Andrés Roemer at a UNESCO event in Paris (France) in September 2017.Christophe Ena (AP)
Israeli police arrested this Monday Andrés Roemer, the once successful communicator, former ambassador and writer, following an extradition request from Mexico on five counts of rape, the Israeli Justice Ministry reported in a statement. The arrest came this morning after the international department of the Israeli prosecutor’s office filed an extradition request with the Jerusalem District Court, which must decide the case. This means that the public prosecutor considers him to be extraditable and proceedings can be initiated for this, which ends with the court decision. The statement says that the reason is “the rape crimes against several women in Mexico City,” for which Mexico sent the request to Israel, where Roemer has lived for years.
Along with the extradition request, the public prosecutor’s office has also asked that he be kept in custody until the end of the trial. The court has accepted the claim for now and will reconsider it later, ministry sources said. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has confirmed the news and trusted for his extradition, for which he has asked Israel for cooperation. If this happens, the currently imprisoned judiciary can continue the proceedings against him. Roemer was the protagonist of a major scandal in February 2021, when several women on social networks made dozens of accusations against him, all very similar, which caused him distress and destroyed his fame until he left the country.
Roemer began her recruitment of young women at the “La Ciudad de las Ideas” festival in Puebla, a kind of breeding ground for brilliant minds with public resources and whose founding partner was the Mexican magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego. There he met her and offered to improve her employment situation. To finalize the arrangements, he met her at his home, a mansion in one of Mexico City’s wealthiest neighborhoods. There was a basement set up to play movies and everything was ready to spend an evening. This cellar was martyrdom for some of them, while others managed to escape their clutches before the sexual assault reached its climax. When the first public complaints came to light on social media, up to 60 women joined in with the same or similar allegations, all reporting identical practices. Some finally dared to go to the public prosecutor’s office, where an arrest warrant was issued for rape. Roemer, of Jewish descent, fled to Israel, where he enjoyed freedom and even recognition; a street was named after him, which was later removed.
The victims and their representatives continued to complain in Mexico. While the judiciary requested international police cooperation and the Financial Intelligence Unit froze their accounts, they went to the Israeli embassy, where they asked for help and warned of the danger of harboring a sex offender. They were unsuccessful. The public prosecutor’s office also does not do this in its extradition requests, which depends on Israel’s will, as no agreements have been signed between the two countries on this matter. In fact, some of the names most wanted by the Mexican justice system, such as that of Tomás Zerón, involved in the Ayotzinapa case, are fleeing to this country. After a period of certain silence, the former diplomat and host of a program on TV Azteca – the television channel of Salinas Pliego – once again spoke in detail on Israel’s social networks, where he defended his innocence and criticized the behavior of the judiciary as well as his own doing the same Lawyers in Mexico on some pending cases. In this way, the first and last names of some of his victims came to light.
Roemer enjoyed great fame in Mexico, which brought him television and other public activities, and he wrote many books. During his diplomatic career, he had a run-in with the Mexican government when he defended Israel, violating its dictated policies. But the victims of abuse, harassment and rape had little use for a man of great fame. Until social networks started putting things in their place in a “Me Too” kind of way. This newspaper was able to speak with him in February 2021 when he complained about the “excessive lynchings” of which he believed himself to be the victim: “I had never experienced such great pain,” he explained. “Now they lynch you the same way if you compliment them or if you dismember a person.” In any case, “you should never deny a person, just listen to them and grow,” he then added. “I express on behalf of many men our ignorance of subjects in which we are unconsciously implicated.” But day after day his fame collapsed like a house of cards, rejected by famous scientists and intellectuals who once trusted in his good name. As if stricken, he was removed from every position in which he had appeared. Nobody wanted to have a relationship with him.
He has always categorically denied the allegations of rape, but the stories of some of these victims were shocking and deserved the interest and credibility of the prosecution. In May 2022, the defendant published a video in which he criticized that “crimes were being fabricated” against him. And he resorted to a civil lawsuit to attack one of the victims who, he said, intentionally harmed him. A judge overturned that story in March of this year. It was the first success of those affected against the writer.
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