Half a century in prison for kidnapping, raping and torturing a minor for a month "for being a woman"

She was 16 years old. He had three more. And both had been dating for a few months when the young man invited the teenager to spend a few days with him at his parents’ house in Fuenlabrada, south of Madrid. “You are going to live a fairy tale, I am going to treat you like a queen,” he promised. A 35-day kidnapping then began in which the victim was raped, tortured, beaten and harassed until the Police entered a room where they found the young woman on the verge of death. The Provincial Court of Madrid has settled the case with a sentence of 50 years in prison for seven different crimes in an episode that they describe as “terrifying” sexist violence.

The sentence explains that the two young people had started a relationship in July 2021 and that one Monday in October of that year the young man made him a proposal: go to his parents’ house in Fuenlabrada. She accepted and did not even notify her parents, convinced that they were only going to spend one day there. He only took his school backpack. That same day began what the judges described as a “true torment” inflicted by the young man on the teenager to “annul her freedom” and “make her depend only on him” for a single reason: “The fact that she was a woman.”

The first two weeks of “terror”, according to the victim’s own words, took place in the condemned man’s paternal home. He forbade the young woman to return to school or go out on the street if she was not with him and, if she did go out, she had to do so with her head bowed or covered. Inside the house he could not leave his room. All under the threat of harming his little sister. She, the judges explain, “acted out of fear.” He had to dress in the clothes of his captor, who also searched his cell phone looking for conversations with other men.

In that first part of the kidnapping, the beatings, insults and sexual assaults began. It was in November 2021, almost three weeks later, when the aggressor decided to rent a room in a shared apartment in another area of ​​the same town in the south of Madrid, where the couple moved to live with three other people. The victim was once again confined to a room where the torments increased in intensity on the sadism scale.

In addition to the daily beatings and insults, torture and humiliation were added, such as having to eat food with cigarette butts or being hit with any object he found around the house, sometimes also on his private parts. On other occasions he was not allowed to go to the bathroom and had to relieve himself on his own. And the aggressor never hid the reason for so much violence: that he could be with other men or that he was thinking about them. The interrogations about the boys she had been with were so violent and constant that, at one point, the young woman began to invent names of fictitious couples, places and situations “thinking she was going to stop, but she didn’t.” “You get out of prison, but not out of the grave,” he even said. If she asked him to stop, he hit harder. With fists, but also with all kinds of household objects.

The release came 35 days after disappearing. The young woman managed to leave the room and scream for help after a beating with which the kidnapper almost ended her life. The three people who lived in the apartment entered the room full of blood, saw the horror and called the Police. The agents who entered the house were very clear during the trial when recounting what they saw. “It was dantesque,” ​​said one of them. His nose had been broken for weeks and he could barely see due to the bruises on his face. The accumulation of attacks made it impossible to quantify the bruises. The officer explained that at first he thought he was seeing a dead body, not a living person. The young woman was in hypovolemic shock and on the verge of death.

Half a century in prison

The accused entered provisional prison shortly after being arrested and was finally tried last October by section 26 of the Provincial Court of Madrid. Neither his pleas of innocence nor his explanations that, in reality, he was addicted to drugs and did not control his violent impulses have been successful before the judges. The result is a sentence, still appealable, of 50 years in prison for seven different crimes in addition to the obligation to compensate the victim with more than 200,000 euros.

The judges speak of “true torment” to describe what this 16-year-old girl suffered during more than a month of captivity. The accused, they explain, “did not show the slightest hint of compassion” while he tortured his victim daily under the pretext of “jealousy.” All, they add, “due to the fact of being a woman.” The sentence needs a dozen pages just to expose the physical and psychological consequences of captivity and all the times she had to undergo surgery once released.

In total, the judges impose 50 years in prison between an attempted crime of murder and another of sexual assault at a rate of 15 years each. The rest of the sentence is divided between ill-treatment, degrading treatment, injuries, threats and illegal detention. And the magistrates leave the door open for the accused, a Hungarian national, to be expelled from Spain when his sentence is final.

Throughout the trial, the young man limited himself to denying the abuse, beatings and rapes, stating that they had “strong” sexual relations and that “he did not think he could end his life” with beatings. For the court, these explanations are “certainly implausible” due to the pages and pages of evidence about the “brutal beatings” that the accused inflicted on the victim to the point of almost killing her. “There was little left if she were not attended to immediately,” the judges explain.

“I never suspected something so serious would happen”

The victim was not completely isolated during his 35 days of captivity. In their first phase, while they were in the aggressor’s family home, they lived with the father and the convicted man’s father’s partner, although there were hardly any interactions. In the second, they shared a flat with three other adults, although the young woman was constantly locked in the room. The captor always managed to keep the victim from leaving the house.

During the first weeks, the victim’s mother went to the defendant’s parents’ house to look for her daughter. The teenager responded to his messages, but she did it in a “different way, it was very violent,” she told the court. Once there he saw that the girl had scratches on her neck and the girl said it was “nothing.” Behind it, the young woman later explained, were the kidnapper’s threats so that she would not say anything.

The victim’s mother reported her daughter’s disappearance to the National Police, who at one point contacted the girl by email. “I am very well and in communication with my parents,” she responded when she was already captive in the house in Fuenlabrada. That email was actually written by the convicted person, as he explained once he was released. The young man’s stepmother, in a “vain attempt” to defend him at trial, tried to demonstrate that their coexistence was normal during those weeks.

The three adults who lived in the second house explained that they heard noises coming from the room that they attributed to sexual relations and the movement of furniture. “It was nothing more than the continuous beatings,” the judges explain. So that they could not be heard, the defendant put the television “very loud” and moved the bed. “I never suspected that something so serious could be happening,” said one of the boys. His partner, who also lived in the apartment, is a nurse and burst into tears at the trial when he had to describe what he saw in the room after freeing the victim. I couldn’t even feel his pulse.

The submission that the 19-year-old kidnapper achieved over the 16-year-old teenager, the court explains, also became total while “the situation of terror and continuous savage attacks” developed. To the point that, when his roommates opened the door, he asked that they not call the police because “you are looking for my ruin,” and she also asked that they not do anything to him, “which highlights that degree of submission.” achieved by him.”

The Provincial Court, in a ruling that has not yet been appealed, but can be challenged before the Superior Court of Justice, describes in fifty pages the hell that the young woman suffered. “Numerous physical and psychological attacks, very violent sexual ones, humiliating him, humiliating him and threatening him to prevent him from fleeing from his evil intentions, to the point, we insist, of losing his life from the beatings suffered from not being treated.”

“We are faced with an unequal and controlling relationship, based on gender,” said the forensic experts who treated the young women during the investigation. The victim, 19 years old when the trial took place, addressed the court to give one last explanation: “Even if I tell it, no one can ever know what it is. What I went through.”

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