‘It was aggression together with rape’

Brazilians for the first time late Wednesday heard from the woman who says that football superstar Neymar sexually assaulted her at a Paris hotel. Extracts of a televised interview with Najila Trindade Mendes de Souza, the alleged victim, aired just one hour before Neymar was about to enter the pitch for a friendly game between Brazil’s national team and Qatar in the capital Brasilia. “It was aggression together with rape,” said the woman in an interview broadcast on the SBT network.

The full interview is scheduled to air on Monday. Trindade, who says she works as a model, acknowledged that she initially liked Neymar -- full name Neymar da Silva Santos Junior -- and wanted to have sex with him. The football megastar paid for a plane ticket to bring her from Brazil and put her up in a Paris hotel. Things changed dramatically at their first encounter, Trindade said. “He was aggressive, totally different than the boy that I got to know on the messages. “Since I really wanted to be with him I said, OK, I’m going to try to handle this,” she said.

After some kissing and caressing “he started to hit me ... then he began to hurt me a lot, and I asked him to stop because it hurt.” According to Trindade, Neymar apologized, but then continued hurting her while they had sex. Separately, the G1 news website reported that police have a video that Trindade recorded of an alleged second encounter between the two. The contents were not made public.

Neymar, who was transferred to Paris Saint-Germain from Barcelona for a world-record 222 million euros ($248.5 million) in 2017, wrote on Instagram that the evening’s game would be the most difficult of his career “due to the circumstances.” In the end he only lasted 20 minutes in the game, and limped off the field aided by two members of the team’s support staff with an ice pack wrapped around his ankle.