Photographer Gabrielle Vega’s Instagram profile is full of images of Montana, United States. There are immense and empty landscapes, men and women with cowboy hats or flowing hair. They have snow-white skin, light eyes, and a seemingly carefree horizon.
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Montana is very far from Salamanca, Spain. It’s the city where Gabrielle Vega landed years ago to study Spanish. She had a great time there, she says, in that setting so different from the residential neighborhood where she spent her childhood. Once settled and familiar with its streets, Vega wanted to make the most of her stay and explore other destinations.
She looked for companies that organized trips to Morocco and found Discover Excursions, based in Seville. The website showed her photos of people like her having a blast. Young Americans living the Spanish dream. Siesta, sangria, and party. Good reviews, good vibes. And off she went.
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She found a guide named Manuel Blanco Vega, the archetype of the local smooth operator with social skills. Dark-haired, confident, known more at night than during the day. A sweet plum that almost all of us have met. Irresistible, aspiring prince, party animal, and scoundrel. But he wasn’t like the others. Blanco is the face of evil in The Predator of Seville, a three-episode Netflix miniseries produced by Newtral and Atresmedia that narrates Blanco’s nine-year prison sentence for sexual assault against Vega in Morocco and two other women in Portugal. In the series, the protagonists are Vega, other women who wanted to tell their testimony after hers, and the trial in which she testified via videoconference. She lost the desire to return to Spain.
The pattern is always the same. In the documentary and in life. He would get them drunk while his own alcohol level was always 0.0. When they woke up, they didn’t remember much. Sometimes they were naked next to him, other times on a sofa. Others remember so little, or have wanted to forget to keep living, which is why they haven’t spoken. One of them fell from Manuel’s penthouse balcony and died. In the dock, he said, ‘Am I not allowed to sleep with people?’, but all of them, of course, with consent. That’s how predators work. With wit, with charm. In Seville, in Montana. Or maybe it’s just me, another one of so many exaggerators.
