Thelma Fardin’s victory is also a victory for all allegations of sexual harassment, abuse and violence throughout the region. “I want this to be a message of hope for all the people who are suffering abuse, no matter how powerful the people are or how evil the system may be. Let this be a light for them to tell,” Fardin said earlier this week, at a press conference called by Amnesty International.
Six years ago, Fardin made her first formal complaint against the actor Juan Darthés, who abused her fifteen years ago during one of the tours of the successful Argentine television show. Ugly Duckling. At that time, Fardin was 16 years old and Darthés was 44. Fardin’s complaint came amid a wave of complaints of sexual violence throughout the region and immediately became an emblematic case. However, the actress was a victim of intimidation and harassment, and achieving a conviction against Darthés was difficult since the events did not occur in Argentina, but in Nicaragua, where the complaint was filed in the first instance. The Brazilian actor took refuge in his country, and the file was first moved to Argentina, and finally reached a court in Brazil. There was a hopeless ruling in the first instance that acquitted the actor, and that came in the middle of a backlash to the entire complaints movement. However, this historic ruling, in the second instance, is hopeful and forceful, as it sentences the actor to six years in prison on charges of “violent indecent assault” and “libidinous acts,” and equates sexual abuse with torture.
As the lawyer Mariela Labozzeta, head of the Special Prosecutor’s Unit on Violence against Women (UFEM), explains in her X account, the ruling is historic for several reasons. Firstly, because the sentence shows “that acts of sexual violence usually occur out of sight of third parties”, and that this “cannot imply the impossibility of applying a penalty”, a very important conclusion taking into account that the majority of These forms of violence occur behind closed doors; and because it recognizes “the probative value of the coherence between Thelma’s testimony and the other witnesses, in addition to the expert reports that confirmed post-traumatic stress.” That is, it gives fair value to the testimonies of the two companions to whom Fardin related this episode of violence, opening an evidentiary route for other cases. This is key, then, in our experience in the magazine Volcanic By journalistically documenting and investigating complaints of sexual harassment and abuse, we have found that these testimonies are key to establishing time, manner, place and circumstance, and to corroborate the testimonial validity of the complaint. The ruling also recognizes that many victims of sexual violence are unable to resist physically, that raising their voices is difficult, and that is why complaints often take years, and the ruling recognizes, as Labozzetta explains, that delaying the complaint cannot “ considered as an argument against its credibility.” The court also took into consideration the statement of Darthés, who said that the minor had sought him out to have a sexual encounter, but was unable to explain why she did not report the incident to production, as she should have done if he was innocent.
“Thanks to the enormous women’s movement I was able to speak, that movement that today is being so reviled, thanks to those networks I was able to get out of the immense pain of the violence that I suffered and build a life without that weight on me. Today I weigh much less, today I feel that all the enormous effort was worth it,” Fardin said at a press conference. I hope that this ruling helps the courts understand the immense damage caused by sexual violence, and the importance of believing the word of the brave complainants.
