It had only been a week since a woman living in Playa Santiago, La Gomera, broke off her relationship with her boyfriend of nine months. It was the night of 1 February 2016, and she was on the sofa in her living room watching TV. The door opened, and she saw Claudio C., an Italian who had been residing in the town for years. He had been her partner, but they did not live together. The woman told him to leave, that he could not be there. That was the last thing she said to him before she endured a true hell until the following morning. For 12 hours, her ex-partner raped her repeatedly after threatening her: “You are not leaving here; I will do whatever I want with you tonight, and then I will kill you,” as the victim recounted yesterday in the trial held at the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
She stated, in response to questions from the defence, that she did not know how many times the accused had raped her, as she had lost consciousness. “It could have been seven, eight, or ten times. I don’t know; I didn’t have the strength for anything,” she replied, adding that she vomited several times during the attack.
The sexual assault began in the living room, and at one point, when she saw that he had his trousers around his ankles, she thought that if she ran to her room, she would have time to open the balcony door and call for help or jump out into the street, even if it was several metres down. “I was clear that I wanted to save my life. I shouted once for help, but he caught me, put his fingers in my mouth, covered my nose, and dragged me to the bed where he raped me several more times,” she confessed.
She thought about how to save her life
The next morning, the victim regained consciousness and realised that her attacker was in the living room: “I heard him taking the laces out of his shoes and thought he was going to kill me.” She stated that when her ex-boyfriend came back into the room, she “opened her arms to hug him” and told him that “everything was fine, that nothing had happened” and that “they would be together”. It was her strategy to subdue the attacker and save her life.
“When I told him that, he started crying on top of me, but then he raped me again. I think that time he thought it was consensual, but it wasn’t. I just wanted to get out of the house and keep myself safe,” she recalled. She convinced him to go to a restaurant for lunch. “I wanted to go somewhere with people to feel safe and maybe ask for help,” she revealed.
Throughout that terrible night, as long as she had strength to resist, the woman tore his shirt. As they headed to the restaurant, she told him to go home to change while she went to her sister’s house, which was just a few metres from hers, to prepare “things for the holiday trip she was taking the following day.” She entered and very hurriedly told her sister what had happened: “I was afraid he was listening outside the house,” so she told her sister to go to the Civil Guard to report it. Fearing that he might do something to both of them, she decided to stick to the plan of going for lunch with him at the restaurant.
The Report
Her sister went to the Civil Guard barracks to tell what her sister had said. According to her account, the officers told her that the victim needed to report the assault and did not assure her that the man “could end up being arrested.” Therefore, according to her version, she did not report it and preferred, some time later, to leave the island until she returned in 2022, after learning that her ex-boyfriend had been imprisoned for sexually assaulting another woman, also a resident of Playa Santiago.
During that time, between 2016 and 2022, she lived in Denmark and Mallorca. “I was alone, away from my mother who lived in Tenerife and my sister, in La Gomera.” Eight years had passed, and she wondered “why I had to be alone while he continued normally on the island, without justice knowing what he had done to me,” she confessed in court. She added that when she found out that he had done something similar to another woman in the same town, she returned to the island and reported the events. “I felt safer; he was in prison.”
The alleged assailant denied all the charges made against him by his ex-partner. He claimed that he never entered his ex-partner’s house without her permission and that the report was due to “revenge” from his ex-girlfriend’s sister’s partner: “I testified at a trial in 2022 against him on behalf of a victim who this man had assaulted,” he stated. This was, according to his version, the reason his ex-partner reported him for rape, eight years after the supposed events took place.
During the trial, the victim’s sister also testified, confirming her account; a psychologist she went to for “anxiety”; and two expert psychologists who examined the woman after the report was made.
The man is accused as the alleged perpetrator of a crime of trespassing and sexual assault, for which the prosecution and the private prosecution are seeking a sentence of 12 years in prison, 10 years of supervised release, and compensation of 18,000 euros. The defence is seeking full acquittal for their client, who is already serving a nine-year sentence for another sexual assault.
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