Abuse allegations cast shadow over remembrance

A37-year-old Cuban woman, who had an affair with Diego Maradona as a minor 20 years ago, has accused the late idol and his entourage of violence and abuse, including rape and holding her against her will.

Mavys Álvarez Rego, who now lives in Miami, told the press in Buenos Aires this week how she met Maradona aged just 16, when the star, then in his 40s, lived in Cuba while undergoing drug treatment.

“I was dazzled, he won me over... But after two months everything started to change”, she said, claiming that Maradona had pushed her into trying cocaine, in turn making her dependent.

“I loved him but I hated him too, I even thought about suicide,” she said.

Álvarez Rego, a mother of two children, said her relationship with Maradona lasted “between four and five years” but that she was subjected to abuse.

She claimed that during a trip to Buenos Aires in 2001, she had been held against her will for several weeks in a hotel by Maradona’s entourage, banned from going out alone, and forced into a breast augmentation operation.

She also claimed that Maradona had “raped” her on one occasion at their home in Havana and mentioned several other episodes of physical violence.

Álvarez has not filed a complaint herself but is giving evidence this week in Buenos Aires to an Argentine prosecutor in connection with a complaint brought by an Argentine NGO. The organisation, called Foundation for Peace, filed the complaint after seeing her confessions in US media outlets in recent weeks. The complaint relates in particular to human trafficking, deprivation of liberty, forced servitude, assault and battery.

Álvarez said she was speaking out after so many years of silence in order to balance some of the stories that were being told about Maradona in the run-up to the first anniversary of his death. She suggested that she would not be initiating further proceedings. “I have done what I had to do, the rest I leave to the courts,” she said. “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.”