After seven years of battling in court against the broadcast of the series, which garnered audience records, the self-proclaimed former drug trafficker Laureano Oubiña has lost the lawsuit he filed against the production company Bambú, Atresmedia and Netflix for considering his right to honor in the fictional content sequences violated and that of his wife who starred in the first episode. The Supreme Court has admitted the appeal of the accusations and annuls the sentence imposed on them for which they had to compensate him with 15,000 euros by interpreting that the rights to honor, privacy and image of the famous Galician ex-capo had indeed been violated – his wife has already died -.
The ruling released this Thursday overturns the foundations of the first instance ruling and therefore rejects the payment of compensation. The high court thus upholds the appeal filed by the production company, the television network and the streaming platform on which the series was broadcast. Thus, the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court revokes the ruling of the Provincial Court that found an illegitimate interference in the plaintiff’s right to privacy due to the bed scene with which the series begins and which takes place in the Pazo de Baión that ended up in the hands of the State among the assets seized from Oubiña for his three convictions for drug trafficking.
Oubiña, 79, went so far as to demand compensation of 1.5 million euros and the removal of the sex scenes that exacerbated him. The Supreme Court has rejected the argument that his lawyer defended in the trial held in November 2023 when he denounced the damage that the series inflicted on his client: “Laureano Oubiña’s life has worsened considerably after the broadcast of this series, because he is portrayed as a person capable of taking the life of another, violent, sexist, cocaine trafficker, impotent, vicious, unfaithful, carried away, bad father, bad husband, brute, foolish, vengeful, abuser of women, ignorant or mafia,” defended Paladino Hernández.
However, the prosecutor’s office had requested that the lawsuit be dismissed because the contents of the series are under the protection of the “right to freedom of creation”, so it is not possible to demand “a criterion of veracity that would be typical of freedom of information.”
The Supreme Court ruling considers that the plaintiff is a public figure having been sentenced to high prison sentences for his prominent participation in organized drug trafficking activities, a matter of clear general interest.
Likewise, the Supreme Court concludes that the suggestion of his relationship with cocaine trafficking in the series does not represent an illegitimate interference in his right to honor, although in the series the character appears with his name and surname, and the production claims to be ‘inspired by real events’.
The Chamber argues that, since it is a work of fiction protected by the freedom of artistic creation, the same strict criterion of veracity that applies to the right to information is not required, and adds that a relevant reputational impairment cannot be appreciated in someone who has already been convicted of serious drug trafficking crimes, even if these were related to another substance.
In relation to the right to privacy, the Supreme Court also agrees with the production companies and states that these are short scenes, with clothed actors, without a particularly explicit character and fully integrated into the story, without acquiring a decisive dramatic relevance.
Furthermore, he considers that the average viewer understands that this is a fictitious recreation that is not intended to reflect real episodes of the plaintiff’s sexual life. In this way, the Supreme Court revokes the order to remove the scene from the first chapter and annuls the compensation set by the Pontevedra Court.
