Benjamin Mendy said he slept with “hundreds of women” and admitted breaching COVID-19 lockdown regulations and driving after consuming alcohol, but denied that he is a “danger to women” during his third day of giving evidence in his rape trial.
Prosecution barrister Timothy Cray KC put it to Mendy that he would “quickly have sex” or try to have sex with women soon after meeting them, and that the Manchester City defender would often never speak to them again afterwards.
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“I prefer to ask to have sex after few words than to be like, ‘Hello’, ‘Can you meet the next day?’, ‘Can you go for a date?’. I am direct,” Mendy told the court. “That’s why I was quick and direct to ask if they wanted to have sex, to avoid that. If we had more (a more substantial relationship), I could hurt their feelings.”
Mendy denies seven counts of rape against four women, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault.
He was arrested in November 2020 and January 2021 and then charged in August last year. Mendy was released on bail after both arrests under the conditions that he had to live and sleep in his Prestbury mansion and not have parties there nor at an apartment in Salford.
The 28-year-old said that he continued to have parties at both addresses, however, during a period of strict pandemic restrictions in England.
When asked whether he felt the rules did not apply to him, he replied: “I was not thinking at all.”
“About my social life, I did a lot of things wrong,” he said. “But about women, I didn’t.”
Mendy said he did not tell City about his parties. When it was pointed out to him that he had been on the bench for a game at Chelsea in January 2021, a day after an alleged incident, he admitted he had not behaved professionally.
Mr Cray often circled back to Mendy’s drinking, suggesting the France international had been too drunk to know whether some or all of the six women to have made complaints against him had given their consent or not.
On one occasion, Mr Cray appeared surprised when Mendy confirmed that he had been drinking at the time of one allegation against him, around lunchtime.
“I’m not drunk but I can’t say I was sober,” Mendy said. Asked later to clarify what he had been drinking by his defence barrister, Eleanor Laws KC, he said he had had “one or two glasses of tequila” with a friend.
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Ms Laws had also asked Mendy to clarify what he meant when he used the word ‘drunk’.
“For me, drunk is when you had some drink,” he said. “It’s not good to say this in court but I want you to understand: with my friends we use, ‘I’m fucked’, but I was not like this.”
When asked how drunk he was on the night of one alleged offence, Mendy said he had driven under the influence of alcohol.
“I was feeling good,” he said. “I knew what I was doing. I could dance, and I drove.”
Asked how he feels about that now he said: “Embarrassed.It’s not a nice thing to do and to say, but at the time I was not thinking all of that was bad — the parties, (not heeding) the COVID-19 rules.
“It’s like I was on the train, I was going fast, and I just kept going until I went to prison. That was the first time I was really alone and I started to think about everything.”
The court had previously heard from another witness that Mendy had been too drunk to stand up.
He confirmed that he had been inhaling gas from balloons as well as drinking alcohol on that occasion, but when it was put to him that he was “just too drunk to remember”, he replied: “Impossible.”
Mendy was also asked on several occasions whether he thought, after being arrested twice, that he might be in “dangerous territory”.
“Maybe a bit, but I kept going,” he said.
When asked whether he had received “plenty of warning about his behaviour”, he replied: “From my side no, because for me everything was fine; I knew I went to the police interview and was arrested but because in my head I did nothing wrong, I just carried on.”
Mendy said he was asked to use contraception by some women but not by any of the complainants in the trial.
When asked by Mr Cray whether he ever worried about catching a sexually-transmitted infection, the footballer replied: “Maybe a few times, but I was enjoying.”
Asked by Ms Laws what he now thinks about his attitude towards contraception, he said: “I was crazy, I was taking risks.”
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Mr Cray put it to Mendy that he was a danger towards women, to which he replied: “No, never.” Asked later by Ms Laws why he would say that, Mendy said: “Because I have a lot of nieces, sisters, friends also; in my way, I tried to be friendly to women, to have parties, to have fun, to have alcohol, to have food.
“Everyone had good parties there, when somebody said, ‘Open the gate’, we opened it. We didn’t put their phones somewhere. If they ask to find them, we help. We were cool with them.”
The trial continues.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
