The Barcelona Hearing confirms the sentence of a year in jail for the former director of Catalonia Ràdio Saül Gordillo for sexual assault on a editor

The Barcelona Hearing has confirmed the sentence of a year in jail for the former director of Catalunya Ràdio Saül Gordillo by the sexual assault on a editorwhen he directed the digital ‘main.cat’. It was after the company’s company dinner, he considers the ruling proven, when Gordillo touched the journalist. In his appeal, the director’s defense claimed that these touching were consented. He leaned for this in the recordings of the disco where they occurred, the Apollo room. Now, the Court of Section 7 points out that «It will only be understood that there is consent when it has been freely manifested Through acts that, in attention to the circumstances of the case, clearly express the person’s will ». Understanding acts “all kinds of manifestations of the person who will consent, whether verbal or not, gestural or situational, but must be taken as explicit.”

Thus indicate the magistrates that although Gordillo said during the trial that he had flirted during the night with the editornone of the witnesses endorsed him and “all of them said they had not seen anything that caught their attention.” «The absolute concordance of all witnesses in relation to this issue was one of the reasons that the magistrate wielded to consider the flirting or seduction set to which Gordillo referred to and we cannot do not want to share this conclusion, since From the abundant evidence practiced in the act of the trial, it is not inferred (beyond the declaration provided by the defendant) that the night of cars would produce a flirting or seduction set, ”says the sentence.

Thus discards the court that the dance prior to the touching had sexual connotations, and that the seven minutes that passed between the events and that the editor told what happened to their companions, “in an obvious state of nervousness,” they do not imply a reason for doubt your testimony. Yes appreciate section 7 a «disagreement that remains reliability to the story made »by the victimsince the facts after the touches “did not occur in the way they remember them,” the ruling abounds, which also gives the reason to the defense when he affirms that “the little time that Gordillo’s hand is placed to the Height of the vagina “of the editor” prevents affirming, categorically, that he could perform masturbation movements ” -as the instance failure was proven.

Despite this, they argue that There is no reason to think that the victim «was missing the truth deliberatelyamong other things because, if so, it would not make sense that it was its own lawyer that, before having made the complaint before the Mossos d’Esquadra, I would have already addressed a requirement to the room to preserve the recordings of the recordings of the Security cameras on the night of day 1 as of December 2, 2022, when the events occurred.

In the images you can see Gordillo performing the victim. «Touches that have an explicit sexual connotation, without being able to forget that he was the director of the newspaper in which he worked (twenty -three) as editor. At first it touches the buttocks and subsequently places his hand over the abdominal area and makes it descend to the vagina. Both are unequivocally erogenous zones that are part of the most intimate nature of people, so when such acts are performed without the consent of the affected person All elements or requirements of the crime of sexual aggression concur», Says the sentence.

The magistrates consider the absence of consent by the victim proven, but modify the proven facts of the instance judgment, considering that the victim’s statement “lacks sufficient reliability.” Despite this, They maintain the penalty imposed on Gordillo, the minimum provided by law, a year in jail, for sexual aggressionby virtue of the called law of ‘yes is yes’which requires “that in the field of sexual relations the consent is affirmative.” They argue that «it is difficult to accept that the director of a newspaper of a certain dissemination, a person of long professional life in the journalistic field, could ignore that the Spanish legislator’s option to demand appreciate the concurrence of the subjective element of the type as long as The active subject worked without having previously collected the consent of the person on whom the typical action falls, even if he had not expressed his opposition at any time, limiting himself to maintaining a passive attitude ».

Therefore they dismiss the appeal of the former director of Catalonia Ràdio and confirms the penalty imposed by the Criminal Court 7 of Barcelona.