Not even she believed it. Tamara Fernández Varela read and reread the letter at home, with which the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 2 of Carballo informed her that her ex-husband had drugged, raped, and photographed her, and she didn’t recognize herself. It included six images. In some of them, she appeared completely naked. “I looked at them and said: it can’t be me. Such an atrocity doesn’t enter your head. A woman like she’s dead in a bed. It was me,” recalls the 43-year-old Galician woman. Her mother and she started screaming. They screamed so much that a frightened neighbor called an ambulance.
Tamara had just learned in writing that Alessandro Pompeo, who had been her partner for eight years and from whom she separated in 2018, the same man who gave her roses every month on their anniversary, was being investigated as her aggressor. And that news reached her in a notification as impersonal as a speeding ticket. That happened in 2022. Two years later, the man fled. Since then, he has been at large. And the trial was paralyzed. The Provincial Court of A Coruña has rejected repeated requests from the Prosecutor’s Office, the last one in February, to activate a search warrant.
“Do you know how disappointed I was the day before the trial? When they told me he was in contempt,” the woman snaps, as she widens her large, lined black eyes with bushy eyebrows. When she gets angry, she unconsciously switches to Galician. Tamara drives through A Coruña while seeing flags and jerseys still hanging after Depor’s promotion. The city is celebrating and life goes on, but hers doesn’t. She feels in limbo. “I wish I were as strong as I used to be. That vitality of saying: ‘Mom, today we’re going wherever the car takes us’,” she laments. Now she doesn’t like driving, nor the city.
After receiving the notification, she went to the courthouse. There she learned that there were more photos and eight videos. The National Police found this material after raiding Pompeo’s house in Carballo in 2020, after discovering that he had downloaded 70 child pornography files. Tamara recognized the furniture and bedding in the photos and recordings. She had to listen to herself snore. Some recordings were from when they lived in Switzerland, where they met in 2009; others, from later, when they moved to Carballo, Tamara’s hometown. The accused admitted the facts. “He said I had consented to everything. Honestly, not even the judge believed him,” she claims. She says the magistrate apologized for the letter the court sent her and clarified that it had not been the appropriate way to summon her.
She detests the photos, but they can be evidence that chemical submission existed, which, without the images, is difficult to prove. In the case of Giselle Pelicot, a 73-year-old Frenchwoman, drugged and raped by her husband and at least 50 other men (those the police could identify), the fact that the assaults were filmed was key to discovering the crime and proving it in court.
Tamara says that at first she was ashamed to go out because she thought someone might have seen the photos. Pompeo’s case is not unique: from time to time, a new Telegram group or a new platform emerges where men send videos of their girlfriends, their sisters, where they exchange advice on how to drug their wives, on what substance and dose is indicated. Her underwear or her piercing also constitute relevant evidence. “I have that filth stored in my house because I had to take it to the judge, but since there was no trial…” laments the Galician woman. In June 2022, Alessandro Pompeo was convicted of the crime of possession of child pornography —the reason the police came to his house— to eight months of supervised release, a fine of about 700 euros, and disqualification from any profession involving contact with minors for two years. In January 2023, according to all the judicial documentation to which EL PAÍS has had access, the Provincial Court prosecuted him for “a continuous crime of sexual abuse with prevalence and carnal access” against Tamara Fernández Varela, for which the Prosecutor’s Office requested 14 years in prison.
Her lawyer requested provisional detention and that his passport be withdrawn, but justice only issued a protection order for her. The police have not found him for more than two years. He has Italian and Swiss nationality; he lived in Zurich from a young age, where he had a son with another woman and where the woman from Carballo met him. They married a year later.
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“He was affectionate, if you tell me he’s a rough person, who yells at you… But never,” she details. He was a blacksmith. She remembers him as a “super thoughtful” man and someone who “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” They liked going to the pool, eating at the Chinese restaurant, walking in the forest, and collecting mushrooms. “Nothing seemed strange to me. Now, yes, it all adds up. We were at the table, we were on the sofa, and I would wake up in bed,” she explains, recounting that he assured her she had fallen asleep. They lived with the daughter Fernández Varela had with her first husband, who was then a minor. She is tormented by the thought that the accused might have done something to her and not being able to know.
They decided to move to Galicia at the end of 2017 because Tamara’s father was very ill. They separated six months later. Tamara survives on state aid, although she always worked as a waitress: “I loved to laugh, to have a good time with customers; many people tell me I’ve become boring.” She suffers from depression and has attempted suicide more than once. “He killed me in life,” she claims, the only time all day her voice fills with tears. She knows he violated her most intimate space, the security of being in her own home, with the person who supposedly knew and loved her the most. “I’m not able to have a partner because it scares me, it overwhelms me. I distrust everyone,” she adds.
The last time they spoke was at the gas station where he started working after they separated. She, who already knew everything, went to fill her car’s tank and look him in the eyes to see how he would react. She relives it with horror: “He tells me: ‘How beautiful you are, long time no see, your short hair suits you so well.’ I didn’t even know what to answer him. I gave him the money and left.” She could never locate him again; he changed his phone and closed his social media accounts. Fernández Varela states that in the images from Pompeo’s files that the police showed her, there were more women. She says she only recognized her ex’s first wife and tried to warn her on Facebook, but she blocked her. This newspaper has not been able to ascertain whether the ex-wife has been notified and if she is aware of the ongoing judicial process.
“I’d bet my life that he’s still doing it. Tomorrow there will be another news story that he has done this to other people and it could have been avoided,” laments the Galician woman. The Provincial Court rejected the requests for an international arrest warrant because the Chamber interprets that “there are not enough indicative elements identified, beyond the accused’s foreign status, that he is in a foreign country.” The crime for which he has been prosecuted prescribes in 15 years.
“Until he appears and pays for what he has done, I won’t be at peace,” the woman repeats. Tamara never found the right words to talk about that violence with her daughter. How to explain all this to her? A few weeks ago, her daughter turned 18 and confirmed that she is proud of her, and that telling her story was what she had to do. The support of her surroundings gives her courage: “I felt guilty for not realizing, but we don’t have to hide.”
At this moment, Tamara Fernández Varela is moving. While dismantling her house this past Thursday, she rediscovered that judicial notification with which the nightmare began. The one she looked at and cried so much over. She had stored it so carefully that she had never come across it before. But something told her she would find it again.
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