Brazil football star Neymar has attended a police station in Rio de Janeiro to make a statement following a rape allegation, his lawyer says.
The star denies raping
Najila Trindade at a hotel in Paris on 15 May, and thanked his fans outside the
station for their support.
Ms
Trindade filed the allegation last Friday, telling a Brazilian TV channel she
wanted justice.
MasterCard
has suspended an advertising campaign with Neymar.
The
credit card company said it would stop using images of the star, who is the
world's most expensive signing and plays for French champions Paris St-Germain,
until the situation was resolved.
Sportswear
manufacturer Nike Inc said earlier it was "very concerned" about the
rape accusation against Neymar, whom it sponsors.
Neymar attended the station on
crutches after having sustained an injury to his right ankle during Brazil's game with Qatar in
Brasilia on Wednesday.
His lawyer, Maira
Fernandes, told Reuters news agency: "Neymar has just given a statement.
He made the point of coming as soon as he could to give a statement, to clarify
everything that needed to be clarified.
"We are
absolutely confident that we will prove the innocence of our client. The
process was thorough but he provided all the clarifications that were to be
provided."
Speaking at the door
of the police station, Neymar said: "I appreciate the support and all the
messages that the world has sent, my friends, my fans, that the world is with
me. I want to say thank you for the well wishes, and say that I have felt very
loved."
Ms Trindade, who is
also from Brazil, says she met Neymar on Instagram.
She told the SBT
Brasil channel she had been attracted to the footballer and had wanted to have
sex with him. She said she had been flown to Paris and put up in a hotel at his
expense.
When she met Neymar,
she said he was "aggressive, totally different than the boy that I got to
know through the messages".
She said she had been
initially prepared for consensual sex but had demanded the use of a condom.
Neymar had refused, become aggressive again and raped her, she said. She said
she had told him to stop but he had refused.
She described the
incident as "an assault together with rape".
SBT published part of
the interview on Twitter (in Portuguese).
The video footage
shows an altercation purported to be between Ms Trindade and Neymar in a hotel
room, reportedly filmed by Ms Trindade.
The pair lie down on a
bed, after which the woman stands and starts to slap the man, who defends
himself with his feet.
The woman says:
"I'm going to hit you, you know why. Because you beat me up
yesterday", suggesting the altercation was a second meeting. Neymar has
said that he and Ms Trindade met twice.
In the SBT interview,
Ms Trindade said she had only begun to understand everything that had happened
to her after the first meeting ended, and that she had returned because she
wanted to prove the events and "wanted justice".
The video was shown on
the Brazilian channel TV Record.
He has not commented
so far on the TV interview but his father, Neymar dos Santos, was interviewed
by TV Record about the hotel room footage and said it was clearly a set-up that
proved his son was innocent.
In
an earlier statement, Neymar's management called the accusations
"unjust" and said the footballer had been the "victim of an
attempted extortion".
Neymar
repeated the extortion accusation in a seven-minute video on his Instagram
page.
Speaking
in Portuguese, the footballer said: "What happened that day was a
relationship between a man and a woman, within four walls, like with any
couple. And the next day nothing much happened. We kept exchanging messages.
She asked me for a souvenir for [her child]."
During
the video, the 27-year-old showed what he said were a long series of WhatsApp
messages with Ms Trindade, including intimate photographs of her.
He
said he had had to make them public to "prove that nothing really
happened". In her interview, Ms Trindade denied accusations of extortion,
saying: "I want justice, not financial compensation."
Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro visited Neymar in hospital after the footballer's
injury on Wednesday, wishing him "a good and speedy recovery". Mr
Bolsonaro said earlier: "He is in a difficult moment, but I believe in
him."
The lawyers who first
represented Ms Trindade say her initial complaint was of "aggression"
or "physical violence" by Neymar. They said they had discussed a
settlement with Neymar's lawyers but that those lawyers then rejected it. The
two legal teams dispute who initially asked for the meeting.
Ms
Trindade then filed a rape allegation in São Paulo last Friday. Her lawyers
said the allegation was "incompatible with the strategy" they had
agreed, and they parted company with her on Saturday. She now has new
representation.
In
her interview, Ms Trindade said of a lawyer in her first legal team: "He
didn't fully believe me. I felt he was prejudiced. He portrayed it as if I'd
not been raped, that I had wanted it."
Neymar could also face investigation over publishing the images of Ms Trindade without her permission, as the act may infringe laws designed to protect privacy.
Source: BBC