Benjamin Mendy returns to trial for rape Manchester City player – Corriere.it

He will have to appear again before the judges Benjamin Mendy28-year-old defender of the Manchester City overwhelmed in the last three years by reports of rape and sexual harassment against six women, for a total of eight cases (seven rapes and one attempted rape). The alleged episodes of violence date back to a period ranging from 2018 to 2020, when the French player was already in force at City, bought the year before from Monaco for 60 million euros. Over the next three weeks, as told by theTeam, the French defender will be called to defend himself again before the Chester Crown Court, an English court located in Chester Castle, which has always settled some of the most complex judicial cases. The defendant has already firmly denied the violence. Mendy had related that the women were all consenting and to please the opposite sex for money and success, even if he wasn’t as good looking as Brad Pitt.

Mendy accused of rape, the stages of the story

The court will be presided over by the judge Steven Everett, honorary clerk of the court. In January, in the first judicial process which lasted five months and began on 10 August 2022, the footballer was found not guilty (with a unanimous verdict) and relieved of the charges of rape and harassment (crimes for which he could face up to 19 years in prison)brought forward by some of the six victims, but has yet to answer for two other alleged remaining incidents, for which he had been indicted. Respectively, another woman who accused him of sexual assault and a girl who said she was attacked by the footballer, but then managed to save herself. For these two cases, which occurred like the others in the villa owned by the footballer, justice has not yet been pronounced. The legal events have not facilitated Mendy’s life in the last two years, suspended by the club as early as August 2021 but still winning three Premier Leagues with the Citizens.

Career over?

In all probability he will leave the club definitively (which no longer wanted to make statements on the matter), due to the contract which will expire at the end of June and which in all probability will not be renewed. Told by the media as a sexual predator unable to listen to the no of the victimsalready in custody and later released on bail, the various stages of the first trial in recent months had been followed by dozens of journalists, resulting in a public debate that jeopardized the player’s career, even before English justice could issue a sentence on all the cases examined.

All this despite the fact that Mendy, between one injury and another, hadn’t been able to express himself at his best in the shirt of the current European champions in recent years. He will also be judged before the same court Louis Saha Matturie, a former Manchester United footballer accused together with Mendy of the same crimes during the holidays in the defender’s villa, found not guilty in three cases of rape against two other women who had filed a complaint. Even for him, not all cases have already been examined by the judges. For the 41-year-old former striker, a new trial will begin in September.