Woman claims Benjamin Mendy’s friend ‘started talking about God’ after sexually assaulting her | UK News
A woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by Benjamin Mendy’s friend said he later started talking to her about God.
The woman, who was 18 at the time, said the Manchester City footballer’s alleged fixer, Louis Saha Matturie, forced himself on her at a party attended by several Premier League footballers.
She claims she was attacked by Matturie at a house in Sheffield in 2016 where then Sheffield Wednesday player Claude Dielna and his brother Joel lived.
The jury at Chester Crown Court heard the witness was not a football fan, and at one party she failed to recognise Manchester United defender Aaron Wan-Bissaka, who became “mardy” and asked her: “Do you know who I am?”
In a 2016 police video interview played to the jury, the woman said she lived and worked in Sheffield and got to know footballers at a shisha bar in the city.
One day she was at the house in the city owned by French player Dielna, who had left to go training.
She was sitting on a bed chatting to Matturie when he sexually assaulted her, the court heard.
Tearfully, she told police: “He started to kiss me. I said, ‘What are you doing?’.
“He forced himself on top of me. I told him to get off. He said, ‘Just enjoy it’.
“I was shouting at him, ‘Get off! Get off! Stop!’.”
She claims Matturie groped her before he stopped and got off her, then she grabbed her phone, fled the house and did not respond to his social media messages.
Matturie denies assaulting her on a day between September 30 and November 1 2016.
‘Do you know who I am?’
Later she began attending clubs and parties in Manchester, where she bumped into him again at a club.
“He said let’s just forget about the past and started preaching to me about God,” she told police.
“I said, ‘Yes. Whatever’.”
At another party in March last year, at a flat near Manchester city centre, she alleges Mendy and Wan-Bissaka both attended along with more than 20 women, who came at Matturie’s invitation.
At the party she claims Wan-Bissaka asked her: “Do you know who I am?”
She continued: “I said, ‘I don’t know who you are’.
“He showed me his Instagram and then I realised who he was. He got a bit mardy.”
Prosecutors allege Mendy is a “predator” who “turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game”, while Matturie had the job of finding the women.
Mendy denies seven counts of rape, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault against six young women.
Matturie, of Eccles, Salford, denies six counts of rape and three counts of sexual assault relating to seven young women.
The trial continues.