Benjamin Mendy’s five-month trial lifted the lid on his private life off the pitch, offering unique “through the keyhole” access to his home and inner circle.
The jury heard the defender’s chat-up lines: “I said to her, ‘Show me your bum.’ She showed me her bum and I said: ‘Do you want to have sex?’” They discovered he never used contraception, despite regularly sleeping with multiple women in the course of a night. They heard that Mendy and his friends sometimes had sex with the same women, albeit separately, on some nights.
The case began with the prosecution giving the jury a video tour of his mansion, called the Spinney, which Mendy bought in November 2017 for £4.8m, shortly after being signed by Manchester City for £52m. It was the first property he saw, he told the court, and he bought it immediately.
The footage, shot on a police officer’s body-worn camera, began outside, where a yellow Lamborghini was among numerous cars in the driveway. The jury was then shown the basement, where Mendy had a swimming pool, jacuzzi, sauna and home gym, as well as a football pitch. Paintings of Mendy and various graphics bearing his name could be seen on the walls. On the first floor, a huge room was set up as a nursery for his young child.
Mendy liked expensive things but was generous with his belongings, the court heard. His assistant, Jodie Deakin, said she once saw him take off a designer tracksuit and give it to a homeless person in Manchester. Brands would send him piles of unsolicited clothes, which visitors often ended up wearing if their own got wet in one of his pool parties.
City manager Pep Guardiola said of Mendy: “He’s a really good boy, I would say, so generous. I think he is happy and I remember that when we were together and everybody asks for some favours and he was able to do it.” But he stressed that he did not know what Mendy got up to in his own time: “I’m not his father.”
But the players, often picked out for greatness before even hitting their teens, were often treated like children, not expected to be able to manage their own lives. The picture that emerged in court of Mendy was of a spoiled princeling who had never been expected to live like an adult. Deakin described having to deal with demands for payments that came through to Mendy’s mansion when he ran out of money to pay for renovations. Despite earning vast sums, he could not keep track of his spending – it was only in prison, when he was earning £4 a day, that he learned the value of money, he admitted.
Deakin described a flamboyant character who liked to stand out. “You can tell a mile off he’s a footballer, as they all have similar dress sense. He drips in designer. A lot of girls would be attracted to that look,” she told the jury.
Despite being popular among City staff, Mendy was “not the perfect professional”, according to Marc Boixasa, a former head of first team operations and support. “On one side, he was really liked by everyone in the team dressing room, players and staff. Sometimes his professionalism was questionable, arriving late in the morning or arriving late for certain meetings.”
That Mendy was often late for practice was unsurprising – the jury heard that he would often party until dawn despite having to get up for morning training. His guests would be left to carry on the party or to get his private chef to rustle them up some breakfast. Often they were still at the Spinney when he returned.
His cleaner Yvonne Shea knew full well he was having wild parties and sometimes turned up to tidy up the aftermath.
She described attending the player’s home in Prestbury after a party. Asked what she saw when she entered the house, Shea said: “Catastrophe. Bottles everywhere, food everywhere. The glass tabletop had been broken. It was like windscreen glass, so that was all over everywhere.”
Various women were wandering around trying to find their handbags, she said. Mendy operated what seemed like an open-house policy at the Spinney.
They were part of “the Manchester scene”, meeting in nightclubs such as Chinawhite in Manchester city centre or Parea in Alderley Edge, a Cheshire suburb beloved of Manchester’s nouveau riche and particularly players of the city’s two football clubs. The jury heard these were the sort of places where if you want a table, a litre of vodka could cost many hundreds of pounds, champagne a thousand or more.
Covid put a stop to the Manchester scene – at least in public. But the parties carried on at Mendy’s mansion, even after he was fined by police for breaking lockdown rules on private gatherings.
It was only when sitting in a prison cell after his arrest for alleged sexual offences that Mendy had time to think about his life, he told the jury. He realised then that the way he and his friends talked about women back then was “disrespectful and bad”.
Mendy told the jury he knew women were mostly interested in him because he was a famous footballer. He’d had a taste of the attention during his early years at Monaco, but when he joined Manchester City in 2017, he said, the attention became “10 times more”.
He said: “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.”
On Friday Mendy was acquitted of six counts of rape and one of sexual assault. The jury failed to reach a verdict on a charge of raping one woman and attempting to rape another.
