A French international footballer who plays for English Premier League champions Manchester City has been acquitted of raping four women at his home in the northwest of England.
Benjamin Mendy, 28, went on trial in August 2022 on charges relating to seven women between October 2018 and August 2021. He maintained all the women consented.
Mendy—who played for France between 2017 and 2019—was suspended by Manchester City after he was arrested on Aug. 26, 2021.
On Friday a jury of eight men and four women at Chester Crown Court found him not guilty of six counts of rape, allegedly committed against four women, and acquitted him of one count of sexual assault against a fifth woman. He was acquitted of another rape charge on the judge’s directions, in September.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the other counts and he faces a retrial later this year.
His co-accused, Louis Saha Matturie, 41, was found not guilty of three counts of rape relating to two teenagers. There was a hung jury on the other counts.
Mendy ‘Looks Forward to Clearing his Name’
The footballer’s solicitor Jenny Wiltshire said: “Mr. Mendy is delighted that he has been unanimously acquitted of eight of the 10 charges he faced. He looks forward to clearing his name in relation to the other two charges so he can start rebuilding his life.”At the start of the trial, prosecutor Timothy Cray, KC, told the jury Mendy was a “predator” who “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game” and his friend, Matturie, was given the task of finding young women for sex.
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.”
He said Mendy had a “privileged and moneyed lifestyle” and knew his “wealth and status” meant “the doors of restaurants and nightclubs were open to him” and people, especially women, wanted to hang out with him.
The trial heard of sex parties at Mendy’s mansion in Mottram St. Andrew, an affluent village where a number of footballers and other celebrities have homes.
Cray said of the victims, they were, “women who were so drunk almost to the extent that they had little or no memory of the incidents, or were asleep, or they were waking from sleep.”
One woman, who was 23 at the time, said she went back to the house in the early hours of Aug. 23, 2021 after meeting Mendy and several other players in the VIP area of the China White nightclub in Manchester.
She told the trial she was drunk and that, after being raped by Mendy, she had consensual sex with his team-mate Jack Grealish—who played for England in the World Cup in Qatar—and another man.
Mendy’s Lawyer Denied He Was a ‘Predatory Monster’
In her closing speech, Mendy’s lawyer, Eleanor Laws, KC, said: “If you are not sure he’s a predatory monster, he’s entitled to acquittal. It is one word against another.”She said: “His life, as he knew it, is over, in football, in the UK. These accusations, he will never escape. Look up Ched Evans; men who have been falsely accused, they never escape them.”
Speaking on behalf of Mendy, Laws said, “Please use common sense and bring an end to this absolute hell.”
Matthurie’s lawyer, Lisa Wilding, KC, told the jury: “This case, and I don’t say this flippantly at all, has all the makings of a good drama; it has money, sex, it has celebrity. But like all good dramas, there was, I suggest, before your eyes over the last 15 weeks the most significant plot twist.”
She reminded them of mobile phone footage which emerged during the trial of a 19-year-old girl who was having “enthusiastic” sex with her client, who she had accused of rape.
Wilding said, “I suggest you have the clearest example of how chillingly easy it is to make a false allegation by a girl who is at the heart of that complex spiders web of connections.”
She went on: “Women have earned sexual equality and young people, your life experience may tell you, approach sexual encounters very differently to those who earned that sexual equality 40 years ago.”
Wilding added: “You may be under clear impression from what you have seen in this case that many of the women in this case actively pursued sexual encounters with men they hardly knew and that is their right. But consensual sex is a complex thing. Regret and hurt and embarrassment can all follow consensual sexual intercourse.”
Mendy’s club issued a statement on Friday which said: “Manchester City FC notes the verdict from Chester Crown Court today where a jury has found Benjamin Mendy not guilty of seven charges. The jury is hung on two charges and the trial is now over.”
It added, “Given there are open matters related to this case, the club is not in a position to comment further at this time.”
