A man has been sentenced by the Álava Court to more than 17 years in prison for raping, intimidating, beating and robbing his niece for almost three decades, from 1992 when the girl was 11 or 12 years old, until 2020, without that none of his family or friends detected what was happening.
The sentence handed down by the Alava Court charges him with two continuous crimes, one of sexual assault and another of robbery with violence or intimidation.
In 1989, the girl began to live in the same home as her uncle, in her maternal grandparents’ house. An emotional bond was created between uncle and niece and he became “the father figure that she had never had.”
When the minor turned 11 or 12 years old, her uncle, born in Gipuzkoa, began to engage in “conduct of a sexual nature” with the little girl while they were playing video games, when they were returning by car from a day at the beach in San Sebastián or when the girl I showered at home.
In 1994 the little girl’s grandfather died and he became “the dominant figure in the home.”
Little by little, the sexual assaults and rapes in the home where they lived when there was no one else in the house worsened, while the minor developed anorexia nervosa and her psychiatric admissions began.
In 1999, the teenager came of age and began working. From that moment on, her uncle began to ask him for money and when she refused him, since she did not return it, he hit her, punching her until he got her to give it to him.
At the age of 19, the victim went to live in shared apartments but that did not stop him from continuing to force her to have sexual relations.
After starting a romantic relationship in 2008, the young woman married her boyfriend in 2013, a marriage that lasted until 2017. During that time, the “episodes of physical violence” continued by the accused to get him to give her money and even on one occasion they maintained penetrative sexual relations after her uncle argued that she “was his,” which the victim “interpreted as infidelity toward her husband.”
The last rape occurred in October 2020. As a result of these events, the young woman suffers from “post-traumatic stress disorder, accompanied by recurrent major depressive disorder and dissociative symptoms from which she will not recover,” the court highlights.
Although the accused denied all the facts, saying that he had never touched her, hit her or asked for money, the Court gives total credibility to the victim’s testimony.
Also the daughter of the accused, who told the trial that her father abused her when she was 9 years old and also saw how on one occasion, when they were driving in a car, her father reached back and touched the complainant’s thigh.
For all these reasons, it imposes a sentence of 17 years and 3 months in prison on the accused, a sentence against which an appeal can be filed before the Superior Court of Justice of the Basque Country.
