Apologies for the formatting. It sounds from the article like Critch tried his best to keep his integrity and great the guy fairly.
Beryly Lubala, the footballer accused and found not guilty of rape
In a Brighton courtroom, Beryly Lubala faced his moment of truth. After less than two hours of deliberation, the members of the jury returned and a verdict was imminent.
“My solicitor told me to pack a tracksuit in case I was found guilty,” he recalls. “It was a tracksuit, sliders, boxer shorts, a toothbrush; the most simple things. As they gave the verdict, I was holding this bag. I knew I could be walking to the right; down the stairs and in a van to prison.”
Instead, Lubala headed left, out of the courtroom, a free man once more.
In the viewing areas, court reporters noted some of his family members gasped with relief, while others gently sobbed after Lubala received a unanimous not guilty verdict after successfully defending himself against an allegation of rape.
Lubala, 24, is a Congolese midfielder contracted to Championship club Blackpool but currently on loan at Northampton Town, who are in the League Two play-off places.
His first appearance for Northampton, on February 1, came five days after the trial ended. It was his first competitive football match for more than 11 months.
Two years and four months earlier, police first knocked on Lubala’s door, shortly after 10pm on September 26, 2019, to inform the then-Crawley Town footballer he had been accused of raping a young woman. She was 18 years old at the time of the alleged incident and Lubala then 21. The complainant’s anonymity is protected by law.
Speaking publicly for the first time since the trial, Lubala tells The Athletic about his experiences as a footballer accused, and cleared, of rape. He does so at his family home, sitting beside his girlfriend, whom he started dating after the allegations were made, and their baby daughter.
Lubala details lessons that can be learnt by other young footballers and also outlines a notable victory that he secured against his own club, when Blackpool sought to terminate his contract upon learning he had been charged with rape by the Crown Prosecution Service. The club argued he had been dishonest in concealing the allegations and, initially, the charge from them as his employers, while he says he acted on legal advice.
In between, he briefly swapped life as an EFL footballer for night shifts packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse.
After that, as he awaited trial, Blackpool imposed a string of safeguarding restrictions upon him, which he says included a prohibition from showering after training sessions and requiring a chaperone to ensure he was never in a one-on-one scenario in the club’s canteen, offices or gym.
“If I wasn’t as strong-minded in how I think, this could easily make people go underwater,” he says.
Earlier that September, Lubala, who had scored in six of Crawley’s opening eight league matches of the season, won the League Two player of the month award for August.
After teenage trials at hometown club Leicester City, Lubala had played locally for Sunday League sides Leicester Nirvana and Friar Lane. Spotted as a 16-year-old in a trial fixture, Birmingham City took him on and when he impressed first in training and then in an under-18s game against Crystal Palace, he received a two-year scholarship.
“It was obviously the best thing that’s ever happened to me — to go from Sunday League to a scholarship in three or four weeks,” Lubala says. He rose into the first-team squad, training with players such as now Borussia Dortmund and England midfielder Jude Bellingham and Che Adams, now of Southampton and Scotland, before departing in the summer of 2019 to join Crawley.
Having seen little game time at Birmingham, his career took off at the fourth-tier side: “I’m thinking, ‘This is my chance’. I’m playing games, scoring goals, I’m ambitious, working towards a move to the Championship or the Premier League — the dream was endless. We played against Norwich in the Carabao Cup and I scored against them and we won. I was matching myself against Premier League players. Everyone in the area knew about me.”
Upon signing for Crawley in the July, the club booked a two-week stay in the local Crowne Plaza hotel for Lubala. On the same day he moved to town, he began speaking to the young woman who would later accuse him of rape.
It started, Lubala says, when the woman liked his photographs on social media.
“They announced I had signed for the team so everyone around there knew there was a new player in town,” he says. “That’s how she found out my name and saw my pictures. Then she said some of her friends had sent her pictures of me. She said that I was really good looking and that’s why she approached me. I hadn’t even played for Crawley at this point.
“She said she likes football, loves sports, does boxing, and keeps tabs on all the local teams. She was really interested. It was a normal, good conversation. I said I was at the hotel and she said where she worked was not too far so she can come to see me after work. So it was a bit fast. That was the first time we met, at my hotel.”
Is it common for footballers to meet up with women after exchanging messages on Instagram?
In retrospect, he says: “It’s hard, because people don’t see you as a person at times. They just see: He’s a football player. You see a blue tick, see he’s verified and they just message you. If I looked in my request inbox now, there are probably a few random girls saying ‘What’s your Snapchat?’ You’ve got to gauge who is looking like they could be a fake account or who’s genuine. That’s the hard thing to know: Who can you trust? Who can you date?”
At his hotel, things moved quickly.
“I came down to reception, we were there for half an hour or so. She asked if she can come upstairs to my room and chill, and that was really casual. The day just kept going on. And obviously, I’m not trying to be rude but I asked, ‘When are you going home?’, but she said, ‘It’s got a bit late’, so I asked if she wanted some food.
“We ordered a takeaway in my room. And then it kept getting late. And then she kind of said, ‘Oh, can I stay?’ We ended up having sex quite a lot, three times, and in the morning as well. And then in the morning, she said, ‘Should we get breakfast?’ and I said, ‘No problem.’ She got on the phone and ordered room service. I paid for everything. She stayed at the hotel until 1pm and then I walked her to her car and gave her a hug. We carried on talking from there.”
The pair, he says, met up again a few weeks later. He says: “We slept together and that was the second time. It was casual, getting to know each other; it was very natural and normal.”
The pair met again during the late hours of September 13, 2019 and into the early hours of the following morning.
Thirteen days on, Lubala received a knock at his door.
“I’m at home, it’s 10.30pm,” he says. “I normally do my stretches at night. I’ve got my mat on the floor. It was a bit of a scary moment because I saw bodies walking around the house. I saw two people around the back. I can see that men are looking through the door and there’s a few at the front knocking on the door. I open the door. They said, ‘Are you Mr Lubala?’ At that point, when it was the police, I was thinking they must have got the wrong person. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re looking for me?’. They said, ‘Yeah, can we come in and talk to you?’”
There were four policemen, he recalls. “I don’t know if they thought I was going to cause trouble. I said, ‘What’s this all about?’ That’s when they said to me, ‘There’s been an allegation of rape’. I was just confused. I asked, ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’.
“I’ve never been in that situation before. I asked if I could call my agent — you get to call somebody when you get into the station. The police stepped into my living room, locked up upstairs and the bedroom. They didn’t want anything to move around. They came in and took pictures of my room as it was, (including) where I keep my condoms. In the case, (that image) helped me a lot because I said, when she wanted to have sex with me, I had to leave my bed to go get protection which was on the other side of the room.”
He slept in a cell that night. “There were loads of things going through my head. I didn’t know who (the complainant) was at that stage. I was just thinking who it was — which was hard, because she was the only person I was seeing recently. I didn’t think we ever had any problems. I never sensed anything like that.
“The other people I’ve had relationships with, I just thought, ‘No, it can’t be’. I was just confused. I called a close family friend and he called the solicitor Iqbal Ahmed, who came to see me the next day. He told me who the name of the person is, because they gave him that information. As soon as he said that, I was able to tell him our whole history. He said, ‘Give a detailed account of everything from minute one’. That’s what I did. In court, it was so consistent.”
On November 23, 2020, Lubala was charged with rape.
When the trial came, the court heard the intimate details of the alleged assault. The prosecution accused the footballer of grabbing the young woman by the hair, instructing her to stop making noise and to be “a good girl”. The complainant told the court: “I said ‘No’, and he carried on. He turned into a different person. There was no kind of listening to what I did and didn’t want.”
The jury heard a tearful voice message the woman recorded on her drive home after the alleged incident on September 13, 2019.
She said: “We have slept together in the past. We were just chilling and it just happened and I didn’t want him to. I told him I didn’t want him to. I’m just driving home in the dark, I can’t stop crying.”
Beryly Lubala, the footballer accused and found not guilty of rape
In a Brighton courtroom, Beryly Lubala faced his moment of truth. After less than two hours of deliberation, the members of the jury returned and a verdict was imminent.
“My solicitor told me to pack a tracksuit in case I was found guilty,” he recalls. “It was a tracksuit, sliders, boxer shorts, a toothbrush; the most simple things. As they gave the verdict, I was holding this bag. I knew I could be walking to the right; down the stairs and in a van to prison.”
Instead, Lubala headed left, out of the courtroom, a free man once more.
In the viewing areas, court reporters noted some of his family members gasped with relief, while others gently sobbed after Lubala received a unanimous not guilty verdict after successfully defending himself against an allegation of rape.
Lubala, 24, is a Congolese midfielder contracted to Championship club Blackpool but currently on loan at Northampton Town, who are in the League Two play-off places.
His first appearance for Northampton, on February 1, came five days after the trial ended. It was his first competitive football match for more than 11 months.
Two years and four months earlier, police first knocked on Lubala’s door, shortly after 10pm on September 26, 2019, to inform the then-Crawley Town footballer he had been accused of raping a young woman. She was 18 years old at the time of the alleged incident and Lubala then 21. The complainant’s anonymity is protected by law.
Speaking publicly for the first time since the trial, Lubala tells The Athletic about his experiences as a footballer accused, and cleared, of rape. He does so at his family home, sitting beside his girlfriend, whom he started dating after the allegations were made, and their baby daughter.
Lubala details lessons that can be learnt by other young footballers and also outlines a notable victory that he secured against his own club, when Blackpool sought to terminate his contract upon learning he had been charged with rape by the Crown Prosecution Service. The club argued he had been dishonest in concealing the allegations and, initially, the charge from them as his employers, while he says he acted on legal advice.
In between, he briefly swapped life as an EFL footballer for night shifts packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse.
After that, as he awaited trial, Blackpool imposed a string of safeguarding restrictions upon him, which he says included a prohibition from showering after training sessions and requiring a chaperone to ensure he was never in a one-on-one scenario in the club’s canteen, offices or gym.
“If I wasn’t as strong-minded in how I think, this could easily make people go underwater,” he says.
Earlier that September, Lubala, who had scored in six of Crawley’s opening eight league matches of the season, won the League Two player of the month award for August.
After teenage trials at hometown club Leicester City, Lubala had played locally for Sunday League sides Leicester Nirvana and Friar Lane. Spotted as a 16-year-old in a trial fixture, Birmingham City took him on and when he impressed first in training and then in an under-18s game against Crystal Palace, he received a two-year scholarship.
“It was obviously the best thing that’s ever happened to me — to go from Sunday League to a scholarship in three or four weeks,” Lubala says. He rose into the first-team squad, training with players such as now Borussia Dortmund and England midfielder Jude Bellingham and Che Adams, now of Southampton and Scotland, before departing in the summer of 2019 to join Crawley.
Having seen little game time at Birmingham, his career took off at the fourth-tier side: “I’m thinking, ‘This is my chance’. I’m playing games, scoring goals, I’m ambitious, working towards a move to the Championship or the Premier League — the dream was endless. We played against Norwich in the Carabao Cup and I scored against them and we won. I was matching myself against Premier League players. Everyone in the area knew about me.”
Upon signing for Crawley in the July, the club booked a two-week stay in the local Crowne Plaza hotel for Lubala. On the same day he moved to town, he began speaking to the young woman who would later accuse him of rape.
It started, Lubala says, when the woman liked his photographs on social media.
“They announced I had signed for the team so everyone around there knew there was a new player in town,” he says. “That’s how she found out my name and saw my pictures. Then she said some of her friends had sent her pictures of me. She said that I was really good looking and that’s why she approached me. I hadn’t even played for Crawley at this point.
“She said she likes football, loves sports, does boxing, and keeps tabs on all the local teams. She was really interested. It was a normal, good conversation. I said I was at the hotel and she said where she worked was not too far so she can come to see me after work. So it was a bit fast. That was the first time we met, at my hotel.”
Is it common for footballers to meet up with women after exchanging messages on Instagram?
In retrospect, he says: “It’s hard, because people don’t see you as a person at times. They just see: He’s a football player. You see a blue tick, see he’s verified and they just message you. If I looked in my request inbox now, there are probably a few random girls saying ‘What’s your Snapchat?’ You’ve got to gauge who is looking like they could be a fake account or who’s genuine. That’s the hard thing to know: Who can you trust? Who can you date?”
At his hotel, things moved quickly.
“I came down to reception, we were there for half an hour or so. She asked if she can come upstairs to my room and chill, and that was really casual. The day just kept going on. And obviously, I’m not trying to be rude but I asked, ‘When are you going home?’, but she said, ‘It’s got a bit late’, so I asked if she wanted some food.
“We ordered a takeaway in my room. And then it kept getting late. And then she kind of said, ‘Oh, can I stay?’ We ended up having sex quite a lot, three times, and in the morning as well. And then in the morning, she said, ‘Should we get breakfast?’ and I said, ‘No problem.’ She got on the phone and ordered room service. I paid for everything. She stayed at the hotel until 1pm and then I walked her to her car and gave her a hug. We carried on talking from there.”
The pair, he says, met up again a few weeks later. He says: “We slept together and that was the second time. It was casual, getting to know each other; it was very natural and normal.”
The pair met again during the late hours of September 13, 2019 and into the early hours of the following morning.
Thirteen days on, Lubala received a knock at his door.
“I’m at home, it’s 10.30pm,” he says. “I normally do my stretches at night. I’ve got my mat on the floor. It was a bit of a scary moment because I saw bodies walking around the house. I saw two people around the back. I can see that men are looking through the door and there’s a few at the front knocking on the door. I open the door. They said, ‘Are you Mr Lubala?’ At that point, when it was the police, I was thinking they must have got the wrong person. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re looking for me?’. They said, ‘Yeah, can we come in and talk to you?’”
There were four policemen, he recalls. “I don’t know if they thought I was going to cause trouble. I said, ‘What’s this all about?’ That’s when they said to me, ‘There’s been an allegation of rape’. I was just confused. I asked, ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’.
“I’ve never been in that situation before. I asked if I could call my agent — you get to call somebody when you get into the station. The police stepped into my living room, locked up upstairs and the bedroom. They didn’t want anything to move around. They came in and took pictures of my room as it was, (including) where I keep my condoms. In the case, (that image) helped me a lot because I said, when she wanted to have sex with me, I had to leave my bed to go get protection which was on the other side of the room.”
He slept in a cell that night. “There were loads of things going through my head. I didn’t know who (the complainant) was at that stage. I was just thinking who it was — which was hard, because she was the only person I was seeing recently. I didn’t think we ever had any problems. I never sensed anything like that.
“The other people I’ve had relationships with, I just thought, ‘No, it can’t be’. I was just confused. I called a close family friend and he called the solicitor Iqbal Ahmed, who came to see me the next day. He told me who the name of the person is, because they gave him that information. As soon as he said that, I was able to tell him our whole history. He said, ‘Give a detailed account of everything from minute one’. That’s what I did. In court, it was so consistent.”
On November 23, 2020, Lubala was charged with rape.
When the trial came, the court heard the intimate details of the alleged assault. The prosecution accused the footballer of grabbing the young woman by the hair, instructing her to stop making noise and to be “a good girl”. The complainant told the court: “I said ‘No’, and he carried on. He turned into a different person. There was no kind of listening to what I did and didn’t want.”
The jury heard a tearful voice message the woman recorded on her drive home after the alleged incident on September 13, 2019.
She said: “We have slept together in the past. We were just chilling and it just happened and I didn’t want him to. I told him I didn’t want him to. I’m just driving home in the dark, I can’t stop crying.”