British reality TV icon and only son of football legend George Best, Calum Best, was tried yesterday at the Provincial Court of Palma for an alleged crime of sexual abuse committed in 2022 at a well-known British venue on Sant Antoni’s s’Arenal beach. After the statements, the trial was set for sentencing and the prosecutor maintained his request for three years in prison. According to him, the complainant’s account is “clear, coherent and persistent” and there is no evidence that she acted out of a “spurious motive”.
The complainant told the court of the first section of the Audiencia that the events occurred on April 22, 2022, when she coincided with Best in a local during her vacation on the island. According to her, she and a friend of hers first had an incident with the defendant. Best was upset because they recorded a video in which he appeared in the background. “I didn’t know then that he was known. He said we didn’t have permission and made us delete the footage. He was very angry,” she recounted.
After this altercation, the girl explained that she went after Best to apologize. “We were in the back of the venue. I apologized to him and he told me everything was fine. He gave me a kiss on the lips and told me he wanted to show me something. He took me to a corner and told me to close my eyes. He guided my hand, put it inside his pants and made me touch his penis,” she said. She then got away and went back to her friend, “I was having a panic attack.” “My friend told me to tell the security guard. I explained it to him, but he told me that these things happened all the time and that he wasn’t going to call the police,” the young woman said.
Best denies the accusations
Best, for his part, denied these allegations. The defendant, who refused to answer the prosecutor and only answered questions from his lawyer, said that he was not alone with the young woman. According to his version, she approached him on two occasions to take a picture with him, to which he agreed. Shortly thereafter, he went to smoke with a friend upstairs and she followed them. “That was already a bit strange. My friend and I went downstairs right away and I never saw her again,” he said. That night he was in another nightclub and on the way out he ran into two policemen who were waiting for him and arrested him for allegedly abusing the young woman. “I came to Mallorca to clear my name,” said Best, 42, who is chairman of women’s soccer team Dorking Wanderers FC and is well known in the UK because he won ‘Celebrity Love Island’ in 2006 with Bianca Gascoigne and starred in two series of ‘Celebrity Big Brother’.
The prosecution considers that this is a crime of sexual abuse so it claims for the defendant three years in prison, prohibition of approaching within one hundred meters of the victim, his home and workplace, and to communicate with her by any means for a period of five years. He also requests that he be disqualified from performing any work in contact with minors for a period of eight years.
As published by the Daily Mail, Calum, whose father scored 181 goals in 474 appearances for Manchester United and was capped 37 times by Northern Ireland, was already arrested on October 12, 2015 in the UK after a 20-year-old woman claimed he sexually assaulted her. He was being held at the Innside Hotel in Manchester after a night out with friends. However, Greater Manchester Police confirmed a fortnight later that the case had gone no further.
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