Benjamin Mendy has told his rape trial that he “enjoyed having sex with lots of women”.
The Manchester City player, who denies the charges against him, said that it was “honestly, so easy” for him to meet women, adding that it was “normal” for him to sleep with multiple women on the same night.
Wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt and tie, Mendy said he began to receive attention from women when he was 18 and playing for Marseille.
When asked by Eleanor Laws KC, defending, 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”.
The 28-year-old France international 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 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.”
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He added he was enjoying “having sex with a lot of women,” but if a woman said “no” he would “accept it and stop”.
The World Cup winner said he “didn’t worry” about using contraception although he “knew the risks”.
When asked why he carried on having parties with women he didn’t know after his initial arrest, Mendy said: “I did nothing wrong so I was just like, carry on.”
Ms Laws said: “Is that something you regret now?”
Mendy replied: “Yeah.”
He said: “When I was in prison it made me realise a lot of things. The partying I was doing, inside I had some pain.”
He told the court he had been injured a number of times while at City.
Asked what he thought now about women, he said: “I didn’t know I can hurt their feelings if we were both OK to have sex.”
He said he realised the way he would sometimes speak about women was “disrespectful”.
Mendy told the court prison was the first time in his life he was working on something other than football and would earn £4 a day which he would spend in the canteen.
He said: “For the first time I was really careful, like ‘I need to buy this but if I get that I can’t have that’. The life I had before, everything I wanted to have I just bought it.
“So it taught me the value of money.”
Mendy denies seven counts of rape, one count of attempted rape and one count of sexual assault against six young women.
His friend and ‘fixer’ Louis Saha Matturie, 41, of Eccles, Salford, denies six counts of rape and three counts of sexual assault relating to seven young women.
The trial continues.
