Maradona death trial: ‘They manipulated us,’ says daughter

The trial over the death of Argentine football superstar Diego Maradona continued on Tuesday, with the testimony of Giannina, Maradona’s second daughter with his longtime wife Claudia Villafañe. Maradona’s daughter spoke for over five hours about her father’s final days, taking questions from the prosecution and the defendants’ lawyers. You may also be interested in: The trial over the death of Diego Maradona starts again. Here’s all you need to know “My dad was lost in time and space; he didn’t know where he was,” she said about the last days of Maradona’s life. “He was struggling to walk, interact, and connect with people. When I asked, they told me it was due to the pills or the alcohol that he was up and down, but he looked even worse.” Giannina recalled that her son approached Maradona on his 60th birthday — October 30, 2020, less than a month before his death — with a picture of the two, but the former star was unable to recognize himself in it. Later that day, Maradona made his last public appearance, part of the celebrations as football kicked off again due to the partial loosening of Covid-19 restrictions. At the time, Maradona looked lost and confused, and struggled to move as two people helped him onto the pitch. “His entourage told me he had to go to the stadium, and I told them no,” said Giannina. “[Maradona] told me he wanted to stay with me, but they wouldn’t let us. The police took me away, and they took my dad away in a van.” Giannina also insisted she met Maradona’s main medical advisor, Leopoldo Luque — who had been working with Maradona since 2017 — only months prior to her father’s death. He was, she added, “the person responsible” for the former star’s health.  She went on to say that she didn’t meet the other two main accused, psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov and psychologist Carlos Díaz, until after the surgery Maradona had to remove a subdural hematoma on November 2. Giannina also claimed the family was “manipulated” by the trio when deciding whether to hospitalize Maradona or move him to a home care solution. She insisted that Dalma and her favored hospitalization, as taking her father to a clinic for his cocaine addiction “was truly the best thing that had ever happened to him, because they treated him like everyone else.” “Luque told us that the best option was to try home-based care,” she said. “I couldn’t have imagined that there was an ulterior motive or that he was up to something else. We truly believed that Luque and Cosachov’s suggestion was the right choice and the best one for him. We trusted them, we were manipulated, and we agreed.” Giannina said Maradona’s caregivers “promised he had the necessary equipment to keep him under observation,” but that instead she never saw “a monitor, or a defibrillator, or the ambulance at the door that they promised would be ready.” However, they found not only the house under-equipped but also severely mismanaged. “When he died, [her halfsister] Jana and I went to get his things and found clothes all over the place, crumpled up in the closets; there were blankets and sheets that smelled of urine in boxes on the grill. Even the refrigerators were disgusting,” she said. Giannina also noted it was her mother who suggested that an autopsy should be done as Maradona’s case had been “mishandled” and that the former star hadn’t passed away from “natural causes.” Prosecutors go against Luque Proceedings started with the prosecution playing a voice message from Luque where he is heard asking to create a “medical record” for Maradona to protect himself in case he dies. “He might die at some point, but there’s no immediate risk, so I’m not liable. But if the family ever turns against me, the paperwork has to be in order,” he can be heard saying in the audio played during the hearing. This comes after Luque downplayed his own responsibility in his testimony last Thursday, claiming that the cause of death was “chronic heart failure,” something for which he didn’t treat Maradona. After the prosecution played the audio, Luque asked to expand his testimony, where he claimed his relationship with Maradona “changed a lot” after the surgery on November 2. “That’s when lawyers, doctors, and the family stepped in to play the role I had long hoped they would take: taking responsibility for the patient,” he said. Maradona died from an acute pulmonary edema in 2020. The trial centers around the circumstances of his death and the attention he received from his doctors and nurses.  Eight people stand accused of failing to administer proper medical care to Maradona, chiefly Luque as his main medical advisor, as well as his psychiatrist, Agustina Cosachov, and psychologist, Carlos Díaz.  This will be the second time the proceeding goes ahead, after the first court case was declared a mistrial in May 2025.