The spokesperson of the socialist municipal group, Reyes Maroto, testified this Tuesday afternoon before the Investigative Court Number 13 of Madrid after being summoned for an alleged defamation crime. The Community of Madrid filed a complaint against Maroto last June for a statement he made on March 13, in reference to the management of the government led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso regarding elderly patients in nursing homes during the pandemic, who he said had been “murdered”. “I didn’t want to accuse anyone of murder,” the politician said before the judge, according to news agencies.
“The victims or elderly people murdered were 7,291,” Maroto declared at the time, when the political scene underwent a small revolution due to the broadcast of the independent documentary 7,291which addressed the topic of residences, on national television and streaming. The Community of Madrid announced shortly after these statements that it would file a complaint against Maroto, a complaint that became effective in June, given that the spokesperson had not retracted her words in a conciliation meeting held that same month.
Maroto was summoned to testify for the crime of ‘advertising defamation’ (accusing someone through social networks or the media) underlining that the elderly had been “murdered” due to “failure to be admitted to the hospitals of our community, the result of a protocol of shame which bears the signature of the regional government”. According to socialist sources, his words “expressly” referred to the management of the autonomous government, in his capacity as spokesperson for the PSOE and in the political sphere. The same sources indicate that his statement was not aimed at “attacking” the personal dignity of the President of the Region, but rather at criticizing his government management, “excluding” his personal sphere.
The spokesperson apologized several times for these words and repeated them in the court that dealt with the complaint. Maroto reiterated before the judge that he had already “clarified” the meaning of his words in a statement published on March 14, one day after having uttered them, and that they had been “widely reported” by the media. The same statement is the one presented during the conciliation ceremony as an apology and which the Regional Council did not accept.
The PP spokesman in Madrid, Carlos Díaz Pache, told the media on Tuesday that the PSOE spokesman “exceeded his statements”. “Permanently returning to that moment to distort the pain of the victims, to put a number on the president’s shoulders is a moral humiliation that the left will not like.” According to Pache, “there are 143 judicial sentences that guarantee that the Madrid government behaved well during the pandemic.”
Following these declarations, the Popular Party of the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, severed relations with the municipal PSOE. His time in court allowed Almeida to once again insist that the socialist spokesperson “ask for forgiveness without buts” and to “examine his conscience”. “He called the Popular Party of Madrid murderers and there is no excuse for having made this slander,” Almeida told the media from Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.
According to the mayor, Maroto brought “concern, confrontation and hatred” to the city and to the municipal plenary. “We witnessed shows never seen in the previous legislature and the only difference is that her name is Reyes Maroto, because she is the only spokesperson who wasn’t there before,” the mayor said. “We have come this far. And we must also apologize to the people of Madrid because there are neither ways nor ways of doing politics in this city. This is a city where difference is valued, not where difference is underlined”, he concluded.
This was not the Community of Madrid’s only complaint about the opposition’s words. Another was also filed against the organizing secretary and spokesperson of Podemos, Pablo Fernández, for saying that the president of Madrid should “be in prison” for her “murderous management” of Covid-19 patients in residences. Added to this is another against the general secretary of Podemos, Ione Belarra, who accused Ayuso of carrying out a “homicidal and criminal management” of said residences.
