BARCELONA (AP) — Brazilian soccer star Dani Alves won his appeal against a sexual assault conviction after a Spanish court overturned the ruling on Friday.
Alves was found guilty in February 2024 of raping a woman at a nightclub in December 2022, and was sentenced to four years and six months in prison. The former Brazil national team defender and Barcelona player denied any wrongdoing during the three-day trial.
The court ruled on Friday that there was “insufficient evidence” to overcome Alves’s presumption of innocence.
Alves’s trial was the first high-profile case since Spain reformed its laws in 2022 to place consent at the center of defining a sexual crime, in response to rising protests after a gang-rape case during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona in 2016.
The legislation defines consent as the explicit expression of a person’s will, making clear that silence or inaction does not equal consent.
But the four judges on a Barcelona appeals court unanimously ruled to overturn the conviction. In their decision, they wrote that the complainant’s testimony differed markedly from the video footage captured before the woman and Alves entered the bathroom where she said he forced her to have sex without her consent.
Alves, now 41, had been jailed from January 20, 2023, until March 2024, when he was released after posting a 1 million euro bail (then about $1.2 million) while awaiting the outcome of his appeal.
