Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy has been found not guilty of one count of rape on the direction of the judge at his trial at Chester Crown Court.
Mendy, 28, was cleared of the rape of a 19-year-old woman at his home in Prestbury, Cheshire on 24 July last year.
Co-accused Louis Saha Mendy, 41, was also found not guilty on the direction of the judge of two counts of rape and one of sexual assault against the same woman.
Judge Stephen Everett ordered the jury to clear the defendants of those counts after the prosecution offered no further evidence and formal not guilty counts were entered.
Both men are still on trial for multiple alleged sexual offences.
Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy is accused of eight counts of rape, one count of sexual assault and one count of attempted rape, relating to seven young women.
During the trial the court heard the former Manchester City defender told a woman that she couldn’t leave a locked bedroom before he allegedly raped her.
On the fourth day of the trial at Chester Crown Court, jurors heard the tearful police interview from a second alleged victim who said Mendy had left her bleeding from a sexual assault in a locked bedroom. He then told the 20-year-old woman: “Don’t tell anyone and you can come over here every night.”
The court heard she had been out with three friends at a bar called Parea in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, on a Sunday night in October 2020.
They had a table and got talking to three “Black guys”, with Mendy buying drinks, and when the bar closed she and her friends and other girls were invited back to the footballer’s mansion, The Spinney, in Mottram St Andrew, an isolated village nearby.
At the house, she sat down near the indoor swimming pool and started scrolling through her phone, but Mendy came over and grabbed it from her hand claiming she was taking photos of him and saying he could be “fined” hundreds of thousands of pounds, the court heard.
Mendy then took the woman’s phone and proceeded upstairs, to where she followed him requesting he return it, it is alleged. The woman said she followed the footballer into a room that the footballer opened with a fingerprint before it locked behind them.
She told the court that she had said to Mendy: “Listen, I want my phone, I don’t know what you think is going on. I don’t want sex with you. He said, ‘The door is locked anyway.’ He said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ He then said, ‘If you just take your clothes off, I just want to look at you. I promise. I just want to see your t**s, your t**s are so big.’”
She told police she thought getting undressed would be “the lesser of two evils” and that she would not then have to have sex with Mendy, so she stripped to her underwear then told him she wanted to go.
Mendy threw her phone on the bed and as she went to get it he approached her from behind and pushed her onto the bed, she said.
She added: “He was holding my love handles and I was saying, ‘No, I really don’t want to have sex with you,’” before the footballer proceeded to rape her, the court heard.
The jury heard she was raped three times by Mendy in the next 20 minutes or so, as she told him: “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have sex with you. I need to go.” She told the court: “My body was so tense. It was just this pain.”
