Explained: Why a Spanish court overturned Dani Alves’ prison sentence for sexual assault

Thirteen months after being found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, former Barcelona and Brazil full-back Dani Alves has had his conviction overturned on appeal.

Alves, 41, was accused of sexually assaulting a 23-year-old woman in December 2022 in the private bathroom of a suite at the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona. He was arrested and placed in preventive detention on January 20, 2023. 

Alves has repeatedly denied the charges against him but admitted during his trial that sexual penetration did take place, though he said it was consensual. The former footballer acknowledged he had lied in previous statements in an attempt to preserve his marriage. 

He was found guilty at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Catalunya (TSJC, the Catalan high court) in Barcelona on February 22, 2024, and ordered to pay €150,000 (£128,000, $163,000 at the time) in compensation to the complainant and was banned from contacting her for nine years.

Alves was granted bail the following month (March 2024) while all sides awaited the outcome of appeals submitted against the initial ruling. The prosecutor’s office wanted to increase the sentence to nine years in prison, the private prosecution was asking for a 12-year sentence and Alves and his defence team wanted the decision overturned. 

Then, last week, on March 28, an appeal court at the TSJC, which was presided over by one male judge and three female judges, unanimously upheld Alves’ appeal, overturning the ruling from last year. 

So, how did this happen? And what were the reasons for such a different decision? The Athletic consulted Sonia Ricondo, a lawyer who specialises in gender violence, to help explain the key details from a convoluted, 101-page ruling.

“We do not share the conviction reached by the Court of First Instance expressed in its ruling, the exposition of which contains throughout the reasoning a series of gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions regarding the facts, the legal assessment and its consequences,” said the TSJC.

So, what are those gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions? 

This latest ruling focuses, in particular, on the evidence — the expert reports (fingerprints, examination of the complainant’s body) and the recordings from the nightclub’s security cameras.

Before considering exactly what the TSJC said, it’s worth remembering what the trial heard happened that night, from the testimonies of those involved and CCTV footage. 

On the night of December 30, 2022, Alves went to the Sutton nightclub in uptown Barcelona with a friend. The complainant was also there with a cousin and a friend. Alves was often at the nightclub and went to table No 6 in the VIP area he frequented. The complainant and her two companions were invited to that VIP area by some Mexicans.

At some point during the night, Alves invited them to his private suite. They were talking and dancing until the former footballer went to the bathroom in the private suite, which was accessed through an adjoining door, and two minutes later, the complainant followed him into the room.

At 4am, approximately 20 minutes later, Alves came out of the suite first, taking someone else’s glass and heading for another table. Seconds later, the complainant also left the suite, and she then asked her cousin if they wanted to leave the place. 

They went to go and, on reaching the corridor that leads to the exit, the complainant burst into tears and was attended to by the nightclub staff, who activated the sexual assault protocol. While she was being attended to, Alves and his friend passed by without speaking to the complainant or her companions.

The complainant was taken to the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, where she underwent a medical examination. Samples were taken from her body and her clothes. Doctors found injuries to her knees and symptoms of post-traumatic anxiety and depression.

This is what the court heard, from multiple witnesses, and saw, from the CCTV footage. 

What happened inside the bathroom of the private suite was not captured by any cameras. 

The complainant claimed that Alves tried to penetrate her vaginally, that he tried to get her to perform oral sex, which she refused to do, and that when he saw that she wanted to leave, the former footballer used his greater strength to throw her to the ground. According to the complainant, this caused her to injure her knee.

Seeing no way out, according to the complainant, and in such a small space, she felt intimidated and unable to react. Using physical force, she said that Alves pushed her down onto the toilet and penetrated her vaginally until he ejaculated inside her.

From this statement, the TSJC concludes that the fingerprints marked in the expert report found “are incompatible with her account because the only fingerprint found is that of the right hand on the left side of the cistern, which cannot be the case if she was looking towards the toilet as she claims”. This means that the fingerprints found do not coincide with the posture described by the complainant during the act.

Another inconsistency highlighted by the TSJC is regarding the complainant’s claim that she did not perform oral sex on Alves, as the former footballer claimed. She said that he brought his genitals to her face and that she moved his penis away from her mouth. According to her, he used force to get her on her knees but when asked if she would perform oral sex, she said no.

The new ruling outlined how there was DNA evidence in the complainant’s mouth that belonged to Alves and supported his claim that oral sex had taken place. 

The third contradiction, according to the TSJC, lies in the reason for the injuries to the complainant’s knees, which are linked to when Alves is said to have forced her to try to perform oral sex on him. If the first ruling did not consider oral sex to be proven, says the TSJC, then the injuries to the knees could not be related to that motive.

“The account is inconsistent because that knee injury could have occurred in the small space in many ways, as all forensic scientists and medical professionals admit,” explains the new ruling.

The second key point of the TSJC’s different ruling is consent. While the first ruling gave a lot of veracity to the testimony of the complainant to conclude that there had been no consent to the act, the new ruling says that it cannot be proven that there was no consent. To do this, it points to the recordings of the moments before they both entered the bathroom.

The complainant claimed to feel uncomfortable and her companions described Alves’ attitude towards her as overbearing. 

On this, the TSJC says the following: “Her statements about the atmosphere of discomfort in the private room have been totally inaccurate, they do not conform to what can be seen on the cameras that record the 20 minutes they spent in the room talking, dancing and having drinks… Mr A. entered the bathroom… the complainant followed two minutes after talking to her friend and cousin and giving them the drink she had in her hand, with a friendly farewell to her cousin.” 

In short, the TSJC judges do not consider that the images reflect the complainant’s discomfort, so they do not consider her account or that of her cousin and her friend to be proven. Therefore, they see no reason why the complainant would not give her consent to Alves.

“The ruling does not say that the TSJC does not believe the complainant, but it weighs up the evidence that there was, the presumption of innocence weighs more, which within the Spanish judicial system has an important weight and to destroy it there must be very strong evidence,” Ricondo explains to The Athletic. “It says that in this case the insufficiencies of evidence that they talk about tip the balance towards his version of events.”

The TSJC concluded: “The insufficiencies of evidence that have been expressed lead to the conclusion that the standard required by the presumption of innocence has not been met, which will have the effect of leading to the revocation of the ruling of the court of first instance and the handing down of an acquittal.”

They also ordered for the €150,000 compensation to be returned to Alves and for the removal of precautionary measures such as probation and a restraining order. 

“The first ruling had its sights set on the ‘only yes means yes’ law,” says Riccondo.

Spain passed legislation in 2022, referred to as the ‘solo si es si’ law (‘only yes means yes’), that stated sexual consent must be affirmative by acts that “clearly express the will of the person” and that it cannot be assumed by default or through silence.

“In the new ruling, they set aside that law and went over what did not agree with the complainant’s account piece by piece,” explains Ricondo. 

“In the first ruling it was explained that the complainant’s attitude could not make us decide whether or not the aggression had taken place and it destroyed many stereotypes about the complainant’s behaviour. 

“The second ruling reflects none of this and leaves behind arguments that the first ruling had vindicated. There has been a very brutal paradigm shift between the first and second rulings.”

At the end of the new ruling, it says that Alves’ version cannot be taken as proven either when he says that the sex was consensual. But as he is not the complainant, he does not have to prove anything.

“In the Spanish judicial system, the verisimilitude, credibility and reliability that you study is that of the person who has made the accusation, not that of the accused. Within this framework, like it or not, he can explain whatever version he wants. It is the accuser who is required to be credible,” Ricondo explains.

What’s next? 

Esther Garcia, the complainant’s lawyer, has announced that she will appeal against this new ruling. The public prosecutor’s office has also appealed.

“This appeal is being made to the Supreme Court. It will be difficult because this type of appeal has very restricted formal and procedural requirements when requesting a conviction,” Ricondo explains.

The final ruling is pending but for the moment, Dani Alves has been acquitted of all charges and all the precautionary measures have been lifted, pending the Supreme Court’s decision.

(Top photo: David Zorrakino/Europa Press via Getty Images)