Ex-Barca, Brazil footballer Dani Alves guilty of sexual assault

Former Barcelona and PSG defender Dani Alves was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman outside of a Barcelona nightclub in December of 2022. Additionally, he must pay the victim €150,000.

He will also be placed on five years of probation upon release, and a nine-and-a-half-year restraining order will also be put into effect.

“The sentence considers that it has been proven that the victim did not consent, and that there is evidence, in addition to the testimony of the plaintiff, to consider the rape proven,” the court said in a statement.

The victim had alleged that Alves took her into a bathroom in the VIP section of the club before forcing her to have sex with him despite repeated pleas to be let go.

According to a friend of Alves’ who was there that night, Alves drank wine and whiskey prior to heading out to the nightclub. While at the club, Alves and a woman were dancing and reportedly showing “chemistry.” According to the friend’s account, the woman seemed fine after she and Alves returned from the bathroom.

The Brazilian national team player was arrested the next month, and continued to change his story as more evidence appeared. First, he said he did not know the victim, then said that he met her but they didn’t do anything in the bathroom. Once biological evidence came back, Alves said that she consensually gave him oral sex, then maintained that the sex was consensual, and lied due to not wanting his wife to find out about it.

According to the victim, she willingly danced with Alves and went to the bathroom with him. She said that she wanted to leave, and he would not let her, slapping her in the face, insulting her, and raping her — which Alves denied during trial.

“If she wanted to leave, she could have left, she was not obligated to be there,” he said during his testimony.

Alves originally was facing up to nine years in prison if found guilty. His lawyers told reporters that Alves plans to appeal his sentence.

“We are satisfied as the sentence recognizes what we’ve been saying all along: That the victim was telling the truth and that she suffered,” the victim’s lawyer, David Saenz, told ESPN. He added that his team would look into if the sentence corresponds to the severity of the crime.

Alves had been playing for Pumas UNAM in Mexico, but had been dropped from the team following the arrest.