Manchester City's Benjamin Mendy told accuser ‘I have had sex with 10,000 women’, court hears

A footballer raped a woman before telling her, "it's fine, I have sex with 10,000 women", a court has heard.

Benjamin Mendy, 28, then told the woman, "don't tell anyone and you can come over here every night", like it was a "privilege" to have sex with him.

The French international is accused of multiple sex offences, with prosecutors claiming he is a “predator” who “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game”.

His co-accused, Louis Saha Matturie, 41, Mendy’s friend and fixer, had the job of finding young women for sex, it is alleged.

Chester Crown Court heard Mendy is alleged to have told the 20-year-old woman she was "locked" in a room before making her strip, and then raping her three times.

On the fourth day of the trial, the accuser’s tearful police interview was played to the jury.

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.

She told the jury that Mendy walked up some stairs saying he was checking the phone, and as it was unlocked he started going through her “private pictures”.

He went through a door, opened by a fingerprint touchscreen, and she followed him into a bedroom and the door closed behind them, she said.

She told the court that she 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.”

She told police she thought getting undressed would be “the lesser of two evils” and she would not then have to have sex with him, so 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 on to 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’.”

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.”

She said he told her afterwards “You’re too shy” and that he had had sex with thousands of women, and she could visit his house again.

"It was like a privilege to come over to have that done every night by him," she told police.

She said she left the bedroom, went to the toilet then left the house with her friends.

The next day at work she was waiting for a meeting when a colleague came over.

Mendy’s accuser told police: “She just looked at me and said, ‘Is everything all right?’ I just started crying my eyes out. I just said I was in a situation last night. I don’t know what to do but I don’t feel OK about it.”

She added: “What makes me really upset is how many times I said no.”

Later she spoke to her mother, sister and a sexual assault referral centre and went to police around three weeks later.

The day after the alleged rape she got a Snapchat message from Mendy with lots of question marks, and one from Saha Matturie saying: “Are you OK? Please can you call me so we can discuss?”

She took screenshots and blocked both their numbers.

Mendy denies eight counts of rape, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault against seven young women.

Matturie, of Eccles, Salford, denies eight counts of rape and four counts of sexual assault relating to eight young women.

Both men say if any sex did take place with women or girls it was consensual.

In cross-examination, Eleanor Laws QC, defending Mendy, put it to the witness that her phone contained “very explicit” photos that she was “happy” for Mendy to look at before she gave him oral sex.

Giving evidence from the witness box, screened from the public gallery by a curtain, the woman said: “No, absolutely not.”

Ms Laws suggested Mendy did not talk about having sex with 10,000 women and that it was a “privilege” to have sex with him.

The witness replied: “I’m absolutely certain, in high definition in my mind, it’s the most traumatising thing that has ever happened to me.”

The trial continues.