with a serious face to explain the reaction of his party, Más Madrid, after the resignation of Íñigo Errejón as a result of anonymous complaints on an Instagram profile for alleged humiliating sexual behavior. This Sunday, the Madrid councilor was once again in front of the cameras, in this case in an interview on the program Saved of La Sexta. “How was I going to cover up as politics what I didn’t know as a couple?” Maestre defended herself, ensuring that neither she nor anyone in her party was aware of the sexist attitudes towards other women of her boyfriend approximately a decade ago.
Errejón, co-founder of Podemos in 2014 and since last February two weeks ago through a letter in which he said that he had reached “the limit of the contradiction between the character and the person.” Maestre considers that statement “an insult to intelligence and an indecent mix of victimhood, throwing balls out of bounds and not asking for forgiveness.”
Days before the resignation, an anonymous complaint on the Instagram profile of journalist Cristina Fallarás indirectly pointed out the politician, a reference on the Spanish left since the birth of Podemos. Later there were other anonymous accounts of “psychological violence, abuse and humiliation,” Maestre says. And a complaint at the police station from the presenter and actress Elisa Mouliaá. Two of the five anonymous episodes occurred during the courtship between Maestre and Errejón. “I’m still digesting it,” he says. The one who was Errejón’s girlfriend ten years ago and a fellow activist in the space on the left of the PSOE then decided to write one that she made public. “I wrote it in one go, it didn’t cost me anything. It came out very naturally and with a lot of anger,” Maestre confesses in the interview.
In the conversation, which lasted almost an hour, Maestre says she feels angry, disappointed, somewhat guilty – “How is it possible that you didn’t realize this?” [los comportamientos de Errejón] before?, she asks herself. But above all he feels anger. “One day I wake up and read a testimony in which a woman says that she had a relationship when Íñigo Errejón was my partner. And that she has felt bad, humiliated, etc. And then I realize that later Errejón came home with me and that has a lot of impact. I do not have a rivalry with that woman, but rather a contempt for that man. That’s why I write the letter.”
“The role is not mine. The victims are the women who have suffered situations of mistreatment, harassment or abuse,” Maestre emphasizes. “I feel cheated, personally and politically,” she continues and explains that from now on she will have to relocate the chapter of her life with Errejón to another place in her memory. “Everything that has happened forces us to relocate and relocate the past in a different way. And I have to do it in private but also in public because the only way to heal is to talk.”
When the scandal was uncovered, many voices, especially on the left, said that Errejón’s behavior with women was an open secret. With a huge face of stupor and surprise, Rita Maestre defends herself and assures that neither she “nor Manuela [Bergerot]by Monica [García]nor any other person” from Más Madrid knew that Íñigo Errejón was “a misogynist, a predator and a pathological manipulator.” Furthermore, he defines the management of this crisis as “impeccable” by both Sumar and Más Madrid. “We have been quick and very forceful and frank with the press and in assuming that there is much to rethink to ensure that this does not happen again.” And she responds with a categorical “no” to the question of whether she is worried about Errejón’s emotional or emotional situation. “Right now, the level of anger and disappointment does not allow me to have empathy,” he concludes. Asked how she feels seeing the end of Errejón’s political career, she states: “What I feel is that we didn’t know all this before. Because I don’t believe that any contribution to politics is worth as much as the parallel damage it has created.”
