After several legal adventures, French footballer Benjamin Mendy was finally declared not guilty of rape and attempted rape this Friday by British justice. Aged 28, Benjamin Mendy burst into tears during the statement of the verdict, at the end of three weeks of trial in Chester, in the north of England. The jury delivered its verdict after just over three hours of deliberation.
He had been retried since the end of June on two charges for which the jury had not reached a verdict at the end of the first trial. He was charged with the rape of a 24-year-old woman in October 2020 and the attempted rape of a 29-year-old woman two years earlier, charges he strongly contested. The defender with 10 selections with the Blues, had been suspended by Manchester City who did not renew his contract which expires on June 30.
Under judicial supervision pending
In the first trial, after four months of hearings, the jury, made up of eight men and four women, retired to deliberate on December 5, but discussions were interrupted several times due to Covid-19 cases. then for a long-planned break, before a truce over the holiday season. Benjamin Mendy was finally imprisoned at the end of August 2021 and spent more than four months in pre-trial detention, before being released in early January 2022, and placed under judicial supervision pending his first trial.
Trained in Le Havre, revealed in Marseille and spent a season with Monaco, Benjamin Mendy became the most expensive defender in history in 2017 when the Citizens paid 52 million pounds (about 61.4 million euros at the current price). ) to secure his services.