The disgust that a rapist arouses in his victim is the kind of feeling that can hardly be expressed in words. Not even in the privacy of the divan. Beyond the fear, anger, confusion, blockage or degradation that the attacked person has come to feel, there is another sensation that remains in his physical body, and it is that indescribable wave of disgust and revulsion.
Anything to do with the perpetrator disgusts him. Including your money, that of that compensation that you can receive if the corresponding complaint in the courts prospers. Just imagine: everything he could acquire with that amount would remind him, over and over again, of the terrible moment that led to his gain.
But that is not the only reason that leads a sexually assaulted woman to renounce economic compensation. After all, the money could be donated to an entity that fights against our culture of rape. No, what is at stake is your credibility. And in this society, the more famous and wealthy the rapist is, the more his victim will be pushed to publicly reject compensation if she does not want to go headlong into the box of cheating sluts who go after the loot of a gullible.
The young woman who has accused Dani Alves of having raped her in the bathroom of the Sutton nightclub in Barcelona has explicitly renounced exercising that right. Her objective – as she explained – is for justice to be done and the former Barça player to pay with jail. And that the prison order issued by the magistrate investigating her case gives her total credibility… That’s how compelling her evidence seems.
On the other hand, it is clear that, if the alleged cases of sexual harassment and abuse of power by Plácido Domingo reach the court, the evidence could not be so conclusive, since the events would have occurred years ago and without mediating physical brutality. That the affected artists have not taken the step of denouncing him in court has been the argument of some fans and music promoters to defend the singer’s innocence. But…, by that rule of thumb, and given the reputational damage suffered by a tenor of his magnitude, wouldn’t it be logical at this point that he was the one who had denounced them for slander?
