“Hello, I'm Rosa and you know I'm calling you from prison. With this I would like the person that I am to be seen, not the person that the media has sold.” These are recent statements by Rosa Peral that, while she was serving her sentence, she attended to the production company Brutal Media that was preparing a documentary for Netflix. The result is The Tapes of Rosa Peral which, like The Body on Fire in series, leads the list of the most viewed films in the platform's catalogue.
The woman sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of Pedro Rodríguez, who was her partner at the time of the events in May 2017, considers that she was the victim of a “lynching” both “before, during and after the trial.” . She tries to sell that if she had been a man instead of a woman with an active sex life, no one would have cared about the case or her relationships. Instead, they found a vein of her in portraying her as a “black widow.”
The Rosa Peral tapes, for the record, are not only the author's version of the crime together with Albert López, who was her lover and received a 20-year sentence. It also has the prosecutor of the case, Félix Martín, who explains how the case was built and why he spoke about Peral's sexual and romantic relationships during the judicial process; with the testimonies of journalists such as Toni Muñoz and Mayka Navarro, who speak both about the way in which they were linked to the case as journalists and their opinion on the matter; or the version of Olga Arderiu, who defended Peral at the trial.
The documentary, therefore, can be understood as Netflix's documentary response to the crime committed by the Urban Police, taking advantage of the launch of The Body on Fire, its fictional treatment by screenwriter Laura Sarmiento. After all, the case that had caused rivers of ink in the media had become even more popular with Crims, the documentary format by Carles Porta for TV3 for which Movistar has the broadcasting rights at the state level.
But, having the direct testimony of the author of the crime, who still defends her innocence, it also arouses controversy. Should this speaker be given to Rosa Peral taking into account that a jury has already declared her guilty and that the victim in the case was Pedro Rodríguez?
