This week has been one of the busiest in memory in the life of Diego ‘El Cigala’. The cantaor received a response this Monday to the accusations of ill-treatment that he received from his ex-partner two years ago. The woman denounced the singer for beatings and psychological abuse, also assuring in her statement that the artist was a “violent” and “jealous” person. Two days ago the final decision of the Jerez de la Frontera court was leaked, and now the consequences are known.
The Prosecutor’s Office has requested for ‘El Cigala’ a sentence of five years in prison, for five crimes of habitual physical and mental abuse. The prosecution’s order shared by the EFE news agency details that the cantaor and his ex-partner maintained a “sentimental relationship analogous to marriage” for six years, from which children were born. In this relationship, the artist’s behavior worsened and intensified, until reaching the point of no return of the current situation.
The text from the Prosecutor’s Office details how, during that long period of time, the cantaor developed abusive behavior “continuously”. There were multiple situations “of dominance and control, belittling her, harassing her, beating her and creating a climate of domination that caused a permanent state of fear and subjugation in her.” These episodes were hidden by the victim from the rest of her family, due to the fear and panic in which she was trapped.
“As one more form of domination, the defendant exercised strict economic control, monitoring expenses and amounts of money, even forcing her to leave the family home after her anger, and threatening to take her children away from her, which generated a permanent feeling of anguish in the victim”, says the report. Mention is also made of the insults that were leaked in the decision of the court number 1 for Violence against Women of Jerez de la Frontera last Monday.
The order also sets forth four discussions that occurred between 2012 and 2020 as an example to support its request. ‘El Cigala’ shook his then partner “while she was holding her minor son in her arms” in an airport terminal, slapped her in a hotel after arguing over alleged infidelity, pushed her and “hit her all over the body” in another hotel or, at home, he grabbed her by the neck while he insulted her, without any of them going so far as to request medical assistance.
These instances overlap with those that Judge Raquel López-Vizcaíno stated in her own order, which reached the media last Monday: “Of the proceedings carried out, it has been indicatively proven that during their relationship, Ramón Jiménez Salazar (El Cigala) he addressed his partner with expressions such as ‘whore, wretch, eat my shit, I shit on your dead’, in the family home and in the presence of their minor children”.
