Former Brazilian football player Dani Alves has had a rape conviction against him quashed upon appeal.
The top court in Spain’s Catalonia region said it overturned the original ruling in Alves’ case saying it had presented “inconsistencies and contradictions”.
The former Barcelona player was found guilty of sexual assault in February last year and was sentenced to four years and six months in prison. He denied wrongdoing during the three-day trial.
It was ruled that Alves raped the victim in a bathroom at an upscale Barcelona nightclub early on New Year’s Eve in 2022.
On Friday, the top court in Catalonia ruled that there was “insufficient evidence” to rule out Alves’ presumption of innocence.
In the judges’ ruling, they wrote that the testimony of the victim “differed notably” from evidence of video footage taken before the woman and Alves entered the bathroom where she said he forced her to have sex without her consent.
In March last year, Alves paid €1m (then £930,000) in bail to be released from prison while appealing the rape conviction.
The former Barcelona footballer paid the sum and handed over his Brazilian and Spanish passports after prosecutors had argued he was a flight risk.
Alves, now 41, had before that been kept in jail from January 2023 until March 2024.
He may now leave the country as the appeal court lifted all travel restrictions.
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The decision can still be appealed before Spain’s Supreme Court.
The Alves trial was the first high-profile case since Spain overhauled its laws in 2022 to make consent central to defining a sex crime in response to an increase in protests after a gang-rape case during the San Fermin bull-running festival in Pamplona in 2016.
The legislation popularly known as the “only yes means yes” law defines consent as an explicit expression of a person’s will, making it clear that silence or passivity do not equal consent.
