Mavys Alvarez, a 37-year-old from Cuba, told a news conference Monday that Maradona raped her while she was staying with him at a drug rehabilitation center in Havana, Cuba in 2000.
Maradona died last year at the age of 60.
Speaking in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, Alvarez said that Maradona had “stolen her childhood.”
“He covers my mouth, he rapes me, I don’t want to think about it too much,” Alvarez said.
“I stopped being a girl, all my innocence was stolen from me. It’s hard. You stop living the innocent things that a girl of that age (16 years) has to experience.”
Alvarez had previously made the accusations in an interview with Argentine news site Infobae last week.
“Maradona covered my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, so I wouldn’t say anything and he abused me,” she told Infobae in the interview. “He raped me. That’s what happened.”
Alvarez said that her mother was in the next room when she was raped.
Insider contacted Guillermo Coppola, Maradona’s former agent, as well as his ex-lawyer Matias Morla about Alvarez’s allegations, but is yet to receive a response.
According to Sky News, Coppola told reporters that he was “witness to a love story” between Alvarez and Maradona, and that he did not believe any crimes had been committed.
During the conference, Alvarez showed several photographs of her with Maradona.
Alvarez has previously spoken about her relationship with Maradona, alleging that she was trafficked from her native Cuba to Argentina by members of Maradona’s entourage.
She had said her relationship with Maradona was generally consensual, but that on more than one occasion he forced himself upon her. She alleged in October that he plied her with drugs and kept her locked in a hotel room.
In October, Infobae published a five-and-a-half-minute-long video from 2000, which showed Alvarez and Maradona on a bed together. The footage also included shots of Maradona swimming and posing with a boxing title belt, as well as shots of a woman — seemingly Alvarez — singing.
Alvarez made her accusation of rape against Maradona almost exactly one year after his death on November 25 last year. She told the news conference that she was speaking in an attempt to “help all women, all victims of trafficking, of crime.
During the news conference, Alvarez said that her family only allowed her to have a relationship with Maradona because of the soccer player’s friendship with then-Cuban President Fidel Castro, who died in 2016.
“My family would never have accepted it if the Cuban government had not been involved,” she said. “They were forced in another way to accept a relationship that was not good for them, or for anyone.”
Alvarez also said it was hard to be back in Argentina.
“It’s hard to be in his country, to see that he is everywhere, he is an idol and at the same time everything I remember about him as a person feels ugly,” she said.
(The Insider)