Irene Montero, sentenced to pay 18,000 euros for presenting as an abuser the ex-partner of María Sevilla

Irene Montero, Minister of Equality, has been sentenced by the Supreme Court to compensate with 18,000 euros to Rafael Marcos, who was the partner of María Sevilla, the former president of the Free Childhood association (sentenced to two years and four months in prison for child abduction and then pardoned by the current Government), for falsely presenting him as an abuser. The Civil Chamber has partially estimated the appeal of the affected, who claimed 85,000 euros, understanding that the words that Montero pronounced on May 25, 2022, when Seville was partially pardoned, were an attack "against the personal reputation" of the plaintiff, by attributing "unfoundedly" a conduct "deserving of the maximum social reproach". Montero said that day, during the inauguration of the Women's Institute, that the pardon to Seville meant protecting "protective mothers" (...) who only do "defend themselves and their sons and daughters against the sexist violence of abusers." In short, she said, the pardon was "a victory for the entire feminist movement." The ruling forces Montero to publish the sentence on his Twitter and delete a tweet with his video statements.

The sentence, released today, includes Montero's statements after the pardon to Seville, who had been arrested in March 2019 on a farm in Villar de Cañas (Cuenca), for having retained her son for more than a year, whom she kept hidden so as not to give it to the father. The woman argued that she did it to protect him from the sexual abuse she attributed to her father. The legal cases for these facts have been closed and the father accuses Sevilla of lying. After entering a social insertion center, she was partially pardoned, after 181 social and feminist groups requested it. She had been sentenced to two years and four months in prison for child abduction and four years' withdrawal of parental rights from her son.

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Montero celebrated the measure of grace as his own decision ("this pardon that we have granted," he said) to cut the "unjust suffering of protective mothers," who suffer "violation of many of their rights, criminalization and suspicion by society (...); That is why it is so important that the State settles the debt it has with protective mothers, that we make public policies that guarantee that abusers cannot murder their children, that it cannot violate the rights of these women and, therefore, that we are able to effectively protect protective mothers. " The minister then tweeted the video with those statements.

María Sevilla, in February 2022, when her pardon was requested. Victor Sainz

The Supreme Court understands that in this case the violation of the right to honor of the plaintiff prevails over the freedom of expression of the minister or her parliamentary inviolability, or over Montero's allegation that the name of the affected person was not mentioned. The Chamber clearly sees that an attempt was made "against personal reputation [by] unfoundedly attributing to a person the condition of abuser", with phrases "outrageous or offensive (...), unnecessary". The judges recall that there is "no judicial resolution that allows concluding that the plaintiff is the author of episodes of gender or domestic violence, nor the author of sexual abuse in the person of his child." Despite this, the court continues, "facts constituting sexist violence are attributed to him." And the room adds on the allegation that Marcos was not identified with names and surnames: "The reason stated for the partial pardon to the plaintiff's ex-partner is to be a protective mother who defends her son from sexist violence, so episodes of violence of such kind are attributed to the plaintiff. However, the pardon comes from the crime of child abduction committed by the former, without externalized connection with gender violence, alleging generic reasons of justice and equity. The words spoken have been duly prepared, they are not the result of haste or immediacy."

The minister, concludes the court, could not ignore that whoever listened to her "would associate the pardoned with the condition of victim of gender violence" and, therefore, victim of her ex-partner. For all these reasons, Montero is sentenced "prudentially" to pay 18,000 euros to the affected, to publish on her Twitter account the header and ruling of the sentence, to delete the tweet published on May 25, 2022 with the video and to publish the header and the ruling in a national newspaper.

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