He asked a friend and boyfriend to beat her to blame her ex-partner: the tragic world of false allegations of spousal abuse

"This is the most Machiavellian case I have ever come across," says Alicia *, a criminal lawyer specializing in criminal law, from Spain.

"It was a couple that I helped to make their separation by mutual agreement," he recalls.

"She was a well-prepared girl, who had never managed to overcome her partner's infidelity, and during the process I could see that she had developed an atrocious hatred against him."

"One day, she called me and told me that he had beaten her and that he wanted me to represent her."

According to him, the beating took place a few hours earlier and the lawyer went to the court where the woman was testifying.

She was shocked by the young woman's state of health: she had an orthopedic collar, a dislocated elbow, her face almost disfigured, a closed eye with a bruise.

"How terrible it is, how could it have done you!" Asked he.

The man was interrogated in another room to which the lawyer also had access.

"Alicia, you know I could not have done that," he said.

"It made me shudder," he recalls.

But what he would discover later would bother her even more.

The secret

The woman claimed that her ex-partner had gone to the house where she lived and beat her.

Later, he says, he left and was helped by his best friend and boyfriend.

In fact, closed-circuit external cameras showed the man entering the two-story house and leaving shortly thereafter.

According to the story, the girlfriend and her boyfriend were on the top floor and when Alicia's customer came to open the door, she did it alone.

The lawyer remembers that they had told her that after a while, her friend and boyfriend had heard the woman howling, they went to see what had happened, they l & rsquo; Were found beaten and the three of them went to the hospital.

The medical staff activated the protocol in these types of cases and informed the police.

After being released, she was sent to a court where she filed her complaint.

The police immediately arrested his ex-partner and a restraining order was issued.

However, there is something that has not really convinced Alicia, who has been exercising this right for more than a decade.

His suspicions were not solely based on what the accused had told him and his experience with him during the separation process.

"It's that level of aggression was not logical," he tells me.

There must be something more.

I felt that the complainant's friend was hiding something.

And he was not wrong. When they left the court, the young woman could no longer stand it and revealed the secret to her.

"He confessed that my client had asked him, as well as his boyfriend, to beat her."

"We did it, it was very difficult for us to hit it … Imagine, it's my friend!" He said.

The lawyer decided to withdraw from the case.

"I told my client that I could not help an innocent person to be sent to prison (.) And advised him to stop complaining."

The woman understood her decision, but did not follow her advice and the case was forwarded to the prosecution.

"Until the last minute, she said that he had beaten her, she never stopped, she wanted to see him in jail."

And he succeeded.

The man was found guilty and sent to prison.

The friend was called to testify but did not do so arguing that "I did not see anything".

"Her boyfriend kept the same thing."

What has really happened?

The lawyer told me that on the day of the badault, the alleged perpetrator had gone to his ex-wife's home to find their son, as agreed.

"There were stairs to go to the duplex door," he continues.

"When he arrived, she shouted at him not to come up because he was not going to give the child to leave (…) They were arguing like that for several minutes, she goes up and down, with the staircase between the two ".

"You will not take the child," he said, and he closed the door "and" to avoid problems, he decided to leave ". But he could see it very quickly and in good condition.

"She had everything calculated to the millimeter," says the professional.

Then the blows came and his friends took him to the hospital.

The child, says Alicia, did not see what happened. Although he was at home, he was totally isolated.

Later, another friend went to take care of him.

When I asked her if she had tried to tell the prosecution what her friend had confessed, she replied that she could not.

"(As a lawyer), I have a duty of confidentiality towards a client and I can not tell what a person has confided (secretly) to the client. exercise my profession, "he explained.

"The most ethical thing was to retire and advise the woman to tell the truth."

When the man was released (after about six months), much of his world was gone and he decided to leave the country.

Extremely unusual

When talking about false allegations of domestic violence, experts and police from different countries consulted by BBC World are categorical: they are exceptional, extremely unusual and numerically minimal, especially when compared to actual cases that affect thousands and thousands of people. thousands of people. women – and to a much lesser extent men – around the world. The people affected are almost always men.

In Spain **, the country covered by this article, 166,260 complaints of gender-based violence were filed in 2017 and 23 prosecutions for false accusations were filed. And as shown in the table below, in 2012 – record year – there were 17 false charges out of a total of 128,543. Only 0.013%.

But even though they are exceptional, they exist and can have devastating consequences for both the accused and the victims of real abuse.

"These are dangerous complaints because they seek to corrupt a system designed to protect the victims and punish the abusers and not be used for other purposes," says psychologist Paula Ronco Cardoso of Madrid.

Ronco recognizes that the cases that he has known are "very specific exceptions" occurring in the context of a divorce or where there is an intention to initiate a divorce.

In this process, he warns, "many emotions are aroused" and sometimes a "fierce competition" is triggered.

"I'll win you," I'll take everything you've got (including kids), "(.)" I'll do all the needed to ruin your life "are feelings of revenge that seem to mitigate the trauma, feelings of frustration" because the relationship did not work.

"The people who create this kind of complaints, both men and women, are blinded, what they are looking for is to" destroy "the other person, they are not aware of the meaning of this false report. ", That in many countries, including Spain, is described as a crime.

"Come as soon as possible please!"

When Pablo * informed Estefania * that she had decided to break up with their relationship and that she was leaving the house, she reacted with anger.

He began to throw away the books, the ornaments of the house, the lamps, the pictures, the pictures, the furniture.

"In the meantime, her husband was packing," said Spanish lawyer Helena Echeverri, who has 22 years of experience in criminal and family law and has been a professor of law. right to the university in Spain.

Stephania called the police: "Come quickly, my husband is attacking! Come as soon as possible, please!"

When the uniform arrived, said Echeverri, the woman opened the door and said, "Look at everything you did!"

Pablo had another version: "Agent: before I stop, I want you to know that everything is registered, here is the recording that I will see, I have already sent to my lawyer" .

After seeing her, "the agent indicated that she was not going to stop it and that in reality, they could stop her".

But Pablo "did not want to denounce him", according to the lawyer,

"He did not want to harm the mother of his children to spare them from suffering."

"If he had not registered (secretly) what happened, his arrest would have been imminent," says Echeverri, who was also his friend and knew the couple as a colleague of Pablo.

"I was really shocked because I could never imagine it."

"You know, when they say sometimes," It's amazing, how this man could have been an abuser with his wife or children? "He seemed to be a very good person. "I could never imagine a woman as sweet and seemingly as reasonable and balanced as she could reach these extremes."

The Latin abuser

Determining when a complaint is false and when it is real is a very complex issue, among other things because cases of violence against women often occur in private and material evidence or witnesses are not always available, which makes it difficult to determine what has actually happened.

In addition, the aggression is often psychological, verbal or emotional and leaves no trace in the body.

After decades of violence against women and feminicide around the world, police and judicial systems in dozens of countries have adopted legal mechanisms to protect whistleblowers immediately after filing complaints.

This saved thousands of lives, not only women but also children.

However, some jurists question the weight that, in some cases, the word of the woman keeps to the word when she files the complaint and warns that this may affect the presumption of innocence of the woman. accused.

At a time when many women denounce the violence of their partners or ex-partners and that there is a significant militancy to fight against feminicides through movements such as Ni Una Menos or Vivas Nos Queremos, and that Others have managed to make visible male bullying with the campaign. "Me too" (me too), the credibility of someone designated as an abuser can be almost nil.

The case that Lucia tells me * illustrates this controversy.

"My sister denounced the mistreatment inflicted on her husband, but at home we all knew that it was a lie and we let the police know that she had Always a very aggressive person, she made my childhood a nightmare, he called my brother-in-law horrible things, and he knew that some of his ex-partners had physically badaulted them, "he admits.

"My mother begged the commissioner to release him and they finally released him, but they asked him not to go back to the house where they lived together."

When Lucia, who was in another city, asked a friend to take him for one night, her response disappointed her.

"As soon as I mentioned the word" accusations of ill – treatment ", no one wanted to accept it, no matter how much I insisted that the accusation be false. , no one believed it, it was a small town and rumors began to come according to which my brother-in-law would have nickname: "the Latin aggressor".

"My sister, meanwhile, went to a women's badociation that supported her wholeheartedly, they accepted her version without reservation, but the victim was him, first of his humiliations, after the public mockery, then in several cases, injuries inflicted by her ".

"Many people went to defend that his nephew, who was then a baby, was entirely under the care of his nephew and that the father had to refuse him the stay in Spain and deprive him of seeing his son."

"They did not realize that instead of protecting the child, they condemned him as an unbalanced and aggressive person."

After the intervention of social services, a judge decided to entrust custody of the child to the father because "there were serious deficiencies in the care of the child when the mother was in load, and the opposite when the child was taken care of by the father ".

Thanks to a visitation scheme, she can now see the child.

"He is lost"

Five years ago, Spanish lawyer Yobana Carril made a decision: abandon commercial law and enforce criminal law.

And he took another step: to represent men exclusively.

The turning point he took after what he has lived in front of an audience.

A colleague had asked her to replace her in a case of gender-based violence.

When Carril told him that he had no experience in such procedures, he replied: "This does not matter because I represent the man with whom (the case) is lost. "

"It really caught my eye," he tells me. Nevertheless, he took up the challenge. It is a woman who said that her husband beat her and her son.

"I imagined it was a small child or a pre-teen, but the son turned out to be a very robust man, in his forties (.) And the client, a man over 70 years with his shirt bleeding with a punch given his son. "

"Without any evidence, beyond the words of his wife, all the questions from the prosecutor's office and the judge concerned the fact that the man was considered guilty, not for the truth, but for his guilt."

"On the side of the prosecutor, he understood, it is his work, but on the side of the judge, no", evokes.

"When we finished, the judge told me officially that I would sentence him and asked him," But on what? "And he told me:" Is this badual violence a problem, go to the Provincial Court to indicate that there are three magistrates and that the responsibility is diluted. " I did not believe what I had heard and seen. "

The threats

The law firm that founded and directs Carril "has specialized in the defense of men who have been violated by the law, false victims of so-called gender violence, parents abused by their children, in short of those who have seen their rights violated because of his bad, "explains his website.

And while he acknowledges that many judges are looking for truth in cases of gender-based violence, he thinks others do not feel as free because of the social pressure that exists in this area.

"Some radical feminists, personally and through some badociations, insulted me, they came to threaten me, not only me, but my daughter as well."

"Sometimes we forget that people who have been falsely accused will have new partners, mothers, sisters, who are also affected (by the processes open to them)".

According to the lawyer, official statistics report a low number of false allegations because very few men decide to initiate a procedure and in doing so, they last for years before to be solved.

"When they are absolved, men have spent a lot of money defending themselves, their energy, their time … There are people who have spent up to three or four years in court."

"They recognized me"

Carmen Santisteban, a specialist in criminal law and gender-based violence, has 12 years of experience.

As a lawyer in the private sector, she has handled some 500 cases of domestic violence and has received numerous convictions against her abusers.

But he also met women who falsely denounced their colleagues and "they recognized me".

"I remember the case of a woman who accused her partner of being cut off with a knife." With the coroner, we were able to demonstrate that it was impossible to make the cut with such a knife and the way she claimed it had happened. It was a clean cut, straight and thin, and we cleaned it. "

"It also happened to a woman who said that her partner had bitten her arm, we found out that it was not him but himself."

The ramifications

The consequences of a false relationship of intimate partner violence can be devastating to the accused. "In this society, we start by labeling and prejudging and as soon as the family and social environment designates you as a violent person, you are separated from society. And if you are not, you should not not have this scourge, "said Paula Ronco Cardoso.

Echeverri recognizes that his ramifications go beyond the personal and the familiar and reach social and work.

For her, "the problem is that these complaints take away resources that should be used to help women who have really been and are being abused".

"You can (run the risk of) begin to question what the victim says," said Ronco Cardoso.

"They can say," Maybe it's not that bad, "but when the victim is real, of course, it's for a lot and a lot more."

The only doubt can have a tragic outcome.

* Names have been changed to protect the identity of respondents and those involved in the sentence.