Court overturns Dani Alves’ rape conviction on appeal

Barcelona: Former Barcelona player Dani Alves won his appeal against a sexual assault conviction as a Spanish court overturned the ruling Friday.

Alves was found guilty in February 2024 of raping a woman in a nightclub in December 2022 and sentenced to four years, six months in prison. The former Brazil and Barcelona defender denied wrongdoing during the three-day trial.

That court ruled Friday that there was “insufficient evidence” to rule out Alves’ presumption of innocence.

“Dani Alves is innocent, and that has been proven,” his defense lawyer Inés Guardiola told Catalan radio RAC1. “Justice has finally been served.”

The Alves trial was the first high-profile case since Spain overhauled its laws in 2022 to make consent central to defining a sex crime in response to an upswell of protests after a gang-rape case during the San Fermin bull-running festival in Pamplona in 2016.

The legislation popularly known as the “only yes means yes” law defines consent as an explicit expression of a person’s will, making it clear that silence or passivity do not equal consent.

But the four judges of a Barcelona-based appeals court ruled unanimously to overturn the conviction after reviewing the evidence and testimonies given to the lower court. In their ruling, they wrote that the testimony of the plaintiff “differed notably” from evidence of video footage.