Barcelona.- Karla took almost seventeen years to feel capable of reporting the man who sexually assaulted her for over a year when she was thirteen, but in 2021, after an investigation where she regained a strength she thought she had lost, the accused committed suicide and left her without a sentence that, she asserts, “would have been restorative.”
“On one hand, I felt relieved thinking that he would never hurt anyone again, but on the other, after months in which every small step had empowered me, I was left wanting to go through with this trial because a verdict would have been restorative for me,” explains Karla to EFE, who has decided to make her case public in the hope of closing a reparation process that was cut short and helping other victims with her testimony.
Between March 2003 and September 2004, Joan P., a doctor and close friend of Karla’s family, sexually assaulted her on numerous occasions as part of an alleged therapy with which he intended to redirect her adolescent “rebellion,” facts for which he was prosecuted—after Karla filed a complaint in January 2020, unknowingly, shortly before the statute of limitations expired—as the alleged perpetrator of crimes of rape of a minor, unjust vexation, and torture.
On June 16, 2021, while under investigation, Joan P. received a second complaint accusing him of abusing another minor. The following day, he committed suicide, thereby extinguishing any “criminal liability,” as stated in the order from the magistrate of the Barcelona investigative court number 31, which closed the case due to the death of the accused.
“I didn’t feel prepared”
“All these years I intended to report it, especially out of fear that he might be assaulting other people, but I didn’t feel ready,” recalls Karla about the period leading up to the report, which she lived with a certain “normality,” protected by a “defense mechanism” that made her “forget or erase” what happened in order to, in some way, “move on.”
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In October 2004, Karla told her mother for the first time, who had proposed starting therapy with the doctor unaware of his methods, but after seeking advice from the Vicki Bernadet foundation and telling her daughter that if she were to report it she would have to testify in the presence of Joan P., she decided not to do so.
“Something went wrong there,” reflects Karla years later, arguing that, despite not having filed a “formal” complaint, they did inform an entity for child abuse victims about what happened, which, however, did not “support” them in being able to move forward with a criminal process that ended up remaining paralyzed for more than sixteen years.
Tired of “staying silent and being ashamed”
Christmas 2019, following a conversation with a friend, Karla decided to take it up again and file a report, not only because she felt a little more capable and had a support network to lean on, but above all because after so many years of hiding it, she was “tired” of being the one who “had to stay silent and be ashamed.”
The following months, in which she relived the assaults numerous times to explain them to police, forensic experts, psychologists, and the investigating judge, she acknowledges that they “shook her,” but also strengthened her: “I would go in with fear, but I would come out empowered, proud of having been able to do it.”
Joan P.’s death interrupted this process forever, which Karla tried to continue through civil channels by mediating with his wife and son to obtain financial compensation, but without receiving a response until the end of last year, when his son told her that he “had nothing to talk about.”
“A survivor”
“I was left halfway,” admits Karla, who by making her case public feels she is starting a “second step” with which she hopes to encourage other victims to speak out, especially one of them: “I would like to contact the other person who reported him, and perhaps there are more.”
Also to contribute to raising awareness in a society that is unaware that in Spain one in five minors suffers sexual abuse and where, furthermore, there is a “strong” judgment towards the victims, especially in cases like theirs, in which “many people question when there is no sentence”.
A society and a system that, nevertheless, celebrates that they are improving in aspects such as the extension of the statute of limitations or the care for victims during judicial proceedings like the one she experienced.
“This will stay with me for the rest of my life. Even if there had been a trial or a sentence, unfortunately, it is something that defines me,” Karla acknowledges, convinced, at the same time, that she wants to stop being “a victim who is afraid and cannot show her face” to become “a survivor who wants to tell her story.” EFE
