Popular tradition says that every act has its consequences. And that’s generally how it is. Even what we post on the networks. If not, ask a man who has been sentenced by the Provincial Court of Lleida to 18 months in prison for spreading the intimate life of his ex-partner through his account on the social network Facebook while both were in the process of divorce. , according to the newspaper Segre. The court confirmed the sentence imposed in the first instance by the Criminal Court number 3 of Lleida to 10 months in prison for a crime against moral integrity and another 8 months in prison for a crime of threats in the family environment. Likewise, it ratified the compensation that the convicted person must pay to the victim for the moral damages caused: 3,000 euros.
The sentence considers it proven that the accused disseminated aspects of the intimate life of himself and the victim through Facebook, a fact that the defendant himself admitted, although he downplayed its seriousness. Your argument from him? That they were “public and notorious facts and that those around him knew about the sexual practices” of the complainant. However, the court ruled that the online publications “are not irrelevant” and threaten the moral integrity of the victim.
“It is a violation of the right to privacy,” says Carlota Planas, a lawyer specialized in intellectual property and new technologies. Asked by La Vanguardia to evaluate this case, Planas emphasizes that the convicted man “has tarnished the image of the victim and even his reputation and her honor.”
The sentence, in this sense, makes it crystal clear: the accused “disseminated certain behaviors of the complainant without her authorization and knowing that such dissemination, in view of the special nature of the contents, threatened the moral integrity of the person.” “He had been his romantic partner.”
Likewise, the Lleida Court considers it proven that there was a crime of threats, since the expressions made by the accused to the victim “constitute the announcement of a bad future and are of sufficient magnitude to cause unrest.” Likewise, he sees the compensation set by the Criminal Court as proportionate (a total of 3,000 euros) under the argument that “there is no doubt that the moral and humiliating damage inflicted on the victim derives from the facts.”
This is not the first case in which an action of this nature has a judicial consequence. Already in 2010, a 20-year-old young man was sentenced in New Zealand to five weeks in prison for posting naked photos of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook, in what many considered the first conviction in an act of this nature. The boy justified his action by claiming that it was an attack of jealousy during a drunken spell, but the judge did not consider this context as a mitigating circumstance.
At first, access to the photograph was limited to the young man’s 218 friends, but later he decided to make it public to the entire Facebook network. The image was accessible for 12 hours, until the police proceeded to remove it.
In Spain there have also been convictions for similar acts. A year after the New Zealand case, a young man was sentenced by the Criminal Court number 3 of Córdoba to 15 months in prison for a crime against privacy and a lack of insult for uploading to the Tuenti social network (now defunct). erotic photos of his ex-girlfriend.
And more recently, specifically in 2022, the Provincial Court of Teruel sentenced a man to a one-year prison sentence and compensation of 10,000 euros for publishing photographs and videos of sexual content of a woman on various websites and Internet pages. with whom he had a romantic relationship.
