Víctor Galindo, Paula Bonet's stalker, will remain at large until the sentence that forces him to undergo "internal treatment in a center appropriate to his disorder for a maximum period of 18 months" is final.
Galindo has not been admitted to a psychiatric hospital as ordered by the ruling because the resolution was appealed and did not become final. And things are going long, because yesterday the Provincial Court of Barcelona resolved that appeal and annulled the previous sentence handed down by criminal court number 10 of Barcelona. What the Court proposes is that the criminal judge "go back" to dictate the sentence and do it in a more reasoned way, expanding the motivation.
We will have to wait for the judge to comply with that order. It is foreseeable that one of the parties, or both, will appeal the new ruling, which will force them to wait for a new ruling from the Provincial Court. Meanwhile, Galindo will remain free.
The man began to harass the writer Paula Bonet in 2019. Galindo showed up at Bonet's workshop shortly before a class began, posing as a student. “I opened the door for him, locked it, told him to wait in the entrance area and went to finish preparing the class. He ignored it and got into the area where I was, then I discovered that he was not a student. He verbalized the desire that he had to be with me and at that moment he decided that he had to hold me. I got away from him, taking advantage of the proximity of the class and the imminent arrival of students," Bonet recounted in an interview with La Vanguardia.
The harassment continued. Galindo sent emails, messages and appeared at the victim's workshop. Until an envelope arrived with a plastic eel inside and the word "rapist". The artist filed a complaint. But her stalker "kept coming to the workshop, to my talks, to my partner's concerts, always in the front row. "He was getting more and more violent."
He went so far as to write a tweet loaded with violence: “If I come across you, I am going to rape and dismember you to please all the miserable homeless people who populate the streets of Barcelona. You'll see what a feast, I'll save my eyes for the last thing and keep my nipples in a lunch box for my own enjoyment (...) if you prefer, you can beg for mercy from this stalker, rapist, torturer and psychopath; You will only be raped until you have your third abortion," the stalker wrote to Bonet in a tweet.
Faced with this harassment, the writer was forced to close her workshop in Barcelona, a place where the harasser had gone repeatedly, and moved out of the city. Later, Galindo entered provisional detention pending trial and Bonet, who is also a painter and engraver, breathed a little easier. The harasser was released a few days before the trial whose sentence was not long in coming.
In that ruling, the judge ordered Galindo to enter a psychiatric center, to stay away from Bonet for five years and to compensate the artist with 3,940 euros. The magistrate considered it proven that the stalker "suffered from a capsulated delusion of erotomania, which completely conditioned his will."
The Court considers that the first instance sentence “is acquittal” and now wants the judge to “develop the argumentation to understand what type of pathology is the erotomanic delusional disorder, from a scientific-psychiatric perspective; what type of affectation does it have for the cognitive component of psychiatric capacity (if it is a psychotic type illness or is it rather a derivation of a personality disorder)”.
