Manchester City must pay their former defender Benjamin Mendy the majority of £11m in wages deducted from his pay packet when he was on rape and sexual assault charges, of which he was later acquitted, an employment tribunal has ruled.
Mendy, who was the world’s most expensive defender when he signed for City in 2017, challenged the Premier League club’s decision to cease paying him from September 2021 until June 2023, when his contract expired.
The following month, he was found not guilty of raping one woman and attempting to rape another after a retrial at Chester crown court. In January 2023, Mendy, who now plays for the French Ligue 2 club Lorient, had been found not guilty of six counts of rape and one count of sexual assault.
In a judgment, published on Wednesday, Judge Joanne Dunlop said that Mendy was entitled to damages for the periods when he was not in custody but not for those when he was being held in jail awaiting trial. It means that the former France international will be entitled to unpaid wages in respect of about 17 months of the 22-month period for which he was claiming.
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Mendy was first arrested in November 2020 after a young woman accused him of raping her a few weeks earlier after she met him in a bar in Alderley Edge. He was released under investigation but arrested again on 4 January 2021 after a second woman reported him to the police, accusing him of sexually assaulting her at a party at his home two days earlier.
Mendy was bailed on the condition that he did not hold parties at his home and continued to play for Manchester City but he continued to invite women back to his mansion. After an afterparty he was again accused of rape. The club suspended him and put him on unpaid leave after he was charged on 26 August and remanded to prison.
Mendy was held in custody until 7 January 2022 before being bailed and spent a second period in custody between 30 December 2022 and 17 January 2022. Dunlop said he was not entitled to recover the wages deducted during those periods because “his inability to perform the contract was, in part, due to his own culpable actions in breaching his bail conditions”.
By contrast, the judge said that Mendy could recover for the two periods he was on bail when he was prevented from fulfilling his contractual obligations partly because of a Football Association suspension, made without any findings of misconduct.
“I found that Mr Mendy was ‘ready and willing’ to work during the non-custody periods, and was prevented from doing so by impediments (the FA suspension and bail conditions) which were unavoidable or involuntary on his part,” Dunlop wrote. “In those circumstances, and absent any authorisation in the contract for the employer to withhold pay, he was entitled to be paid.”
She said there was a general principle“that the obligation on the employer to pay wages (absent an express contractual provision) subsists during a suspension which is imposed not as a sanction, but as an interim, precautionary measure”.
Dunlop added: “To a degree, both sides presented arguments which went to the question of whether or not Mr Mendy deserves to be paid the wages that Manchester City chose to withhold from him.
“Mr Mendy’s position is that he is an innocent man whose career has been ruined, and life blighted, by false sexual allegations and that the football club which brought him to this country effectively abandoned him in his hour of need. Manchester City’s position is that Mr Mendy largely brought his troubles upon himself and ignored sensible advice and warning after warning in his self-destructive pursuit of his chosen lifestyle.
“Both these narratives have validity, and there is no one cause of the chain of events which unfolded in this case. The question of whether Mr Mendy deserves to be paid, however, is one for the commentators and comments sections. The only question for me is whether Manchester City was legally entitled to withhold that pay.”
