Former Brazilian footballer Dani Alves was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in a Barcelona nightclub in 2022 by Catalonia’s top court on Thursday.
He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and ordered to pay €150,000 to the victim.
“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.
Despite his claims of consensual sex, the court disagreed and the prosecutor had originally sought a nine-year prison sentence.
Dani Alves, aged 40, was arrested in January 2023 after being accused of assaulting a woman in a nightclub bathroom on New Year’s Eve 2022.
He had been held in preventive pre-trial prison ever since, with bail requests repeatedly denied due to the risk of him fleeing.
During the trial in Barcelona earlier this month, Alves changed his story multiple times before eventually admitting to meeting the woman in the club bathroom.
The case lasted three days and concluded with the court’s decision to convict Alves.
The former Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain defender, when confronted with biological evidence, changed his version of events again, saying she had consensually performed oral sex on him.
Last April, following the results of further biological tests, Dani Alves admitted for the first time that he had sex with the woman, claiming it was consensual and that he had lied to hide his infidelity to his wife.
