Benjamin Mendy: footballer tried to rape woman after shower, jury told

The Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy tried to rape a woman who had gone to his house to meet another footballer in his entourage, a court has heard.

She told police the 28-year-old assaulted her after she had a shower in his mansion, tugging at her towel and telling her he wanted to see her naked before attempting to have intercourse with her.

The woman, then 29, had met Mendy in a nightclub in Barcelona in October 2017 along with another French footballer, Diacko Fofana, a jury at Chester crown court was told on Wednesday.

The woman, who was described by the prosecutor, Timothy Cray QC, as “the opposite of a football groupie”, told police she was introduced to Fofana and Mendy by a club promoter who offered them VIP treatment. “We don’t want to hang around in queues and stuff so we took advantage of the opportunity,” she said in a video interview played to the jury in Wednesday.

The next year, in October 2018, she agreed to meet Fofana at Mendy’s multimillion pound mansion in Mottram St Andrew, near Macclesfield in Cheshire.

That night she went out for dinner and to a few clubs in Manchester with the footballers. They were accompanied by two other women, one “very beautiful” who appeared to be with Mendy and was sitting on his lap, the jury heard.

In the interview, recorded in January this year, she described how Mendy began to show her unwanted attention in one of the clubs, touching her and saying: “When he’s [Fofana] not looking I’m going to kidnap you.”

She said she thought he was joking: “I just said ‘no, you’re not’ and took his hands off me. I said ‘I want him’, as in, I want Diacko. I made it clear that my intention was solely directed just at Diacko.”

She spent the night with Fofana but the next day was