The verb “threaten” and the noun “threat” are often spoken with the intention of stopping someone from warning them of something: Are you threatening me? That accusation is scary, especially when the speaker didn’t mean to threaten you: No, of course I didn’t mean to threaten you, sir. What will I do if it can constitute a crime provided for by article 169 et seq. of the Criminal Code.
The threat, second Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish, It is the announcement to another of an evil of sufficient magnitude to inspire fear. An evil that the perpetrator of the bullying himself can cause.
OK. What could Andrés Martínez Arrieta, president of the court trying the public prosecutor Álvaro García Ortiz, fear, listening to the testimony of the journalist José Precedo, of elDiario.es?
Let’s take a look at the dialogue at that point:
I’ll start by saying: “And here I find myself faced with a big moral dilemma, which all journalists have many times. And I know who the source of this story is. I know. I won’t say it, for professional secrecy…”.
M. Arrieta: “…It’s one thing not to say it, it’s another thing to threaten us with knowing it.”
Let me start by saying, “I’m not threatening anyone. I’m saying there’s a moral dilemma that there’s a person being asked to go to prison (for revealing a secret), who I know is innocent because I know the source, but I can’t say my source. It’s a moral dilemma, it’s not a threat.”
Magistrate: “So I understood”.
First of all, the magistrate lacked pragmatism when he interrupted the journalist. He hadn’t threatened anything. He limited himself to saying that he knew who was the initial source of the news according to which Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of Madrid, had offered to the Prosecutor’s Office to plead guilty, pay a fine and avoid prison. In reality Precedo did the opposite: he said he wouldn’t tell it. The threat was therefore incompatible with the immediate statement that, whatever the director knew, he would not tell anyone; which was not expressed for the benefit of the inventory but of professional secrecy, which is sacred in this profession.
So, what did the magistrate have in mind so that, after listening to the journalist, the verb “to threaten” came out? Nobody knows, perhaps not even the judge himself, if it was a spontaneous subconscious reaction. Yes, I can tell you what I would have had in mind, faced with such a situation: I would have spoken of “threatening” if I had been afraid. Because that’s what the verb “threaten” is about: instilling fear. And what fear could I feel, if I were a magistrate, faced with the possibility that a witness would tell a truth that he knows well? Nobody. But if I felt such fear, perhaps it would be related to the obvious discredit of the entire case resulting from that exculpatory testimony delivered with firmness and knowledge, and I would think: “How stupid, the whole court here, the defenders, the accusers, the Prosecutor’s Office, the journalists, the public… and it turns out that we spent months of investigation and many hours of trial for nothing.”
But the blood did not reach the river. Precedo did not reveal and does not want to reveal the source, and the magistrate pulled his feet out of the water with that lucky phrase: “So I understood”. A way to correct the trajectory that his paragraph was following, but also to finally understand that a key witness was proclaiming the accused’s innocence.
