The other day I read, in this same newspaper, Íñigo Errejón said that, in my opinion, it has not happened. A lynching is when a large group of people take justice into their own hands without waiting for the legal process and therefore disregarding legal authority. The RAE specifies in its definition that lynching is “executing a prisoner without trial and in a tumultuous manner.” That’s why I say that Errejón has not been lynched. Not only because it has not been executed but because none of them were intended to replace a legal process.
The analysis spoke of Errejón’s “civil death,” but since that has not happened either, the text had to invent it. Specifically, it was stated that “no one will dare to give him work or frequent his acquaintance, since his irreparable negligence will spread to everyone who approaches him, like the miasmas of the plague.” And I say that he invents because reality contradicts prophecy. The most notorious case of sexual harassment in Spanish politics was that of Nevenka Fernández, and. The one who had to leave Spain and couldn’t find anyone who wanted to hire her was her. Ismael Álvarez, the aggressor, was tried and convicted: he resigned in 2003 and in 2010 he was back in politics. And if you want a more recent one, there you have Donald Trump, who will be president of the United States again after being convicted of sexual abuse and defamation.
What reality tells us is that we should be more concerned about Elisa Mouliaà’s civilian future than that of her alleged aggressor. She, like all victims of sexual assault who choose to report it, knows that she will be harshly judged for it. It is for this reason that many victims prefer testimony to reporting, not because they confuse one thing with another but because of how well they know the difference between one thing and another. For years: wearing a skirt that was too short, for example. Now, the experts of the lynching text suggest that the victims, even if they did nothing wrong, may have understood something wrong: the difference between bad sex and sexual violence. And they suggest, in passing, that its poor understanding could damage the democratic health of a country. The arguments seem new but the scheme is old: focus on the behavior of the victim and not on that of the aggressor. A scheme that is precisely the one that thousands of women have tried to banish since they began to be counted (without questioning) back in 2017.
Let us then focus on the behavior of the accused Íñigo Errejón and not on that of the women who question him. The police are investigating because there are signs of a crime and because the accused confessed that he was crossing the line. The one who has resigned is him, the one who planned to make him resign was his party. And the testimony that has aroused so much indignation has been . Even so, a group of experts comes to tell us that he has been lynched by a group of confused feminist women. Come on now.
