Cristina Fallarás: “Madrid is the coming hell. A Trumpist experiment but more brutal”

BarcelonaCristina Fallarás had a very simple idea: to publish on their social media profiles the stories of sexual abuse of those who wanted to tell their story without risking being identified. A very extensive collection of these first-person stories is brought together in the book You don't publish my number, published by Siglo XXI, which ends up creating a terrible cartography of abuse. We spoke with this journalist and activist about this work and the price she has had to pay to carry it out.

How many stories of abuse have you read?

— In that second stage, about 20,000. And between 50,000 and 100,000 if we count from when I did the first batch, in 2018, with the hashtag #Cuéntalo. I still have many, thousands, that I haven't had time to read. I do all this alone, with my mobile, and I'm going at the pace I can.

What is the impact of being subjected to such a flood of painful messages?

— The truth is that I am managing to get it to do little or no harm to me. With #Cuéntalo, as I was not prepared for what awaited me, it did me a lot of harm. I had to stop and start therapy, to learn to separate Cristina the activist from the rest of the Cristinas. But this time, when the Jenni Hermoso case broke out, I had already known for a couple of years what I wanted to do. I was waiting for the right moment to arrive, because without this trigger the population hardly joins a campaign. And it was Jenni. Now that I have been with this again for a year and a half, I should start thinking about stopping it, because, however, it generates a vicarious trauma: you inherit the pain of the rest.

Doesn't it bother you to have thousands of messages waiting for even just one reading, yours?

— No, because I will end up reading them. I cannot afford to have even one left unread.

Many refer to unknown abusers, but others point to people with a prominent public profile.

— I have read messages and witnesses of abuses affecting singers, journalists, a former president... They have not come to light because I never publish names, I only reproduce the stories, but I have put in place the necessary mechanisms so that this is investigated. I cannot allow a woman to explain to me something very serious about a prime minister or a regional president and have it remain hidden.

Reading this unbearable string of witnesses, I have come to feel that all abuses are obviously unique but that, paradoxically, they are, at their core, the same abuse.

— I understand you perfectly. I recently read a book by Laura Llevadot called My wound existed before me andI was fascinated by it because it speaks of that wound that comes and takes up space. And I think that yes, we arrive with something already marked: what the Church calls original sin and which was already attributed to Eve and the apple. And each of us deals with it in one way or another, depending on the circumstances.

And often, from a young age.

— What really leaves a mark is sexual violence in childhood. Fear is sexual violence. The fear that your daughter will be raped and that you will pass that fear on to the girl. The thing about: "Don't go over here, don't take candy, watch out for the neighbor..." Or the typical idiot who one day goes to the beach with the child, aged 8, 9 or 10, and says: "How upset the girl is!" It's brutal, and it already places the girl in the sexualization. From there, depending on whether you have experienced sexual violence in childhood, you will occupy the wound in one way or another and reproduce it. Or you will widen it, because if the violence in childhood has been manifest, the predators will come and fuck the wound, which will continue to open. All of us who have suffered sexual violence in childhood and adolescence know this well.

A key element of this sinister equation is silence.

— Absolutely. Silence is the greatest weapon of repression against women. Against many other groups, but especially against women. As for "in the beginning was the word..." No, no. In the beginning was silence. Only later comes the word.

The Errejón case arose from one of the witnesses published on your Instagram account, without a name. Did you know who they were referring to?

— No. At that time I had identified at least three left-wing politicians, from three different parties, who had been pointed out by some girl, and they fit a very similar profile. So the messages about Errejón could have been from any of the three. The woman who wrote to me didn't tell me and I didn't ask her, because I don't have time to do so.

Right-wing and far-right media are having a field day watching these behaviours emerge in left-wing parties. Is it more serious that this is happening in parties that have traditionally championed feminism?

— Well, it also happens on the right. Look at the case of the mayor of Algeciras, with several complaints. Quite a mayor, eh? With much more institutional baggage than a Monedero, for example. But nothing happened: he didn't move because the party didn't move him. There have been complaints against right-wing politicians, of course. And they have been published... But then nothing has happened.

What do you attribute this to?

— Well, they are not interested. They don't care. And because they know they are not going to lose voters. We talk a lot about the aggressors in the left-wing parties, from Sumar to Más Madrid, the CUP or Podemos. Agreed. But let's not talk enough about the women in these parties, who have made an enormous exercise of courage by pointing out their colleagues. And, furthermore, we know that things do not end well for women who speak out: they end up scalded and, nevertheless, they continue to do so.

Are you afraid that by acting as a channel for anonymous complaints, you will encourage the wholesale criminalization of all men?

— There is a problem that encapsulates a tremendous contradiction. Would you put your hand in the fire for all the men in your editorial office? It is the "Not all men", which is the opposite of considering that any man is potentially a rapist. But when I am going to present a book, I ask that they not put a man next to me, because the only time they did, a woman called me to tell me that that man was the one who had explained to me that had broken her ribs. of social movements, as a preventive measure?

It seems implausible.

— I recently read Jaume Asens saying that Errejón and Monedero were finally his friends and that you have to be with friends in good times and bad. Of course, if we don't get people to reject sexual assaults, there will still be sexual assaults, and this gives me goosebumps. I'm worried about the men's stony silence. It terrifies me, because I thought that with #Cuéntalo they would react, and no. And they haven't reacted with #ShaAcabat either. They only reacted when Errejón came out and admitted it. As long as this silence exists, the most brutal machismo will continue to advance, because they know that there is half of the population that doesn't rebel against it. What's more, they see them as comrades.

Have any parties contacted you to inquire about cases that may affect them?

— Some, some. All of them on the left: from the PSOE to the alternative and nationalist left.

And to the right of the PSOE?

— None, not even the nationalist right.

Beyond the emotional price, I suppose that being the visible face of this movement must have also had other tolls on you.

— I have paid a very high price, starting with the financial one. You quickly become a dirty person. Just the other day, I was not invited to a festival that used to have me. They told me they were very sorry but they couldn't invite me because men would be scared. They would feel uncomfortable and uneasy because of my presence. The media has also left me behind, or the places where I gave lectures.

And beyond ostracism?

— The most brutal violence is that which is faced in the street. I have had to move house in Madrid twice because of death threats, with physical presence in front of my door. And after my address was made public, I had to leave Madrid. I have also received death threats against my daughter and my son when they were very young. I have been spat on, I have been thrown out of a bar where I was eating a trout pint, I have been chased in the street, I have been cornered on a train... Everything you can imagine. Once they even started hitting me in the street with a rosary.

Barcelona, ​​​​Madrid, Zaragoza. These are the three cities around which you have pivoted. What does each of them represent?

— Zaragoza is my childhood, but only in the family and school sphere, because I spent my entire childhood going to Calafell. We went every Friday and did not return to Zaragoza until Sunday night, apart from all the holidays. The memories there are only those of the family, then: some very good, but others downright terrible. To the point that at 18 I went to Barcelona, ​​​​which is my city. And that is even though the 30 years I lived there were very hard and ended with my eviction. They were also the years of the Trial and I had to suffer some attacks against me, such as that letter from Antonio Baños, which was very ugly. But the memory I have is that of a city I would like to return to.

And Madrid?

— Madrid is the coming hell. A Trumpist experiment but more brutal. I have met the best people in the world and my current friends are from there. And I have woven everything that I am as an activist, because in Barcelona I did above all cultural activism. But when I hear Feijóo saying that he will apply the Madrid model throughout Spain... ugh. I have been warning for a long time. In Madrid life is bad, because you would be protesting all day long. It is a tense city. A city made for the rich and the very rich, over-zoned. There are neighborhoods where, when I set foot, they are already singing to me. Facing the sun. Or they came under my balcony to sing it to me, with their hands raised and the Spanish flag. Madrid is the only place in Spain where certain terrifying movements are financed and where there remains an undergrowth of Francoism that still has many worms alive.

You are a regular and...

— Was.

...?

— I only have left the Everything moves on TV3, which is not a talk show, but rather a one-shot. It's what I was telling you before: all the others stopped calling me. Yes, I got calls from a couple of places, but I don't consider that a talk show, but something more disgusting. It's also true that, as I've calmed down, I notice that the television stations are less interested in me, because they're looking for something a little more grotesque. And I've got very little left of the grotesque.

A question that my non-journalist friends often ask me is whether, after setting the cavalry on them, they should all go and have a beer together.

— Well, it's true that we've been meeting some of them for over a decade in discussions and they're right-wing, very right-wing, but by meeting them you develop empathy or even love, but not to the point of making beers. And then there are others with whom I don't exchange a word outside the studio. Because they're the enemy.

And something that is never explained about the gatherings?

— That they are a construction. And that it is the talk shows that have normalised the extreme right in Spain. They have popularised arguments that would have seemed scandalous to us only ten or fifteen years ago, and we have swallowed them with potatoes. I remember the day they sat me down with Rocío Monasterio. The presenter on duty said to me: "Cristina, won't you answer him?" And I, looking at the camera, said: "I don't talk to fascists." And, of course, I had a problem. They didn't like it. The role of the talk shows has been to criminalise the left and peripheral nationalisms, not the Spanish one, of course.

Have you ever been a quota journalist? You have been very close to Podemos.

— Of course, I have always been part of the left-wing group. And they have taken me to places where I didn't know what to think, and I thought: "I'm going because you pay me, but not so I can say anything." Also, with this curly red hair I can be seen a lot! I knew they thought: "If we have the Fallarás, we have already covered the left-wing quota." Since I have declared myself a Marxist and sympathetic to communism, they have brought me more as a leftist than as a woman. In fact, if you look closely, little by little they have been placing women on the right in the talk shows: before the right-wing talk show participants were men, and on the left there were four or five women. But this has been reversed, because it is convenient to give the image that there is room for women on the extreme right and on the right.

But you don't just have a very clear ideology: you have also been involved in political parties. You closed the electoral lists in 2019 with Ada Colau and Podemos wanted you as an RTVE advisor.

— I agreed to be on the lists only to be in the final places, so that it would be guaranteed that I wouldn't be chosen. And, in the case of RTVE, it was one of those jobs that worked one day a month, without pay. Because what I didn't want in any way was to be economically linked to a political party. I hold my autonomy and my freedom in high regard. Then, through the press, I found out that I hadn't been chosen and I thought: "Well, it must be that I wasn't." It seemed strange to me that they wouldn't accept me anywhere!

Sometimes they stopped calling you and sometimes they kicked you out altogether. I remember when you were eight months pregnant and they fired you from the free newspaper DNA. What happened?

— They were about to make a redundancy plan that would later lead to the closure of the newspaper, and I found out by chance that they were planning to do so. I went to the director's office, Albert Montagut, to ask him who they wanted to fire, since I was the deputy director. And he said: "Well, you first." Then I went to speak to the CEO, who was José Sanclemente, and I said: "Look, dear, what a bummer. I'm giving birth in twenty days. Nobody will hire me." He told me not to worry, that he would write a novel. I had to choose between a severance package so I could feed my children or the alternative, which was to spend years litigating against Planeta.

This happened in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. It must have been a critical moment.

— I told them: "In three years I'll be evicted." They said: "Look, you're an alarmist and you like drama." But, sure enough, three years later I found myself on the street, with a little girl in my arms, a small child and homeless. The other media had made their EREs, so it was obvious that no one would hire me: first, by law, they should recover some of their lost workers. Luckily, I was able to settle in a cabin that they lent me in La Floresta.

Are you already recovered, financially?

— I will never be rich, but now I can live relatively well. If I wanted to live with my two children in Madrid, I couldn't, right? But now I live abroad, with my wife. We lived separately, but now I live with her because I don't have the financial means to live alone with two children.

You married a woman after having had three husbands. I don't know if what is often said on the left is true: that the personal is always political.

— Apart from the fact that my last two husbands were abusive, I now find it very difficult to deal with men. So yes, it has a clear political dimension. And it makes me laugh when I say that I am now a lesbian and lesbians tell me off and say: "You don't become a lesbian like someone who supports Betis!" I have made a decision that is political. I don't want to have a male partner, and I hardly want to have any relationships with men, because neither they know how to deal with me nor I know how to deal with them. They approach me with fear, with reluctance, and they know that I notice it. In the end, sexually I have always been a great fucker and I have liked everything. So... much better with a woman.