The court has handed down a sentence on Dani Alves and I will not be the one who, unlike his former teammate Gerard Piqué, considers that he should spend more years behind bars. Or rot away the rest of his days in a cell. Case closed.
As already happened with the conviction and imprisonment of Iñaki Urdangarin, one is pleased with the justice of this country, so severely attacked day in and day out in the media and the political sphere, from where the idea is transmitted that we are in hands of sinister, dressed and capricious characters who do whatever they want.
Not so many years ago, I have the impression that Dani Alves would have gotten away with it, covered up even from FC Barcelona itself and with the social complicity of everyone – perhaps even me. Here is an unquestionable merit of feminism. Of so many women. And, above all, those who, without boasting or arrogating or making this condition profitable, made us see, granite by granite, so many masculine clumsinesses, among which, yes, they never included considering rape as minor.
Perhaps it is machismo to say – but that's what I think – that many men have been the first to demand severity with those who abuse a woman and rape her, taking advantage, sneakily, of her being drunk or things like that. We never needed a law that made things clear...
Neither fame nor money have saved the Barça footballer from this conviction and from the status of rapist that he earned that night of December 30, 2022 at the Sutton nightclub at the expense of a young woman who should never have stayed in a booth given the slimy attitude of the footballer. No one is saying that this permanence justifies the violation in the slightest, but that the case should serve to warn about the “culture of the reserved.”
I lack legislative knowledge to give an opinion on whether the years of the sentence are few or many. I hope the victim rebuilds her life, I celebrate that her identity has been preserved and I regret that Alves had another side to the cordial and friendly one that he conveyed. And once he has served his sentence, I wish him to be a new man.
