The former mayor of Madrid Manuela Carmena has won in the first instance the professional faker Luis Pérez Fernández, known on social networks as Alvise Perezfor violation of the right to honor by lying writing that in the middle of the pandemic the former judge also used her influence to receive a respirator at her home.
The failure of Court 59 of Madriddated March 8, determines that the messages disseminated by the defendant constitute “an illegitimate interference with the right to honor” of carmenafor which he is sentenced “to cease the dissemination of the tweets by proceeding to withdraw or delete them from his Twitter account.”
It is also sentenced to Alvise “to refrain from publishing in the future false news regarding Manuela Carmena» and to publish the judgment in your personal account for 30 days. To do this, you must anchor a message in which you reproduce the ruling of the sentence and insert a link to the text of the complete sentence, leaving it fixed as the main one in your account during said period. Likewise, he is sentenced to pay the former mayoress 5.000 euros as compensation and payment of costs.
It was March 31, 2020, in full state of alarm due to the coronavirus pandemic, “in a situation of lack of respirators and collapse in hospital ICUs”, when the defendant published a first message. “Do you know which 76-year-old former mayoress has received a personal respirator from the VitalAire company at her house to avoid going to a public hospital and queuing like the rest of Spaniards?” Wrote the creator of hoaxes.
The same day carmena He answered in the same way, a message on this social network. «AlviseI don’t know you and I don’t know what reasons you have for publishing that slander. I am not sick and I have not received any respirator. In these moments of concern and collective effort by our country to overcome the pandemic, attitudes like this do not help. you should be ashamed», replied the former mayor.
The limit to the right to information
«The limit to the right to information or exposition of facts is found in the veracity of the information and its public relevance. The defendant has not been interested in any evidence from which to deduce the veracity of the information. The plaintiff has provided some denials published in other media,” the ruling states.
This court considers that Alvise “did not sufficiently contrast the facts, excluding the possibility that it was merely transmitting rumors or suspicions, and therefore it could not be considered that said publication is protected by the right to information of article 20 of the Constitution.” “In short, it can be concluded that preference should be given to the right to honor over freedom of information,” the ruling concludes.
He was already sentenced to pay 60,000 euros to Ábalos
Alvise Perez He was already sentenced to pay €60,000 to the former Minister of Transport Jose Luis Abalos for having committed an illegitimate interference with his right to honor, by spreading on his account two photographs of Ábalos on the terrace of his house illustrated with the text “What would you think of the mental health of a minister who spends all afternoon staring at a couple of caged birds…?»
In both images -for which consent was not requested- appeared concussions on the terrace of his private home, “violating the text that accompanies the right to honor given its derogatory and insulting tone”, as reflected in the sentence.
the magistrate Maria de los Angeles Martinhead of the sentencing court, stated in its resolution that “we have to take into consideration that the plaintiff’s image is clearly used to discredit his work as a member of the Government, which is disclosed on social networks, implying a massive dissemination of this content by having the demanded a considerable number of followers (around 223,500) and must be added to this the dissemination by other means of communication and the difficulty, once these manifestations have been introduced on social networks, of proceeding to their disappearance”, for which he considers that 60.000 euros It is a weighted amount as compensation.
Dissemination of a false PCR of Illa
Alvise He has also previously admitted before the judge that he disseminated a false positive PCR from the former Minister of Health, Salvador Illaduring the last campaign of the Catalan elections, although he claimed that he was not the first Internet user to do so.
The professional faker declared for half an hour in the head of the investigative court 33 of Barcelonawho investigated it for injuries y documentary forgery.
