“Erotic game” is one of the many expressions used by a team of lawyers to argue Daniel Alves’ innocence in the process in which the (former?) player is accused of rape.
The defense referred to UOL some parts of the strategy.
Whoever saw it must have felt like adjusting his top hat and putting on his monocle to read it better. The props, as well as the mustaches, the buggy and the expressions used by the defense, were common at the beginning of the last century: sent to the Justice in 2023, the piece would fit on a page of the newspaper “Crítica”, a daily newspaper directed by Mário Rodrigues in the years 1920 and 30.
The journalist’s best-known son, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues, perhaps did not even blush when checking the description of the images in which “you can clearly see two adults developing an erotic game preliminary to coitus”.
Or that, based on the same images, “one can observe in the complainant an openly sexualized conduct, typical of a sexual courtship phase”.
“At some point, the young woman is seen placing her back to the athlete, twisting and rubbing her buttocks in movement with the pelvic area of the accused to the rhythm of the music”, describes the defense.
And look at the pages of the Rodrigues family newspaper, women who did not retreat to the confines of the home and/or who dared to separate from their husbands were equally demonized. Especially if they wore blue silk dresses, a felt hat, locks of blonde hair and “the triangular neckline of the suit that left the chest uncovered”. Even worse if he “smiles sometimes”.
Daniel Alves’ strategy seems clear, and it gains even clearer contours with the apparently random insertion in a fact of the life of the former side of the national team. “Athlete Daniel Alves has a life project in Barcelona. The family has always wanted their children to complete their university studies in Spain. The next academic year of studies will be carried out in Barcelona and their children’s housing has been registered in the house that Alves owns in Esplugues de Llobregat”.
The terms may be old-fashioned, but they’re not naive.
In the chronicle of “A vida como ela é” version 2023, the athlete is described as a family man who was worried about the education and future of his children when his pelvic area was teased with the buttocks of an adulterous woman whose destiny is to sin. The “preliminary erotic game to coitus” would lead to a typically Rodriguean sentence in one of his plays: “All nudity will be punished”.
The dance cited by the lawyers does not take the characters to the 1920s, when expressions like “coitus” were still used. It leads to a makeshift alcove in the club’s bathroom.
The attempt to shift the blame to the woman who denounces a man for assault is between the lines of the defense’s arguments. All that was left to say was that nothing bad could have happened if she had maintained “her status as an angel of the home”—an expression used by the Rodrigues family lawyer in a famous trial at the time. (We will not go into details so as not to confuse the roles of defendants and defendants in different stories, but written in similar language and raw material).
Alves, as the accused, has the sacred right to defend himself with all the resources at his disposal. Even if in the process he needs to change the version of the same story just so, according to him, not to shake the structures of the family (apparently, already well shaken).
But that doesn’t stop me from saying that the material produced by the defense is a complete disgrace. Her lawyers spare no efforts to portray the woman as the character to be discredited because she went out dancing and, at least at the first moment, responded to a flirtation, according to the defense.
(In time: it is in the sacredness of the home, without dancing or “erotic games”, that most cases of violence against women take place. At whatever age. Wear the clothes you wear).
The defense is also embarrassed because it forgets, or pretends to forget, one detail: what is under discussion in this story is not what happened before the complainant entered the booth, but during the period she was there.
What is known is that she left the place injured, with a grated knee and some bruises, and went to cry hugging her cousin. Alves runs away without even offering a hug to someone who, minutes before, swore they had a consensual relationship.
At least the patriotic and moralist side did not repeat a typical Nelson Rodrigues character: the one who attacks, apologizes and then says he loves.
#Cortejo #Dani #Alves #defense #oldfashioned #terms #naive