“It is difficult to comment on a situation like this. I am surprised and shocked meeting Dani. Justice will dictate whatever: we cannot enter there. I know very much for Dani”. Xavi, the Barcelona coach, responded with these words after being asked this January about the Alves case, in provisional prison since then after being denounced by a 23-year-old girl who says that he sexually assaulted her in the bathroom of the nightclub’s private room Sutton Barcelona on the night of December 30.
Some statements that did not sit well with the footballer. “Xavi is my friend, my lifelong friend and he didn’t think about the consequences when he said that. When I heard it, I cried. I would have loved to pick up a phone to call him and say: ‘Thank you, thank you, but don’t ever do that again. Do not say anything. Please forget about me, I’ll take care of myself, don’t worry’”said the Brazilian to the journalist Mayka Navarro, who published an exclusive interview with him yesterday in The vanguard and who has continued to reveal new phrases in Ana Rosa’s programspace in which he also collaborates.
visits in jail
Navarro also asked him if he had missed a friend in these months in which he has been incarcerated. “Not a single one. I also tell him that everyone I’ve played football with is not my friend…”, responds.
“But if, I have friends in football who have even wanted to come see me, but I haven’t let them”, he confesses, and adds the reason: “Jail is not a place for them. Neither for my children, nor for my parents, nor for my wife…, although in the end it had been so many months that I let them visit me”.
“I don’t let anyone come and I don’t want anyone to defend me in public because right now defending myself is detrimental to whoever does it. I do not expect anything from anyone”keep going.
Sentence
The Brazilian, despite all the information that has come out against him and the refusal of the Barcelona Court to release him provisionally pending trial, scheduled for autumn this year, continues to defend his innocence tooth and nail. “I am not a rapist. I am not a sex offender. As it was not what they insinuated to me, those who threw bananas at me in soccer. I have the mental and moral strength to shield myself from injustices and stigmas.”
“I will leave here with my head held high and I will maintain my life project, which is to live in Barcelona and see my children grow up in Barcelona. This is my city and I had decided a long time ago that I wanted to live here,” he says. and clarifies about his children: “They did not register and school as a defense strategy”.
When Navarro points out that the rapist is one of the worst tags that it may have, it responds: “I know, but even if I am sentenced and spend my years here, I will walk out that door with my head held high and apologizing only to the one person to whom I owe my apologies, my wife.”
