Thursday, March 28

Justice acquits the OkDiario journalist accused of harassing the children of Irene Montero and Pablo Iglesias

The criminal court 30 of Madrid has decided to acquit Alejandro Entrambasaguas, a journalist for the digital OkDiario, accused of harassing the woman who took care of the two young children of Irene Montero and Pablo Iglesias. For the judge, his action “did not constitute a crime, since neither the acts themselves, nor the way in which they were executed, nor their number, nor the length of time, make it possible to consider the existence of harassment, even though they generated a very relevant to both the caregiver and the parents of the minors,” she says.

The reporter Alejandro Entrambasaguas sat on the bench of the Julián Camarillo courts, in Madrid, on February 9 with the Prosecutor’s Office requesting a year in prison for him and the accusation, brought by the children’s parents, duplicated that request.

According to both the woman who took care of the children and Iglesias and Montero, in 2019 the editor of the digital directed by Eduardo Inda went to the couple’s home in Galapagar and tried to contact her several times through the phone. He also tried it through the woman’s mobile phone and eventually got to record the woman with a camera. He tried it several times between November and December of that year.

The judge begins by ruling out that the couple or their children, very young at the time, were victims of some kind of harassment. “They never saw or heard anything that the accused could have done,” he says of Iglesias and Montero. And about the children, he explains that they were so young that they did not know: “With little more than a year at the date of the events, they were certainly oblivious to what was happening around them and specifically to the knocks on the door or by phone that the defendant could do,” he says, while denying that the babies were “passive subjects of the crime”.

The judge endorses Entrambasaguas’s version and explains based on the proven facts that his objective was not to harass the family of the minister and the then vice president, but rather to obtain information on who and how he cared for his children. “Given the public repercussion of the parents for having political positions of notorious relevance, the accused, in his capacity as a journalist, intends to initiate an investigation into the conditions in which the caregiver carries out her professional activity,” says the sentence.

In the first place, the sentence highlights that the journalist, in reality, did not get in touch with the woman who took care of the children, although he did call several times by phone and talk on the intercom at home. “Not only does he not know the person he supposedly intends to harass, but he neither sees him nor exchanges a single word with him. And this is so because he did not give him the option to speak and refused from the first moment not to open the door for him from his house but also to answer the defendant’s calls, whether they were to the intercom in his portal or to his mobile phone”, says the judge.

For the judge, the woman’s “secrecy” performance was “really an impediment to consider an unequivocal initial moment of a possible harassment situation.”

The sentence recognizes that “it can be perfectly understood in this sense that they felt alarmed by the presence of the journalist because he could reveal data, such as the location of their children’s nursery, which could affect the tranquility and security of the minors” but rejects that there was a crime. “This alarm, which certainly caused a change in their state of mind and which led them to strengthen protection at the police level to prevent the safety of minors, did not originate so much in what the accused journalist did, acts of very little entity and that they did not exceed in their execution of the work of a journalist as described above, but in their consideration of an intruder who had accessed a place that they wanted to keep secret, thereby breaking the confidentiality of the location data of the children of the plaintiffs who wanted to be preserved at all costs”, concludes the sentence that is still appealable.



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