"My defamer continues to have a voice in the country's media with impunity."

BarcelonaTen years ago, when the writer and journalist Eva Piquer was in the waiting room of the Vall d'Hebron Hospital fearing the cancer prognosis that her husband would face,In a blog post published by the journalist and then director of ARA, Carles Capdevila, a series of defamatory articles appeared attacking them, especially her, whom he had already described – one year, seven months and eighteen days before her husband died – as "the official widow of the tribe", "our future Pantoja". "When the father of my four children had just been diagnosed with cancer and I was on the threshold of hell, when we were trying to banish from our respective minds the idea of a short-term death, right at that moment of vulnerability, bewilderment and self-pity", he said.Ngany, a human being found it opportune to harass me," writes Piquer.

That article spread like wildfire (you know, viruses and virality in the age of Twitter), and not only caused terrible and instant pain to the family, to her four children, but also remained an open, festering wound for the writer. Until now. Ten years and one Me Too later, Piquer has found the strength to break the silence with an essay titled Defamation (Club Editor), where he comes to terms with that public ridicule. And he presented it this Monday night before around 500 people in the Paral·lel 62 hall in Barcelona, ​​​​along with journalists Gemma Nierga and Alba Riera, and before an auditorium where there were dozens of familiar faces: journalists such as Albert Om, Antoni Bassas, Toni Soler, Xavier Graset; politicians such as Gerardo Pisarello, Jordi Sánchez, Javier Domenech, David Fernández, Carlos Riera, Juan Manuel Tresserras, Raúl Romeva, Natalia Garriga, and people from the cultural world such as Silvia Soler, José Lluch, Pilar Beltrán, Izaskun Arretxe, Ester Pujol, Teresa Cabo Marina Garcés, Enric Canet, Carmen Solé Vendrell, Ana Polo, Magda Oranich, Silvia Bel, Lluís Cabrera and Eva Armisén, among many others.

In the book, Piquer unravels the maze of how defamation works, the mechanisms of delegitimization and dehumanization that later make mockery and humiliation possible. The writer explores the limits of freedom of expression and delves into the hypothetical motivations of her enemy, columnist Bernat Dedéu. whom you do not know personally and of whom he doesn't even write his name in the entire book –He calls him Ricard, with the intention of turning him into an archetype–, although he does quote her articles verbatim. Piquer raises some plausible scenarios for having been the recipient of this violence: classism, misogyny, cruelty, neo-fascism. He adds: "My defamation has a touch of vicarious violence; he attacked me as a result, because he wanted to write in a diary he kept for my husband."

Against impunity

Piquer, author of fourteen books (latest, Landing, in Club Editor) and director of the digital culture Fourteen, details the effects of sexist vilification, both first-hand and structurally, as a mechanism of inequality. "It affects self-esteem, mental health, careers, and personal relationships, and discourages speaking up," she writes. For her, it has been a moral drag for years, conditioning her grief. –his and what others needed to do–, and it's even caused him to lose friends. "Carles is dying, and my fear is above all that they won't think I'm La Pantoja. My obsession was not to prove my slanderer right. Gosh, what nonsense! But you end up believing it," laments Piquer, who had put a stop to tributes and hadn't attended those held in Capdevila.

It even influenced her writing. "I spent a lot of time needing to start writing again, because I needed something to motivate me to move forward, and I forbade myself from writing about grief, about how you deal with it when you've suffered a loss, a catastrophe, even though it was the only topic that interested me," she recalls. A year before publishing Landing, asked the therapist to prepare her for what she would call her defamer. He was also the first person she thought of when she received the National Culture Prize. "An enemy is a driving force because, as long as he follows you around,"Yes, it doesn't let you let your guard down," she says sarcastically. And she admits: "As an enemy, I'm a nightmare: I have a memory, I'm spiteful, I'm vengeful, and I'm resilient. But the defamers don't realize that there's a person like them behind it."

The fact that the defamer derives pleasure from this essay hasn't made him give up, but quite the opposite: "For me, it's already a victory to have stopped keeping quiet," writes Piquer, who once found support in the public eye but not in public. "I would prefer not to have suffered so much and not have to write what I've written, but I'm glad to get it over with," he says in Paral·lel 62. And he goes further when he says he intends to "shake up the Catalan media and cultural world: let's see if we wake up once and for all," he proposes. "We should ask ourselves what kind of people we give microphones and loudspeakers to. My defamer continues to have a voice in the country's public and private media with impunity." –Piquer denounces–. I have broken the silence so that we can break impunity." "Insults, slander, defamation have become commonplace; there is no public space that is safe; the language of brutality has become the norm," recalled editor Maria Bohigas. "We must find ways to ensure that words do not become just another tool of destruction."

The event at Paral·lel 62 ended while the song was playing. You don't sink me, by Juan Gabriel, with the voice of Isabel Pantoja.