“About four years ago or so, a good friend of mine who I won’t name but who works in very high places at the national level told me: ‘Dieguito, they’re coming for you.’ He calls me that, Dieguito. I remember perfectly where I was at that moment. I was relatively calm although we had been convicted in civil proceedings and everything had been very strange. They gave him everything he asked for. If they ask that we have to pay for the children’s end-of-year trips, too. The civilian was very clear about where he was going but a criminal trial in the Provincial Court of Barcelona… ” The person who explains this is the photojournalist Diego Arrabal, sentenced along with his former partner Gustavo González to ten months in prison and as many months of disqualification from professional practice for a crime of revealing secrets. Mariló Montero was photographed in Bora Bora and although those top shots never saw the light of day, she sued both of them through civil proceedings and then pursued criminal proceedings. Today the sentence was handed down.
Neither Diego Arrabal nor Gustavo González can explain why the court considers extreme proven facts such as that Mariló Montero was on a private beach. “But at the beginning of the trial it is said in the courtroom that although they had requested internally from the French embassy the Coastal Law of Bora Bora, where the archipelago belongs, it has not reached them but it is not necessary. As? And then how is it a proven fact that that place was a private beach?”
In fact, the defendants themselves had already provided the information that in Bora Bora all the beaches are public as an element of their defense. The inconsistencies do not end there, explains Diego Arrabal: “The ruling says that even the director of the medium understood that the material was unpublishable and that is why they did not see the light of day. And it was not like that: the director of Readings said that he had sent them to Mariló Montero to see if she gave him the OK and since she did not give it to him, they were not published. In effect, the ruling says that the photos “were not publishable because there were indications of illegality in obtaining them and they were sent to Ms. M. to alert her of their existence.”
Diego Arrabal says that he has preferred to censor himself many times to avoid getting into trouble with people of social relevance much more important than Mariló Montero. It is not clear why this complaint has gone so far, much less a conviction: “I have always told Gustavo: here we have hit a nerve and I don’t know what it is that makes them hate us so much. To give you an idea: the lawyers of the other party knowing our information, they have written it wrong, an incorrect address so that they could put us in search and capture. While I was on a television set the police came there to give me a summons. And again, in a hotel in Valencia: they woke me up at 6:30 in the morning to tell me that there was a couple from the Civil Guard at the reception to give me a summons. Is that normal?”
Needless to say, Arrabal and González are going to appeal the ruling before the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia, but at the moment they already have a very serious problem on their heads: the Court’s ruling disqualifies them for ten months “from exercising any activity.” related to that of the press agencies.”
