Dylan Bettencourt
Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy is alleged to have raped three women in one night following a pool party at his mansion, a court heard.
The 28-year-old is accused of attacking the women in his remote million pound mansion as he and a friend “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game.”
Two of the victims felt they could not escape Mendy’s study and bedroom because the doors had been shut with a lock designed to turn the rooms into panic rooms, according to The Times.
The French left-back faces eight accusations of rape, one of attempted rape and another of sexual assault. He denies all the charges.
Mendy’s co-accused Louis Saha Matturie denies eight charges of rape and four of sexual assault. Two women are said to have been raped by both men.
On the first day of Mendy’s trial, the jury was told that Saha’s job was “to find young women and to create the situations where those young women could be raped and sexually assaulted”.
One of the victims said she remembered being in a swimming pool during the party and her next memory was being face down on a sofa in the living room with her arms being held behind her back.
She accused Mendy of telling her at that moment not to move. Saha is accused of raping the same woman.
Timothy Cray, for the prosecution, told the court the pair targeted women as young as 17 “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”.
Mendy, a Fifa World Cup winner, is believed to have been paying for the flat of his co-accused.
Cray added that this case has very little to do with football but is about the broader issue of men taking advantage of women.
“It is another chapter in a very old story: men rape and sexually assault women because they think they are powerful, and because they think they can get away with it,” the lawyer said.
Image source: @TheGuardian
