Dani Alves Acquitted of Sexual Assault Charges by High Court

BARCELONA, Spain — The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has acquitted former footballer Dani Alves after unanimously overturning a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence for sexual assault on March 22, 2025. The ruling concluded that the testimony of the accuser lacked sufficient credibility to sustain a conviction.

The appellate court’s decision invalidated all precautionary measures against Alves, including the requirement to maintain a distance from the accuser and the payment of compensation. The court dismissed appeals from both the public prosecutor’s office, which had sought a nine-year sentence, and the private prosecution, which requested twelve years.

In their ruling, the TSJC noted significant “gaps, imprecisions, inconsistencies, and contradictions” in the victim’s account, particularly regarding aspects that could be verified objectively, such as security footage from the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona, where the incident reportedly occurred during the early hours of December 31, 2022.

The court highlighted contradictions between the victim’s testimony and the material evidence, including DNA reports and fingerprint analyses. The appeal judgment criticized the original ruling for reaching a “leap of judgment” by accepting the young woman’s claims of non-consensual penetration without adequately contrasting those assertions with all available evidence.

“The leap of judgment made by the initial sentencing places the subjective belief in the accuser’s testimony above the necessary comparisons with other evidence,” the judges stated, as reported by the Catalan newspaper Sport. The ruling emphasized that criminal convictions require a “reinforced canon of motivation,” stressing that the presumption of innocence was not overcome in this case.

The judges clarified that the decision to acquit Alves was rooted in the failure to prove the accusation’s hypothesis but did not automatically validate the defense’s narrative. “The absence of evidence supporting the prosecution’s hypothesis does not imply that the defense’s version is the true one,” the judgment specified.

Dani Alves had been in pre-trial detention for fourteen months after his arrest in January 2023. In March 2024, the Barcelona Court granted him provisional release after he posted a one-million-euro bail. The judges then ruled that the risk of flight had diminished due to Alves’ residency in the city and his cooperation with the judicial process.

The original conviction in February 2024 resulted in a sentence less severe than what the accusers sought, as the court applied a mitigating factor of damage repair after Alves compensated the victim with 150,000 euros. The first-instance court had found that the player acted with violence and without consent, yet that judgment has now been entirely annulled by the TSJC, which underscored the original decision’s inadequacies in evaluating the available evidentiary elements.

Following the announcement of the court’s decision, Alves’ defense attorney, Inés Guardiola, expressed her satisfaction, stating in an interview with RAC1: “We are very happy; justice has been served, and it has been proven that Alves is innocent.”