August 15 – The trial of Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy began today (Monday) over rape allegations, with the prosecutor arguing that the French player considered his victims “disposable”.
Mendy, 28, is accused of eight counts of rape, one of attempted rape and one of sexual assault. The offences allegedly took place between October 2018 and August 2021 at the home of Mendy. He stands on trial alongside co-defendant Louis Saha Matturie, 41.
Timothy Cray QC said this case had “very little to do with football” and was more about men who “think they are powerful”.
Cray said: “It is another chapter in a very old story: men who rape and sexually assault women, because they think they are powerful, and because they think they can get away with it.”
“These women were disposable: things to be used for sex, then thrown to one side. That was the effect of deliberate, planned choices the defendants made, and the desires they let loose many times.”
The prosecutor alleged “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 acts that the defendants did together show callous indifference to the women they went after.”
The prosecutor said of both Mendy and Saha: “The defendants’ pursuit of these 13 women turned them into predators, who were prepared to commit serious sexual offences. … They would not take ‘no’ for an answer, or that they engineered situations where ‘no’ was not even an option.”
Mendy, a World Cup winner with the French national team, has denied the charges. The trial continues.
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