‘The Sambre Case’: anatomy of rape culture

The French can boast of having invented the true crime modern. Although it would be necessary to see to what extent to be proud of it. In 2004, 10 years before Serial podcast (2014), Jean-Xavier De Lestrade premiered The Staircasea documentary series that inspired the wonderful fiction of the same name, released in 2022 on HBO with Toni Colette and Colin Firth at the helm.

Twenty years after De Lestrade laid the first stone of this lucrative church, his latest miniseries arrives in Spain, with which he himself crowns it: The case of Sambre (Movistar Plus+). In it he addresses, of course, a real case: between 1988 and 2018, the date of his arrest, Dino Scala (in the Enzo Salina series) committed 54 rapes within a 28-kilometer perimeter. He was able to do it thanks to many factors. Among them, in addition to the neglect of the victims and the minimization of the case, thanks to the error in drawing the profile of the rapist, who turned out to be an ordinary man. The police were looking for a lone nut or an immigrant (who do they remind us of?) when they had the culprit right under their noses. The case of Sambre is a magnificent analysis of how rape culture works, from the privacy of the victims to the treatment by institutions in general. Not one comes out well.

Of course, audiovisual is no stranger to it. A few days ago a clip of Jodie Foster became popular, at a table of actresses in The Hollywood Reporter saying that in many of the scripts she has read the only motivation of the female character was her trauma after being raped (perhaps in her case her Oscar for Accused). But Danny Mannus, script analyst, took advantage of the situation to tweet: “I once had a heated argument with a client when I told him that seven violations in his script was having six or seven too many. He said: okay, four then. As a script consultant who has read over 8,000 scripts, I can’t tell you the alarming number that contain violations.” It’s not how many, it’s how, why and for what. I always remember Selina Meyer’s phrase in veep: “If men could get pregnant, abortions could be done at ATMs.” If men were victims of rape in the same numbers as women, the stories we would see would be more like The case of Sambre. Or not even that: perhaps the case itself would not have existed.

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