Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Amanda Erikson.
The woman was later found curled in a fetal position, crying in “a distraught state.” She went to the police, who made arrests the next day.
The subsequent trial ended on Thursday. The men were found guilty of “sexual abuse.” But the men were acquitted of sexual assault, a charge that includes rape.
Each man must pay the woman about $12,000, and they were sentenced to nine years in prison for their crimes. The woman's attorneys had sought 22 years.
In the wake of the verdict, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest. Holding signs declaring, “It’s not sexual abuse, it’s rape,” activists rallied in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia Pamplona and Alicante. An online petition calling for the disqualification of the trial’s judges has gathered more than 1.2 million signatures.
State prosecutors say that they will appeal the ruling.
Even Spain’s national police force came out strongly for the woman, tweeting “No is no” a dozen times shortly after the verdict.
The ‘Wolf Pack’ case
The five men were part of a WhatsApp group, dubbed the “Wolf Pack.” Shortly after the attack, the men texted “us five are f---ing one girl” and “there is video.” In other chats, the men joked about drugging women, then raping them. One even shared video of one of the men assaulting another woman, who appeared unconscious.
The judge did not allow the jury to consider the WhatsApp chats among the men.
Much of the trial revolved around short videos the defendants took of the woman during the attack. In the clips, the woman is seen in a “passive, submissive stance,” with her eyes closed. The men’s attorneys said this was evidence that she’d consented. They also pointed to a report compiled by a private investigator who secretly followed the victim in the days after the incident. He took pictures of her smiling and laughing with friends — evidence, the defense team said, that the woman had not been traumatized.
The woman’s attorneys pushed back against the idea that she had offered her “consent.”
“The defendants want us to believe that on that night they met an 18-year-old girl, living a normal life, who, after 20 minutes of conversation with people she didn’t know, agreed to group sex involving every type of penetration, sometimes simultaneously, without using a condom,” prosecutor Elena Sarasate said, according to the Guardian.
Spain’s laws on sexual violence
Politicians have promised to rethink Spain’s laws on sexual violence. Right now, a victim must prove that a perpetrator was violent or intimidating to gain a rape conviction. Many women’s rights activists say that sets the bar too high.
An editorial in the newspaper El Pais noted that violence or intimidation can be hard for survivors to prove. It “leads to the painful question of just how much a person needs to fight to avoid being raped without risking getting killed, and still get recognized as a victim of a serious attack against sexual freedom while ensuring that the perpetrators do not enjoy impunity,” the newspaper said, according to a translation by Agence France-Presse.
“The government has been, is and always will be with the victims,” Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, a spokesman for the government, told reporters.
