A man has been sentenced to a year in prison in Spain for beating his wife live on the social network TikTok, a decision all the more rare given that the victim refused to lodge a complaint, the court hearing the case said on Tuesday monday with
In a judgment published on Monday, the Soria City Court (North) found the defendant guilty of ill-treatment and violence against women.
The crime happened on the night of January 27th to 28th in Soria. During a live “battle” on TikTok with three friends in front of a virtual audience of several thousand people, a woman received a punch in the face, so hard you could see her head snapping around and her hair flying.
The court emphasized in its decision that the gesture brought tears to the victim’s eyes.
“The defendant publicly and famously assaulted his wife in front of thousands of people with intent to violate her physical integrity and to humiliate her in public. If it has not caused harm, then it is indeed a case of obvious and actual abuse,” the court said.
The judge who delivered the verdict recalled that crimes against gender-based violence “do not require the victim to report it and the sanction can be imposed once the facts are known.”
An important clarification as the defendant had refused to answer during the trial and the victim had defended her husband.
“This simple live transmission of the slap was enough for the authorities to apply the victim protection protocol, regardless of whether they recognized themselves as such or not,” the judge writes.
The fact that “the victim agrees to the slap and justifies it” does not speak against the sanction, since “in the case of violent crimes against women, as with all serious injury crimes, the consent of the victim is irrelevant and the sanctions apply in any case”.
“This behavior,” the judge continued, “deserves as severe a sanction as possible, since the accused cannot even respect his wife in public.”
The court also sentenced the defendant to three years of estrangement from the victim and a ban on contact with her and a three-year ban on gun ownership.
For twenty years, Spain has made the fight against sexist violence a priority. In 2004, her parliament passed the first law in Europe making the sex of the victim an aggravating factor in the event of aggression.