The volleyball coach Cosme Prenafeta, on the abuse: “It was a relaxed atmosphere among adults disinhibited by alcohol”

The coach and historic player of the Spanish volleyball team and the Almería Volleyball Club, Cosme Prenafeta, explained to the judge that the atmosphere in which the meeting with two 18-year-olds, team players, took place was “relaxed”, between “adults disinhibited by alcohol” and “conscious”. The events date back to the afternoon of December 28, 2020. The order of transformation of preliminary proceedings to abbreviated procedure and in the provisional qualification letter of the prosecutor state that the two young complainants went, along with the rest of the team they were part of, to a meal at their coach’s house and that, “after the other teammates left”, he would have asked them to stay “a while longer”, to which they agreed From that moment on, according to the investigating judge and prosecutor, the three would have “drank alcoholic beverages” and Cosme Prenafeta would have proposed “playing question games of a sexual nature.” The Public Ministry highlights that, “without the consent” of the two young women, the defendant allegedly “kissed” them “on the mouth and neck several times” and had also come to “touch the buttocks” of one of them. In his statement to the judge, as NIUS has learned, the coach explained that they stayed voluntarily and that they gave each other “several kisses on the mouth”, but that he did not touch them. He has insisted that everything took place in a “relaxed atmosphere between adults disinhibited by alcohol but aware.” Upon his arrival at the court, his lawyer, Manuel Halcón, stressed that there is no evidence that undermines the presumption of innocence. “It was something consented to among adults,” he explained to the media, while denouncing that the sentence (of 4 years) seems disproportionate to him.”Signs of sexual abuse” in the forensic reportThe Public Ministry filed an accusation against Prenafeta after that the investigating judge found “indications of sexual abuse” in the evidence carried out during the investigation, including the forensic report issued by the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) of Almería and the “declaration” in court of the “investigated himself”. The young player to whom he touched suffers, according to the forensic medical report, an “anxious depressive symptomatology” derived from these events, which qualifies as two crimes of sexual abuse of article 181.1 of the Penal Code.