 demanded he be jailed for 12 years after they also contested the original conviction and prison sentence.
On Friday the Catalan High Court rejected the appeals – and acquitted Alves of the crime he was convicted of last year. Alves has been on bail since March last year.
The Catalan High Court ruling was announced in a 101-page written document. It said: “It cannot be concluded that the limits of the presumption of innocence have been surpassed.”
Alves had to post €1 million bail to be allowed to leave prison – and agreed to hand in his passports as part of a ban on leaving Spain and sign on at court every Friday. He ordered take-away hamburgers on his first night of freedom.
He protested his innocence on February 7 last year after taking the stand on the last day of his three-day trial, saying the sex he had with his 23-year-old female accuser was consensual and insisting he would never hurt anyone.
The woman he was found guilty of raping insisted he had forced himself on her after hitting her when she gave her evidence in court behind a screen.
The three original trial judges confirmed in a 61-page written ruling convicting him of the sex attack they had taken into account as a “mitigating factor” his pre-payment of the €150,000 (£128,000) he was ordered to give his victim as compensation.
The Catalan High Court of Justice said in a statement confirming Alves’ acquittal on appeal: “The Appeals Section of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia has unanimously upheld the appeal of footballer Dani Alves, who was sentenced by Section 21 of the Provincial Court of Barcelona to 4 years and 6 months in prison for a crime of sexual assault on a young woman in a Barcelona nightclub on December 31, 2022.
“The full bench of the Appeals Section, composed of judges María Angels Vivas, Roser Bach, Maria Jesus Manzano, and judge Manuel Álvarez, does not share the conviction expressed by the Barcelona Court and points out that its exposition contains ‘a series of gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and contradictions regarding the facts, the legal assessment, and its consequences.
“The court thus dismisses the appeals of the prosecution – which requested the partial annulment of the sentence and, alternatively, an increase in the penalty to nine years – and of the private prosecution – which sought to raise the penalty to 12 years – and acquits the defendant, nullifying the precautionary measures imposed.”
The appeal judges ruled Dani Alves’ accuser was an “unreliable complainant” as shown by video evidence and the fact she denied a sexual act had taken place which had been corroborated “with very high probability” by DNA tests. They added: “It cannot be concluded that the standards required by the presumption of innocence have been met. The trial court’s ruling uses the term credibility as a synonym for reliability in its analysis, and it is not.
“Credibility corresponds to a subjective belief, which cannot be verified, associated with the person giving the statement. Reliability, on the other hand, pertains to the statement itself.”
Mirror
