This Thursday the trial of a participant in the Spanish edition of the Big Brother program for alleged sexual abuse of a partner in full registration began in Madrid, Spain, in 2017.
José María López sat in the dock to answer for a crime of sexual abuse against Carlota Pradoand faces a request from the prosecutor’s office for two years of imprisonment and 6,000 euros ($ 5,850) in compensation, the same money being asked of the program’s producer.
The trial was supposed to begin in February, but was suspended due to the victim’s mental problems which prevented him from testifying. After the suspension, and according to the ABC newspaper, Prado dropped the charge of his alleged attacker.
The events happened when Big Brother, broadcast by Telecinco, was being recorded in the house where the contestants held for weeks to capture all their movements with cameras and microphones, while the audience decides which participants to eliminate.
A young woman accused a partner, with whom “she had started a romantic relationship about 50 days earlier”, according to the accusation, of having sexually abused her, when he was in an advanced state of intoxication, in one of the rooms under the gaze of the cameras.
According to the indictment, the man took advantage of the fact that the woman was in a “semi-conscious state” and, both covered by a duvet, “they touched, rubbed and moved with a purely sexual content, stripping the victim of his clothes”.
The young woman “up to two times raised her hand as if she wanted to tell him to stop” and came to stammer “I can’t”, the prosecutor wrote in a note.
After about ten minutes, when the young woman uncovered her face and revealed her “state of inertia”, it was then that one of the technicians “in charge of viewing the recording” intervened.
The images were never transmitted and the matter came to light only two years later, when the press revealed in 2019 that the woman had to watch the tapes the next morning in an isolated room called Big Brother’s “confessional”.
A video of this interrogation, broadcast over the internet, showed the young woman crying and begging the images to stop.
“They never asked me if I wanted to see it (…) if they had asked me, I would have said no,” he later told a Spanish media.
The heartbreaking story of Carlota
El Confidentcial newspaper managed to interview Carlota two years after the alleged abuse. The young woman said: “We were celebrating a party in the house, one of many. The normal thing was that they provided us with alcohol. I remember that I was worried because we barely had any food and the effects of alcohol could be greater. And well, it made me feel bad with me, just as it could have felt bad with other people. The last thing I remember well is being in the kitchen. The images in which I find myself in the living room, which I uploaded to my Instagram account , I do not remember”. And then she talks about a fight.
“There was a normal reaction in me to something I don’t like at all. You see a fight because obviously I don’t like being touched …. What is happening at that moment is already enough to act on it, which ‘GH’ has not done … Those images are not a close-up of what was happening, someone on social media found it and increased it. space that person and I were inside. I say that person because it is impossible for me to say his name “, explained Carlota.
“When I got up, on my way to the bathroom, I noticed that my underwear was falling to the floor because it hadn’t been worn correctly. that important detail “, declared Carlota in front of the newspaper El Confidentcial.
“(In the confessional) they told me to calm down and that I had to see some pictures. And at that moment they played the video of what happened that night, without telling me what I was about to see. I don’t know what the procedure is in these cases, because I’m not a specialist, but there should have been someone by my side, a psychologist or someone to help me deal with such harsh images. They never asked me if I wanted to see him … If they had asked me, I would have said no. I didn’t want to have that shit on my head for the rest of my life. “
Source: Clarin
