The Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy has told jurors in his trial for rape that it was “normal” for him to have sex with multiple women on a night out, and to sleep with the same women as his friends without using contraception.
Giving evidence at Chester crown court on Monday, the player said it was “honestly, so easy” for him to meet women to have sex with.
But the 28-year-old French international player said that he always stopped if a woman said “no”. Being in prison while on remand for the charges had made him “learn lots of things about life”, he told the jury.
Mendy said he had begun to receive attention from women when he was 18 and playing for Marseille. When asked by his barrister, Eleanor Laws KC, if he realised why, he said: “At the beginning, no, but after, yes. Because of status.”
When he joined Manchester City in 2017, he said, the attention became “10 times more”. He added: “The way they came to me, it’s not because of my look, it’s because of football.”
Asked about his attitude to having sex with women he did not know particularly well, he said: “At the time I was not thinking, like, how they were feeling or they can be upset because, for me, if they wanted to have sex and I wanted to, everything was fine and I would carry on my partying.”
He said he was enjoying “having sex with a lot of women”. But he said if a woman said “no” he would “be fine, I’d accept it and I’d stop”.
The footballer said he “didn’t worry” about using contraception although he “knew the risks”. He said sleeping with different women on the same night was “normal” for him.
Asked about having sex with women who had sex with his friends on the same night, Mendy said: “The same. It was part of us.”
Two women told police they were “passed between” Mendy and his friend and “fixer” Louis Saha Matturie at Mendy’s multimillion-pound Cheshire mansion, where he held pool parties. One was so drunk she only found out both men had had sex with her when semen from each was found in her knickers, the jury was told earlier in the trial.
When asked to speak up during his evidence on Monday, Mendy said he was “ashamed” to talk about sex. He said: “More embarrassed, like when you ask me the question I can’t scream: ‘Yeah I love sex’ because it would seem weird.”
The jury was told Mendy had been in prison on remand from August last year until January. He said it was the first time in his life he had had time to “really think about what I was doing”.
He said he had his first non-football job in prison, making £4 a day, which he would spend in the canteen. “It taught me the value of money,” he said, adding: “I was sad and upset to be going there but at the same time I learn lots of things about life and the way I was.”
Mendy denies seven counts of rape, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault against six young women.
Matturie, 41, of Eccles, Salford, denies six counts of rape and three counts of sexual assault relating to seven young women.
The trial, which began in August, will continue on Tuesday.
