Victims forgive Asencio and three footballers in trial over sexual video in Las Palmas
The two young women affected forgave the four defendants, which allows the charges of breach of privacy to be withdrawn, although not those of child sexual abuse material.
Trial in Las Palmas: victims' forgiveness does not extinguish all charges
The two young women who appear in the sexual content videos distributed without authorisation appeared before the judge of the Criminal Court number 5 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria this Thursday and confirmed that they forgive the four footballers on trial: Real Madrid defender Raúl Asencio and his former teammates Ferran Ruiz, Juan Rodríguez and Andrés García. According to La Vanguardia.
The forgiveness formalised at the beginning of the trial allows the Public Prosecutor's Office to withdraw the accusation of breach of privacy—distributing intimate images without consent—that weighed against the four implicated. However, it does not eliminate the charges of child sexual abuse material maintained against Ruiz, Rodríguez and García, since one of the girls was 16 years old when the video was recorded, in 2023. In this type of offence, the victim's forgiveness does not extinguish criminal responsibility.
The three footballers accused of child sexual abuse material have reached an agreement with the Public Prosecutor's Office and accept a sentence of one year in prison. The sentence will not result in imprisonment as long as none of them has a criminal record, although they will have to commit to completing a course on "sexual re-education". Before the agreement was sealed, the Public Prosecutor's Office had requested four years and seven months for the three.
Asencio is free of all charges as he did not intervene in the recording of the video. The Public Prosecutor's Office had sought two and a half years in prison for him for the distribution of the images, an accusation that is also dropped with the victims' forgiveness. Nonetheless, his public image has accumulated twofold deterioration: in addition to the legal proceedings, in August he tested positive in a breathalyser test.
Source: La Vanguardia