A Madrid court has imposed three years in prison on a man who in 2015 sexually abused a drunk and semi-conscious woman who did not report the incident until, six years later, she found her attacker by chance walking through the city center. . The judges of the Madrid Court endorse the victim’s story and justify the time it took to report the facts. “Guilt, shame and fear,” the judges say, are “frequent feelings” in victims of sexual crimes that leave an “indelible mark” on those who suffer from them.
The conviction, which can still be appealed and which elDiario.es has been able to examine, explains that the victim was sitting with a friend on a terrace in the center of Madrid in April 2021 when she stood up and pointed her finger at a man wearing the face covered with a mask. She held him at the scene until the Municipal Police showed up and then identified him, without hesitation, as the man who had sexually abused her six years earlier. According to an agent at the trial, the accused even knelt on the ground to ask that the woman not be ignored.
The story she told that day to the agents and, later, to all the judges who have studied the case, places the events in the first days of January 2015, when she was partying with some friends in the La Latina neighborhood. , in the center of Madrid. After vomiting several times and feeling sick from drunkenness, she decided to go home in a taxi, at which point the accused got into the car with her to go to her home. Once there, and after vomiting again, she remembered being sexually assaulted by the accused despite her refusal to have relations with him.
At that moment, the victim provided several details to the Police, in addition to the story she had already told her friends a year before: that night, after the abuse, the accused drank a glass of milk with cookies in her kitchen, made a comment about the views of the property and left. The next day, he also sent a message to the victim’s cell phone. Almost ten years after the events, this evidence has served to ensure that his story is “peripherally corroborated.”
The abuses took place in January 2015, the “chance” of the encounter in the center of Madrid in April 2021 led to the first complaint and the trial was held in the Provincial Court of the capital last November. The result has been a three-year prison sentence for a crime of sexual abuse, according to the Penal Code in force at that time, in addition to compensation of 20,000 euros for the victim that the accused already paid two days before the trial. The sentence is still appealable before the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid.
The Provincial Court dedicates a good part of its ruling to explaining why it considers the victim’s story “absolutely persistent” and “completely credible” almost a decade after the events. That almost six years passed from the abuse to the complaint, the court explains, does not diminish its credibility. “The time elapsed between the date of the events and the identification of the accused does not disqualify the veracity of the victim’s statements,” the ruling states.
The messages, an “irrefutable proof”
The judges analyze that the victim told her friends what happened for the first time at the end of 2020 and that she then began psychological treatment. All the witnesses, both those who were there on the night of the events and at the time of the arrest, corroborated his version of the events. And the judicial police were able to recover evidence that the court considers “irrefutable”: the messages that the accused sent from his cell phone to the victim’s the day after.
The court recognizes that the chance meeting between the two in April 2021 in the center of Madrid was a “coincidence” and that this initial recognition, with a mask on, could have led the case to file without further evidence involved.
Throughout the trial, the defendant’s defense denied the facts and alleged that, at that time, he was not in Spain but in his native Italy. He also questioned the validity of the WhatsApp messages, pointing to possible fabrication of evidence and the implausibility that he had drunk a glass of milk with cookies after perpetrating the sexual attack: he is lactose intolerant.
The judges reject these arguments and explain that the victim’s statement, accompanied by the testimonies of her friends, psychologists and telephone messages, is sufficient to impose a three-year prison sentence for sexual abuse. Taking into account in favor of the accused, they add, that he deposited 20,000 euros a few days before the trial and that “almost 10 years have passed” since the events occurred.
The passage of time until the complaint, filed after a chance encounter on the street, is not an obstacle for the judges of the Madrid Court, who rely on their “judicial experience” to explain that victims suffer from “frequent feelings” of sexual crimes: “It was difficult for her to accept and come to terms with what had happened, she was ashamed, she felt bad and guilty, she did not want to harm those close to her, she had doubts about how she would be treated by the Police and she felt afraid since the aggressor knew where she lived and had invaded what “She considered her home to be a safe place.” Sexual crimes, the court explains, leave an “indelible mark” on the victims.
#court #supports #victim #abuse #years #report #attacker #Guilt #shame #fear
