Woman ‘woke to find Benjamin Mendy on top of her’, court told

A young woman tearfully told detectives how she woke up in bed with Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy raping her.

The woman, aged 19 at the time, said she had been drinking champagne with Mendy, his friends and other young women at China White night club in Manchester, before returning to the France international’s Cheshire mansion.

After spending time in the swimming pool, she became sleepy and went up to a top floor bedroom at the house owned by Mendy, 28, in Mottram St Andrew near Prestbury.

She changed out of the bikini she had brought with her and into her underwear and fell asleep, alone, in the double bed.

In her police interview, played to jurors, the woman, breaking down in tears, said: “I woke up to find Ben on top of me, but I was on my side. It was horrific, I was on my period.

“I remember five seconds of it and him putting a towel under me. I remember saying, ‘No. I’m on my period’.”

The woman, who described herself as “out of it” or “6/10” drunk, is asked if there was “any chance” Mendy could have thought she wanted to have sex with him that night.

She replied: “No, because I don’t know him that well.”

The woman said two or three months before the alleged rape, she had sex with Mendy, “like a one-night thing” but that she was sober and it was consensual.

Under cross-examination, Eleanor Laws QC, defending Mendy, suggested her account of what happened, waking up to find Mendy raping her, was the “exact same” allegation made by her friend, who the footballer is also accused of raping the same evening.

The witness replied: “I have not spoken to her.”

Mendy denies the rape, in the early hours of July 24, 2021, along with the rape of two other young women over the same 24-hour period at his home.

He also denies five other counts of rape, one attempted rape and a sexual assault, all relating to seven young women, between October 2018 and August last year.

His co-accused, Louis Saha Matturie, 41, of Eccles, Salford, denies eight counts of rape and four counts of sexual assault, relating to eight young women.

Prosecutors allege Mendy is a “predator” who turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game.

Matturie, 41, Mendy’s friend and fixer, had the job of finding young women for sex, it is alleged.

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

The trial at Chester Crown Court continues.