The legal services of Radio y Televisión de Andalucía (RTVA), the company that includes Canal Sur, are studying a complaint of workplace harassment against Gustavo Fuentes, former general director of Andalucía Digital Multimedia (ADM), the main production company of the Andalusian public entity, who is being investigated for alleged crimes of assault and sexual harassment against a reporter from that company. This was reported by the media management in the chain’s Equality commission, which met this Thursday extraordinarily at the proposal of the CC OO union section, according to sources from the union that this newspaper was able to learn.
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The RTVA management has not provided information about the date when the alleged workplace harassment situation took place nor clarified whether the victim was a male or female worker of ADM. When elDiario.es revealed that Fuentes was being investigated for alleged crimes of assault and sexual harassment, the chain called another extraordinary meeting of the equality commission to inform that no complaints related to the former executive of the production company had been received through the official channel for reporting such conduct. That meeting took place on June 11. Since then, RTVA has become aware through this channel of an alleged case of workplace harassment by Fuentes.
The former ADN executive — a production company partly owned by the Junta de Andalucía through the public telecommunications company Sandetel, which holds almost 48% of the shares — is summoned to testify in the case investigating him as the author of alleged crimes of assault and sexual harassment on July 21, after his appearance was postponed twice (the first was scheduled for May 11, during the regional election campaign, and the second on June 25).
The complaint includes three episodes of sexual assault in 2013, when Fuentes was responsible for Giralda TV, where the victim worked; and in 2021 and 2023, when he was already general director of ADM, where he joined in 2020. The complainant also recounts cases of sexual harassment, many documented in the WhatsApp history, included in the complaint, which he sent her from 2018 to the present, including persistent proposals for private meetings, as well as language with sexual and intimate connotations such as “Darling, I want you”; “You owe me a crazy night” or “What time can we talk about adult things?”.
The reporter also requested an investigation of Fuentes for workplace harassment, although the investigator decided not to include it in the case as it was not within the jurisdiction of his court. When this complaint became known, testimonies from other workers who had been under the former executive’s orders and had suffered humiliations in public and private began to emerge, sometimes “because he wanted to and could do it,” as several employees interviewed by this newspaper agree, or to provoke an “unjust isolation that forced voluntary abandonment of the company,” others say.
This is not the first complaint of workplace harassment against ADM with Fuentes in charge. As this newspaper revealed, the production company was condemned on August 19, 2024, by the Labor Inspectorate for workplace harassment of one of its workers, a very serious administrative offense that entailed a fine of 7,501 euros, confirmed by the Employment Vice Ministry of the Junta de Andalucía in September last year.
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“The company isolated her at work, not integrating her into the organization, operation, and ordinary activity of the company, nor assigning her tasks corresponding to her professional category,” concluded the inspector in her report, who considered this behavior as “acts by the employer contrary to respect for the privacy and due consideration of the dignity of workers,” a fact constituting a very serious offense.
This conviction was preceded by the account of the employee who reported episodes of assault and sexual harassment, which she brought to the attention of the CC OO union section.
Five other women, including the reporter who filed the complaint in court, also recounted similar situations. The union leaders then conveyed to them the difficulties involved in pursuing claims of this type without a prior judicial complaint. Faced with the victims’ refusal to take that step, it was decided to report the facts constituting workplace harassment to the Labor Inspectorate.
In the previous meeting of the RTVA equality commission in June, CC OO warned that ADM lacked the mandatory Equality Plan. The Labor Inspectorate is also investigating alleged irregularities in that plan, which was approved one month before Fuentes was dismissed, because it was signed by the union representative who had been on leave for more than four years. Regarding this investigation, RTVA management stated at Thursday’s meeting that it is following the instructions of the Labor administration, according to the union sources present.
