The Manchester City star Benjamin Mendy admitted asking a fellow footballer if he could have sex with his partner after the other man was finished with her, a court has heard.
Mendy said the other player, Diacko Fofana, agreed, but that as soon as the woman told him no, he stopped trying to sleep with her.
She is one of six women who accuse Mendy of raping, sexually assaulting or attempting to rape them at his multimillion-pound mansion in Cheshire. The 28-year-old denies all nine charges against him.
Giving evidence in his defence at Chester crown court on Tuesday, Mendy recalled meeting the woman in a nightclub in Barcelona in 2017, where he had been having surgery. That night she struck up a flirtation with Fofana and agreed to visit him when he was staying in Mendy’s mansion in October 2018.
Mendy described how they all went out to a nightclub in Manchester, where he “joked” about kidnapping her when Fofana was not looking.
He said the woman flirted with him and had “some banters” with him and that he thought she fancied him.
When the group returned to Mendy’s home in Mottram St Andrew, near Alderley Edge, Fofana and the woman spent the night together. The following morning, Mendy claimed, he asked Fofana “if it was OK if I try to have sex with [the woman].”
He told the jury that Fofana agreed and that he now realised it was a “disrespectful and bad” move, but that at the time he went upstairs and tried his luck.
The woman was in the shower and Mendy began to try to seduce her when she got out. The pair ended up “cuddling and spooning” on the bed, he claimed, until he asked her to have sex and she said “no, because of Diacko”, Mendy said.
He said he told her that Fofana had “said it was OK” and “she started to get upset”, putting an end to the episode, he insisted. The jury had previously heard the woman describe him attempt to rape her by pressing his penis against her vagina as she tried repeatedly to “wriggle out of it” and to keep her towel on.
The 28-year-old Premier League star sat in the witness box as his lawyer, Eleanor Laws KC, took him through the allegations. He spoke in English in a strong French accent, occasionally consulting an interpreter when he struggled with his vocabulary – for example when describing a dance move made by wiggling on the floor (it was the caterpillar, more commonly known as the worm).
The jury was shown footage of one complainant captured on CCTV at a nightclub dancing with Mendy and hugging him the night after he allegedly raped her.
The morning after allegedly raping another woman, Mendy had to go to training for a few hours but returned to find her playing ping-pong in his house, he claimed. He said she returned to his house “lots of times” after the alleged rape, which he insisted was consensual sex.
The woman who sparked the initial police investigation and Mendy’s first arrest in August 2021 was just 17 years old, the court heard. Mendy claimed he thought she was 21 or 22, and said they enjoyed “dirty” sex and that she agreed to take the morning-after pill afterwards, sending him a photo of the pill before she took it.
Prosecutors say Mendy is a “predator” who “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game”, while his co-defendant, Louis Saha Matturie, allegedly had the job of finding young women for sex, which he denies.
Matturie, 41, of Eccles, Salford, denies six counts of rape and three counts of sexual assault relating to seven young women.
The trial continues.
• This article was amended on 9 November 2022 to correct several misspellings of Diacko Fofana’s last name.
