Seen for sentence. This is how the trial for an alleged crime of revealing secrets against the paparazzi Gustavo González and Diego Arrabal as a result of the criminal complaint filed by the presenter Mariló Montero has turned out. The hearing, which lasted two days, ended this Wednesday with the statements of both defendants and the final conclusions of the prosecution, prosecution and defense. Section 3 of the Provincial Court of Barcelona will decide whether the photos taken of Montero during a vacation in Bora Bora, some of them topless, constitute a violation of his privacy and, above all, whether both reporters would be authors or co-authors of crime.
In their respective depositions, González and Arrabal apologized to Mariló Montero while explaining how a graphic report that never saw the light of day was handled. The photos were sent from Bora Bora, the commercial of his agency offered them to the magazine Lecturas but they ended up in a drawer: the director of the publication, Luis Pliego, explained the day before that he decided this after consulting what he had in hand with the unintentional protagonist of the photo pack. He acted in the same way with a previous report sent by the same agency that was published: Mariló, who was relaxing in the Maldives, appeared in a bathing suit. It was very good graphic material and the magazine had to give it a release, so it finally saw the light with the condition that it was flattering. And so it must have been, because Montero herself commented on it on her TVE program and on El Hormiguero, on whose set she joked about comparing herself to renowned models.
Everything was different in her speech on Tuesday: Montero spoke of harassment, violation of privacy to the point of feeling violated and the frustration of being observed also in the most remote place she could think of to escape. The presenter defended her belligerent position against the paparazzi on principle, because it is her right and because she has never sold an interview. Also because as a result of that interference she suffered emotionally to the point of preferring to abandon her work on television for a long season and move away from the spotlight. For this González and Arrabal apologized. But here the friendly terrain begins and ends.
The former partners, at the head of the Code Press agency (whose business name was Diegus SL) testified to having received material from Polynesia with a renowned Spanish figure relaxing on vacation. When they downloaded the file they saw that it was Mariló Montero, so they made a selection, Gustavo wrote a light accompanying text and her commercial was directed to the magazine Lecturas, the most interested in information related to the presenter. They claimed not to have otherwise participated in the process, nor to have ever set foot on Bora Bora.
Also, the photos not only did not show that Mariló and the friend who accompanied her had been captured in a private space – if so, they themselves would have discarded the reports – but that most of them were taken at the airport, the street or in a different beach. The director of Lecturas confirmed that the photos had only reached him and it was proven that Code Press never offered them to other media once the purchase of the report was rejected.
In his final conclusions, the lawyer for the private prosecution explained for one hour and eight minutes the reasons that, in his opinion, maintain that there is a crime. It was an eloquent speech, brilliant even in terms of oratory and the conviction that he gave to each of his considerations. He based the existence of a crime on jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court for similar cases and on the fact that the defendants declared before the civil court judge that they had information about Mariló Montero's escape to Bora Bora and even that two reporters close to her agency traveled with her on the same plane. On this point he built the possibility of mediate authorship or co-authorship of the alleged crime and on an e-mail from the director of the resort, that only through a boat or directly from the hotel is it possible to access the bungalows, ergo, it was a space private. He also paid the bill to two photographers to settle in the hotel two days before Mariló Montero arrived. The accusation developed up to 13 indications of guilt to build the accusation. However, the prosecutor shook his story minutes later with purely technical elements.
The Prosecutor's Office reaffirmed that there is no direct evidence that the defendants were authors of the report and that article 197 of the Penal Code does not apply, summarizing this issue in that due to the nature of the photos it has not been proven that González and Arrabal were aware of the illicit origin of the material and, even so, tried to commercialize it. The prosecutor said that things have now been explained that they could not have known then, such as that the bungalow area could only be reached by private boat or from the hotel, so nothing was as evident in 2015 as the prosecution maintained yesterday. He himself stated that, with the photos in front of him, he could not be sure that it was a raid on a private space.
Finally, González y Arrabal's defense lawyer, based on the four bases that jurisprudence has used to reject claims of this type (famous person, public place, newsworthy event and execution by a press agency) presented an interesting reasoning: has asked them for double liability, civil and criminal, for the same fact, a fact that if it had criminal relevance from the first moment, the criminal complaint would have been filed first and not the civil lawsuit. He also recalled that the accused do not have to prove their innocence – it would be a reversal of the burden of proof – and they have given a reasonable explanation of what happened while the prosecution does not find a motive for a crime, nor has new evidence appeared from the investigation to the oral hearing. .
Also that the crime of revealing secrets has been reformulated to adapt it to new technologies and has to do with issues such as the installation of hidden cameras, access to private images, mail theft, interception of computer data, etc., rather than with take photos with a telephoto lens. In any case, the prosecution has not been able to prove that these photos would have later passed from hand to hand, since only the director of Readings received them, and after being rejected neither González nor Arrabal offered them to any other media. They never saw the light, neither before nor after being sued.
