The Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy told one of his alleged victims he had slept with 10,000 women, his rape trial has heard.
The 28-year-old Frenchman made the boast to a woman after raping her in his bedroom, having confiscated her phone at his Cheshire mansion, Chester crown court heard on Thursday.
The woman – the first of seven to go to police to accuse the footballer of rape or sexual assault – said she believed she had been locked in the room after Mendy told her she could not get out and promised to give her phone back if she stripped naked.
In a police video interview played to the jury at Chester crown court, the woman, then a 24-year-old teacher, said she met Mendy at Parea, a bar in Alderley Edge, an affluent Cheshire town, on 11 October 2020.
When the bar closed, she and some friends went back to Mendy’s home in nearby Mottram St Andrew, where she was confronted by the footballer after he saw her using Snapchat on her phone.
She claims he told her that she could not put pictures of his house on social media, as he had already been fined £200,000 for having lockdown-breaking parties. He then took her phone and started looking through her pictures, she said, some of which were of an intimate nature.
She described following the footballer upstairs and into a bedroom he unlocked using his fingerprint on a touch screen, as she repeatedly asked for her phone back. She said she made it clear she was not interested in him. “I said: I don’t want to have sex with you. I want to go,” she told police.
He then started asking to see her naked but she refused, she claimed.
Believing she was locked in, the woman described taking off all of her clothes apart from a thong. He then grabbed her from behind, she claimed, before he attacked her. When she protested, he said: “Oh, you’re too shy,” she claimed. “And I said ‘No, I’m not shy. I just don’t want to have sex with you.’ And he was like: ‘It’s fine. I’ve had sex with 10,000 women. It’s OK.’”
She said she told him she needed to go and started to get changed, only for him to say: “If you don’t tell anyone anything you can come here every night.” She said she did not understand how he could possibly see what he had done to her as “a privilege” that she would want to repeat.
Interviewed by a specialist police officer, she described how she repeatedly said no. “What really upsets me is how many times I said no. How many times I said: I don’t want to have sex with you. I was very clear and that wasn’t listened to,” she said.
She was interviewed on 11 November 2020, nine months before Mendy was charged with any sexual offences by Greater Manchester police.
Eleanor Laws QC, Mendy’s barrister, read out messages to the jury from the woman to a friend early on in the evening.
In the messages, the woman said she was going to “get fucked”, meaning drunk, and “listen, if I’m ever going to get pregnant, it’s tonight”.
The woman said it was a joke. She denied Laws’ suggestion that the sexual activity was consensual and that she had lied about the 10,000 women remark.
Mendy denies all of the charges against him.
The trial continues.