Two of the seven women who have denounced the Manchester City player, accused of eight rapes, an attempted rape and a sexual assault, spoke yesterday at the trial
The trial of Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy – suspended by his club for a year – continues in England. Yesterday it was the turn of two of the seven women whom the player allegedly raped. The testimonies of the victims describe in depth the terror they suffered in the mansion that Mendy owns in Cheshire, where the prosecutor points out that the alleged violations were committed.
The footballer followed a pattern with the victims: coerce them and lock them in the “panic room”, as the prosecutor in the case stated this week. Yesterday, one of the victims told how the player invited her to a party at her mansion after meeting her at a local bar. To the victim’s surprise, the soccer player took his mobile phone without permission and began to spy on his photos while he went to a room that he opened with his fingerprint. The door closed. “I want my phone, I don’t want to have sex with you. I just want to go,” the victim told him, according to the trial. The City footballer, according to the testimony, refused: «I promise, I just want to look at you. You can’t go out anyway.”
From that moment on, the victim decided to take off her clothes as the “lesser of two evils”. “I thought I’d get undressed… ‘at least you don’t have to do anything with him’.” But it was not like that. According to the victim, Mendy pounced on her and she asked him to leave. But she couldn’t. The woman addressed the jury stating that the soccer player raped her “three times in 20 minutes” while she tried to stop him: “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have sex with you.” The victim stated that her body was sore and bleeding after that and that the soccer player accused her of being “shy”, to which she replied, according to what she says, that “I just don’t want to have sex with you”. Mendy then allegedly bragged about her experiences: “Okay, I’ve had sex with 10,000 women. (…) Don’t say anything to anyone and you can come here every night », says the victim in her version of events.
“When you’re not looking, I’m going to kidnap you”
The trial session included testimony from another of Mendy’s alleged victims. A woman he met in Barcelona along with her friend. The following year, the victim traveled to England to visit her and the footballer. The three went to two nightclubs that night, and in one of them, Mendy allegedly told the victim that “when you’re not looking, I’m going to kidnap you.”
According to the testimony, the next morning he woke up at the soccer player’s house and while he was taking a shower, he entered the room “obstructing it” while the victim tried to grab his underwear. “He made an effort to see me and take my towel off,” this woman tells the court. She says that he «took off his underpants and brought her penis closer… I kept thinking ‘where are his friends? Why is no one here? Scream? Has no sense. He’s on his own turf, what am I going to do?’
The victims’ account coincides with the “panic room” of the Cheshire mansion that the prosecutor described on Monday. The prosecution stated that nine of the alleged crimes were committed at that location. The player, through his friend Louis Saha Matturie – also accused – locked up the girls and forbade them to access the house with a mobile phone. Mendy, 28, denies the ten charges against him for events that allegedly occurred between October 2018 and August 2021. The player faces life in prison.
