A Cuban woman has accused former Argentine football captain Diego Maradona of raping her as a teenager two decades ago. Mavis Alvarez told a news conference on Monday that the Argentine player raped her when she was 15 and “stole her childhood.”
Alvarez, 37, testified last week to a court in Argentina’s Ministry of Justice, which is investigating his allegations of trafficking against Maradona’s former entourage linked to events when she was 16.
Maradona, widely regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time, passed away a year ago on November 25, 2020.
The complaint relates to a trip with Maradona to Argentina in 2001, when she was almost 40 and he was 16.
Alvarez said she first met the football star shortly before the trip, when he was in Cuba for treatment for drug addiction.
At a news conference in Buenos Aires, lvarez said that Maradona raped him at the clinic in Havana, where he was staying, while his mother was in an adjoining room.
“He covered my mouth, he raped 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 has to go through.”
Matias Morla, Maradona’s lawyer before his death, did not respond to a request for comment. Reuters could not identify Maradona’s other legal representatives in the case.
Alvarez has previously described the relationship in media interviews as consensual, but has also stated that on at least one occasion Maradona forced himself on her.
She said that her family allowed Maradona to have a relationship with the star only because of Maradona’s friendship with the late Cuban President Fidel Castro, despite the huge age difference.
“My family would never have accepted this if the Cuban government had not been involved,” she said. “They were forced to accept a relationship that wasn’t good for them or anyone in another way.”
The Cuban government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alvarez said she had filed the complaint “to help all the women, all the victims of trafficking, the crime,” she said. “To be able to help them all I can. That’s my idea.”
She said it was hard to come back to Argentina, where Maradona remains a hero to many.
“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 looks ugly as a person,” she said.