Rita Maestre: “A good boyfriend was at the same time a misogynist who returned home normally after attacking a 20-year-old woman” | Spain

Rita Maestre, spokesperson for Más Madrid in the capital’s City Council and couple of Íñigo Errejón For several years, she has published a letter this Sunday on her wants to “answer” those who have speculated about the degree of knowledge he had of these behaviors. Errejón resigned last Thursday as parliamentary spokesperson for Sumar, where Más Madrid is a member, after the coalition opened an investigation against him for accusations of sexual harassment and denigrating and sexist attitudes launched anonymously through the Instagram account of journalist Cristina Fallarás.

“As everyone knows, Íñigo Errejón and I were a couple for several years and, although we had been estranged for a long time, everything that has emerged this week overwhelms and shocks me, especially because I am now discovering that some of the episodes of misogynistic behavior and violence reported by the victims happened when the aggressor was still my partner,” explains Maestre. “A normal-looking person, a ‘good boyfriend’, was at the same time a misogynist who returned home normally after attacking a 20-year-old woman in a hotel,” he adds, referring to the anonymous complaint. made by a woman through the medium The Jump. “The aggressors,” continues the Más Madrid spokesperson in the Madrid City Council, “who are usually presented as exceptional monstrous beings, are a father, a brother, a co-worker or your ex-partner. But it is overwhelming because now it is not a theory or a motto, it is my life, and it is impossible for me not to speak from there.”

Maestre then replies to those who They have speculated about the degree of knowledge he had of Errejón’s behavior. “Evidently, it is impossible for each of the people who have shared parts of our lives with him, in whatever area, not to think about how we could not see that we were facing someone with those multiple faces, how we could blind ourselves to that level of manipulation.” , because that is what someone who sustains a network of attacks and humiliations of this magnitude in their daily lives is: a manipulator,” he says. “Now,” he adds, “it can be very easy and tempting to put the different information that has emerged under a focus of obviousness that is simply not such. I have neither been a part, nor am I aware of any cover-up of any aggression or violent action, because there has not been one. Rather, I feel deeply deceived and that deception is devastating.”

The spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Madrid City Council then emphasizes the need to care for, accompany and respect the victims and to “end the spaces of impunity” whoever the aggressor is. “We are tired of feeling judged when we have been part of the aggressor’s personal environment. Fed up with not being believed and being questioned when we are attacked. Of not knowing where to turn when something happens to us like any of the things that are occupying covers and headlines, in their full scale of severity.” Until now There is only one complaint filed with the police. In her letter, Maestre encourages any woman who has suffered assault or harassment “to use feminist support networks to move forward.”