Dani Alves seemed like one of the good guys – now we know he wasn’t | Jonathan Wilson

Messi called him the world’s greatest full-back but after rape verdict we can never watch clips of Brazilian in the same way

The first emotion has to be of sympathy for the victim, the young woman who was raped by Dani Alves in a nightclub bathroom in Barcelona in the early hours of 31 December 2022. The details of the case, the verdict rendered all the more chilling by the legal terminology in which it is couched, are horrifying: “There was violence to force the victim to have sexual relations.”

There is the horror the victim endured, the appalling nature of the attack and the difficulties she must have endured in the months that have followed and that she will continue to endure. But because of Alves’s fame, that strange – ultimately trivial – sense that we “know” celebrities, there is also feeling of shock, and of betrayal.

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