Mavys Alvarez Rego, a 37-year old Cuban woman who currently lives in Miami and who had an affair with the late football legend Diego Maradona about two decades ago, accused the latter of raping her when she was in her teens.
According to AFP, Alvarez said she met Maradona when she was 16, back when he was living in Cuba and undergoing drug treatment.
"I was dazzled, he won me over... But after two months everything started to change", she said, adding that she both “loved” and “hated” Diego.
The alleged rape occurred in a clinic in Havana where Maradona was staying, while Alvarez’s mother was in the next room, Alvarez said during a news conference in Buenos Aires.
“He covers my mouth, he rapes me, I don’t want to think about it too much,” she said as quoted by Reuters. “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 experience.”
Last week, Alvarez delivered her testimony to an Argentine Ministry of Justice court investigating her “allegations of trafficking against Maradona's former entourage”, as Reuters put it.
She alleged that, during a trip to Buenos Aires with Maradona back in 2001, she was held by the footballer’s entourage in a hotel against her will, prevented from going out alone and even forced to undergo a breast augmentation operation.
The complaint was filed not by Alvarez herself but rather by an Argentine NGO called “Foundation for Peace” who made that move after seeing the woman’s confession in the American media earlier, AFP notes.
"I have done what I had to do, the rest I leave to the courts," said Alvarez. "I achieved my goal: to say what happened to me, to prevent it from happening to others, or at least so that other girls feel the strength, the courage to speak up."