Benjamin Mendy said ‘You can’t get out anyway’ before ‘raping woman in locked bedroom’, court hears
Footballer Benjamin Mendy told a woman that she couldn’t leave a locked bedroom before he allegedly raped her, a court heard.
Mendy, 28, is accused of multiple sex offences, with prosecutors claiming he is a “predator” who “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game”.
On the fourth day of the trial at Chester Crown Court, jurors heard the tearful police interview from a second alleged victim who said Mendy had left her bleeding from a sexual assault in a locked bedroom. He then told the 20-year-old woman: “Don’t tell anyone and you can come over here every night.”
The court heard she had been out with three friends at a bar called Parea in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, on a Sunday night in October 2020.
They had a table and got talking to three “Black guys”, with Mendy buying drinks, and when the bar closed she and her friends and other girls were invited back to the footballer’s mansion, The Spinney, in Mottram St Andrew, an isolated village nearby.
At the house, she sat down near the indoor swimming pool and started scrolling through her phone, but Mendy came over and grabbed it from her hand claiming she was taking photos of him and saying he could be “fined” hundreds of thousands of pounds, the court heard.
Mendy then took the woman’s phone and proceeded upstairs, to where she followed him requesting he return it, it is alleged. The woman said she followed the footballer into a room that the footballer opened with a fingerprint before it locked behind them.
She told the court that she had said to Mendy: “Listen, I want my phone, I don’t know what you think is going on. I don’t want sex with you. He said, ‘The door is locked anyway.’ He said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ He then said, ‘If you just take your clothes off, I just want to look at you. I promise. I just want to see your t**s, your t**s are so big.’”
She told police she thought getting undressed would be “the lesser of two evils” and that she would not then have to have sex with Mendy, so she stripped to her underwear then told him she wanted to go.
Mendy threw her phone on the bed and as she went to get it he approached her from behind and pushed her onto the bed, she said.
She added: “He was holding my love handles and I was saying, ‘No, I really don’t want to have sex with you,’” before the footballer proceeded to rape her, the court heard.
The jury heard she was raped three times by Mendy in the next 20 minutes or so, as she told him: “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have sex with you. I need to go.” She told the court: “My body was so tense. It was just this pain.”
She said Mendy had told her afterwards “You're too shy,” and that he had had sex with “10,000” women, and that she could visit his house again.
The next day at work she was waiting for a meeting when a colleague came over. Mendy’s accuser told police: “She just looked at me and said, ‘Is everything all right?’ I just started crying my eyes out. I just said I was in a situation last night. I don’t know what to do but I don’t feel OK about it.”
She added: “What makes me really upset is how many times I said no. I was very clear and that wasn’t listened to. That has really been hard to get my head around because I’ve never experienced anything like that before – it could have never been misinterpreted,” she told police.
Later she spoke to her mother, sister and a sexual assault referral centre, and she went to the police around three weeks later.
The day after the alleged rape she got a Snapchat message from Mendy with lots of question marks, and one from Saha Matturie saying: “Are you OK? Please can you call me so we can discuss?”
She took screenshots and blocked both their numbers, she said.
Mendy denies eight counts of rape, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault against seven young women. Matturie also denies eight counts of rape and four counts of sexual assault relating to eight young women.
The trial continues.
