Footballer Benjamin Mendy, a defender for top English club Manchester City, is on trial accused of raping women as young as 17 in “panic rooms” at his countryside mansion.
A practising Muslim who has previously made the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Mendy is a French citizen who played for the French national team from 2017 to 2019, contributing a remarkably brief 40 minutes of playtime to a single goalless game during their winning World Cup effort in Russia in 2018.
But while the 28-year-old once made headlines in Britain as “the world’s most expensive defender”, reportedly transferring to Manchester City from Monaco for £52 million, he is now back under the public spotlight for unambiguously negative reasons, appearing before Chester Crown Court to face eight charges of rape, one count of attempted rape, and one charge of sexual assault against five women — charges which he denies.
The prosecution, as quoted by The Telegraph, said Mendy had “friend and fixer” Louis Saha Matturie, who himself faces eight rape charges and four sexual assault charges against eight women, which he also denies, lure his alleged victims out to his large and isolated mansion in the countryside, and that once inside “the free, informed consent to sex of the women… just did not matter.”
“Because of his wealth and status, others were prepared to help him to get what he wanted,” prosecutor Timothy Cray QC said, referring to Mendy’s co-defendant Matturi, 40.
“The allegations show that one of Saha’s jobs for Mendy was to find young women and to create the situations where those young women could be raped and sexually assaulted,” the prosecutor alleged, telling jurors that “[o]ur case is that the defendants’ pursuit of… 13 women turned them into predators, who were prepared to commit serious sexual offences. The fact they would not take no for an answer, or that they engineered situations where no was not even an option, is something you will hear time and time again.”
Some women are said to have been attacked in the mansion’s cinema and in ad hoc “panic rooms” set up via special locking mechanisms on room doors in the mansion, ostensibly installed as an anti-burglary measure. Others are said to have been attacked while they were unconscious.
The trial continues.
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