In a statement, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJCAT) reported that the four judges of the Court of Appeals unanimously decided to give the reason to the former soccer player and annul a conviction in which HThey looked empty, inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions about the facts, the legal assessment and its consequences.
The Court of Appeals also spoke of probative insufficiencies in the sentence And described The testimony of the complainant as not reliable. However, he also did not say that the true version of what happened was that of Alves, but that the accusation was not sufficiently accredited.
Therefore, the judges acquitted the former Barcelona player, 41, who I was already on probation Waiting for resource resolution, and They canceled the precautionary measures.
Read more: alves in Spanish courts surrounded by screams and insults
“We are very happy. Is innocent and has been demonstrated. Justice has already spoken, ”Alves’s lawyer told Rac1 Radio, Inés Guardiola, that was with him.
“It has been very exciting,” he added.
The events occurred in the Bathrooms from a Barcelona disco he December 31, 2022, When Alves spent a few days in the city after returning from the Catar World Cup, which he played with Brazil, and before returning to the Los Pumas team, in Mexico.
Alves entered preventive detention in January 2023, shortly after the events, and was finally sentenced on February 22, 2024. On March 25, 2024, it was released on probation, After 14 months, in exchange for the payment of a bail of one million euros.
Also read: In Spain they denied news about the suicide of Dani Alves in prison
Divergence between the related and what happened
The Court of Appeals rejected the resources of the Prosecutor’s Office, which I asked to increase the penalty to nine yearsand of the particular accusation, which requested 12 years.
Alves and the complainant met in a Reserved part of the disco. The athlete was there with a friend, and the complainant, with a cousin and a friend.
After inviting them to champagne, Alves would have invited the young woman to enter another exclusive area where there was a small bathroomin which some events occurred on which both disagreed at the trial.
The first part of the meeting, when both met, remained recorded by security cameras of the establishment, but not the second, that of alleged crime in the bathrooms.
The original sentence found that the woman’s story about The facts that were recorded did not correspond to what was seen, But he gave credibility to the events that occurred outside the camera because the story was consistent and for the injuries he presented.
However, the Court of Appeals estimates that the divergence between what was reported by the complainant and what really happened seriously compromises the reliability of your story.
It also estimates that probative insufficiencies They have expressed themselves lead to the conclusion that the standard that requires the presumption of innocence has not been overcome.
President of Brazil criticized Alves
The president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, spoke on the Alves case when it was on probation, criticizing the existence of a Justice for rich and another for poor.
A Spanish Court of Appeals annuls the sentence of 4 years and 6 months in jail for sex #AFP #AFPDEPORTES pic.twitter.com/p8gvbar09b
-Agency France-Presse (@afpespanol) March 28, 2025
“We see that Daniel Alves can be released prior payment. I learned in Pernambuco, when I was little, that a person who owned 20 bosses of Rés did not go to prison. This remains like this,” the president lamented in March 2024.
“Daniel Alves’s money, the money that someone could give him, cannot redeem a man’s offense to a woman he raped,” he added.