Filipe Amorim / LUSA
The candidate for President of the Republic, João Cotrim Figueiredo
Neither IL nor Cotrim wanted to explain what the candidate wanted to insinuate when he asked journalists if “they asked how many accusations of harassment have been made against Inês Bichão?”. So far, there is no sign of another similar complaint.
In the final stretch of the presidential campaign, João Cotrim de Figueiredo was confronted with one of the former parliamentary advisor of the Liberal Initiative (IL) Inês Bichão, that the candidate had sexually harassed her.
Cotrim denied this, and launched a challenge to the journalists: “Did any of you ask how many accusations of harassment you have made against Inês Bichão?”, suggesting that there were other accusations from the now working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thus devaluing the serious accusation in a publication published without her consent and which has since been deleted.
The Observer reported that the issue would be anchored in legal proceedings preparatory to a defamation complaint. But neither Cotrim de Figueiredo nor IL publicly specified what these alleged “other accusations” would be.
Given the lack of clarification, he made formal requests for information to the party and tried to obtain a response from Inês Bichão herself and beyond: he went to investigate within the party what was known.
IL responded that the MEP filed a criminal complaint for defamation and that he would not speak about the matter outside of court again. The former advisor has remained silent since the last statement, in which she said that the situation in 2023, something that the party .
The DN investigation focused on rumors that circulated in the liberal universe. Two names were mentioned: a lawyer from a company where Bichão had worked and a university professor. When contacted, both denied that there had been any complaint filed by Inês Bichão.
In the case of the teacher, there was a disciplinary process in 2020 related to complaints from female students at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon, but Bichão was not among the complainants and would no longer be at the institution at the time of the facts in question.
In Portugal, the Labor Code defines sexual harassment and classifies it as a very serious offense, without prejudice to criminal liability. In the Penal Code, the verbal aspect partially appears in the crime of sexual harassment, the number of investigations of which almost doubled between 2016 and 2024.
