The images of Rosa Peral speaking to the camera from prison are powerful. “With this I would like the person that I am to be seen,” she says in The Tapes of Rosa Peral, the documentary that Netflix released at the same time as The Body on Fire. It is the first time in 25 years that he has offered an interview. And, then, Peral instrumentalizes the feminist cause both directly and through the testimony of third parties to defend herself against a final sentence: she, like Albert López, her lover, was responsible for the murder of Pedro Rodríguez, her fiancé, spring 2017.
“They attacked the victim and deprived him of his life in a violent manner, carrying out their action and acting with the common spirit or intention, or knowing and assuming the high probability that existed, of ending the life of the victim if they acted in the way they did it,” the sentence reported. They could not have the exact facts of what happened that night but they could have sufficient evidence and indications to rule on their involvement. In the end, the text declared Peral as “criminally responsible co-author of a crime of murder with malice aforethought” for which she received the sentence of 25 years in prison.
It is important to read this sentence because, upon hearing Peral’s testimony, it seems that she was on vacation in Cancun when her fiancé was murdered. “The evidence we have to look for is to know what happened to Pedro, how it happened,” he says as if he had not been present at home when his fiancé was murdered and as if the premeditation had not been discovered with the who planned said murder.
She speaks as if she herself, along with Albert López, had not hindered the investigation: first by hiding evidence (and setting fire to the victim’s car with the body in the trunk in the Foix reservoir), then by keeping her secret involvement in the crime and then accusing each other with his lover, and as if the two had not hidden from Pedro Rodríguez’s family how the man died and for what reason they decided to murder him.
She argues that she was the victim of a “lynching,” that the media portrayed her as a “black widow,” and that her judicial process would have been very different if she had been a man. What she forgets to mention is that literally all the men involved in the crime were related to her on a sexual-emotional level: to the two men already mentioned, we must add the ex-husband to whom they tried to pin the murder on without success. The relevance of her sexual life, consequently, was more than proven.
Rosa Peral’s tapes expose the case, minutes are offered to the prosecution and journalists, but at the same time the murderer’s speech, who could already be heard at the trial, is allowed to run wild. It is her view and to consolidate it she has the help of the lawyer, who plays the role of her defender, and a father who has no choice but to believe her daughter’s version. If Rodolfo Sancho has shown one thing in recent weeks, it is that defending a child can be a very thankless job.
The criticism of the media treatment received by Rosa Peral, for the record, is legitimate. The media have shown on more than one occasion that they can have a clear sexist bias, not to mention that the coverage of the black chronicle always forces professionals to get into swampy terrain in the service of their duty to inform the population. “Surely we have gone too far because the character of Rosa, the person of Rosa, unintentionally made you fall and it was very tempting to fall into clichés,” acknowledges Mayka Navarro.
However, here criticism is exercised solely as a tool to defend Peral, to denounce that he did not receive a fair trial, and to give wings to his victimist discourse. She practically asks the viewer that, because of the noise around her, he must forget any evidence or clue presented. The documentary comes into play and contributes to perverting the feminist cause: it uses the arguments of a collective struggle to defend a particular case where it is not applicable.
You just have to see how, among the last testimonies, you can find the father alleging that she was blamed for having “a good body” and “for having slept with whoever she wanted”, and then giving up a last minute to the murderer, who never gave up. is confronted by her interviewers. Footage of the trial can be offered but the montage always gives the murderer enough room to maneuver to whiten her public image. The journalist Toni Muñoz, who appears in the documentary as an interviewee, has explained to what extent this documentary is to the greater glory of Peral in an interview with Rac1.
It is, consequently, a morbid content that, instead of doing justice to the true victim (or even pretending to think about her), prefers to encourage the murderer’s speech by having her statements available exclusively. . As Crims has already done the exhaustive work before, so The Ribbons of Rosa Peral can benefit from the conversation it may generate.
And, taking into account that the world is full of people willing to reject any type of evidence, as shown by flat-earthers and defenders of chemtrails, this way of approaching the documentary is absolutely irresponsible.
