Dani Alves’ wife has shared a picture with the disgraced Barcelona star for the first time since he was released from prison.
The shamed footballer, who has appealed a four-and-a-half year jail sentence after being found guilty of rape last month, was released from prison after paying €1m (£850,000) bail.
And he appears to have been reconciled with wife Joana Sanz, who had demanded a divorce after Alves was arrested. However, the 31-year-old later said the divorce had been put on hold and she gave evidence on his behalf at his trial.
On Monday, the Spanish model shared a photo of the pair holding hands, with what appeared to be matching 1+1=1 tattoos. Alves’ distinctive hand ink was also on display.
In an Instagram post, she wrote: ‘May this month be good, may you be stronger than you have been until today. May you feel totally grateful because, despite everything, you are here. May it be a month to give and receive love, a month to feel at peace and happy for everything you have fought for an how much you are yet to achieve. May April be a positive month for everyone.’
Spanish journalist Marisa Martín Blazquez, speaking on Fiesta, reported that a Brazilian magazine paid Alves bail in exchange for an interview. Blazquez said the Alves would have been requested to ask his model wife Joana Sanz to feature as part of the interview.
‘The magazine, known in Brazil, does great reports on important people in Brazil, but also internationally,’ Blazquez said. ‘There are a series of requirements that must be met. An interview would be conducted as a video report on Alves’ story and, in addition, Alves would have asked Joana Sanz to participate in this report.’
‘[The payment] would have been an advance as payment for that documentary-type interview that is being done.’
Sanz revealed last year she had demanded a divorce after Alves admitted for the first time to having sex with the woman he was found guilty of raping, but claimed as he still does that the relations were consensual. The 31-year-old brunette later said the divorce had been put on hold and she gave evidence on Alves’ behalf at his trial from February 5 to 7. Alves is on provisional release and will usually attend court hearings on Friday.
The former Barcelona player was released from Brians 2 prison a week ago after 15 months spent behind bars awaiting his trial for raping a woman in December 2022.
The 40-year-old was found guilty in February of this year and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, but Alves is in the process of appealing the verdict, and will be doing so from his own home after agreeing to a number of conditions handed out by the court. Alves has surrended both his Spanish and Brazilian passports, and will have mandatory once-a-week visits to the court to maintain his freedom, after first paying a €1million (£850,000) bail bond.
But after doing so, the disgraced player was keen to make the most of life outside the prison walls, and is thought to have celebrated his father’s recent birthday in some style. As per Spanish TV program ‘This is Life‘, the day after Alves was released he hosted his family and friends at his house in Esplugues de Llobregat after they had attended a dinner party in Barcelona in honour of patriarch Domingos Alves Da Silva without him.
After dinner, the party made their way to Alves’ £4.5m villa, with festivities thought to continue until five o’clock in the morning. The former defender might have been freed sooner, had he not had difficulties coming up with the money to pay his high bail.
Alves’ lawyer Ines Guardiola has said the Brazilian has two bank accounts in Spain, one with no balance and the other with €51,000 (£44,000), with a judicial seizure of €50,000 (£43,000). Guardiola claimed last year that her client ‘is broke’ and has a ‘negative bank balance of £17,000’, despite reportedly once having a fortune of £47m.
Sport reported that Alves accounts in Brazil have also been blocked due to problems with his ex-wife Dinorah Santana. Alves, however, is expected to receive €9.2m (£7.9m) after his tax lawyer Fernando Mota won four cases against Spain’s tax agency.
The hearing to determine Alves bail had noted the 40-year-old was set to receive ‘a large sum of money’ back from the treasury, but he has not yet received the funds.
Brazilian team-mate Neymar’s dad had been expected to help Alves pay the money to secure his freedom, but he issued a statement denying he would hand over any cash after coming under political pressure in his homeland.
Memphis Depay’s agent was forced to deny ‘fake’ claims on social media that the Atletico Madrid player had been the one to furnish Alves with the cash necessary to win his temporary freedom on Tuesday. ‘This is fake news. It is false news, it is not true at all,’ Sebastien Ledure told Informativos Telecinco. Ledure also asked to ‘correct at an official level’ the claim, after it spread on social media on Monday.
Alves was convicted of raping a 23-year-old woman in the toilet of an upscale Barcelona nightclub, Sutton, over a year-and-a-half ago. The jail sentence he received, considered lenient by some critics, was far less than the nine years public prosecutors demanded and the 12 years Alves’ female accuser wanted if he was convicted.
Previous attempts from the footballer to be allowed bail had been rejected by the courts largely because he was viewed as a potential fight risk, and the player’s home nation, Brazil, does not extradite citizens sentenced abroad.
His ex-wife Santana is among those to have spoken out against Alves being granted release from prison on bail. ‘There are times when you will have to share the table with Judas, without that taking away your peace. Well, me today,’ she wrote on Instagram.
Santana, the mother of his two children, had initially said she was standing by him and insisted he would never commit the crime he was arrested for. The sports agent later claimed she felt she had been ‘used’ and told Spanish television: ‘For me, he doesn’t exist. For me, he has died.’
