The discredit of the victims

The Movistar+ platform has premiered Believe me (Black Cab), a four-episode series that takes us back to the multiple rapes that occurred in London between 2000 and 2008. More than a hundred women who took one of the city's iconic black cabs were drugged and raped by their driver, John Worboys. For years, that taxi driver was able to act with absolute impunity because the police looked down on the complainants and judged them for their state of unconsciousness or for having been out partying. They also failed to properly file the reports, and this meant that the evidence and the victims' accounts were lost in the databases without being able to trace the culprit or detect a pattern of criminal behavior. It is inevitable that this series reminds us of another very similar one that Netflix released in 2019. Unbelievable (Unbelievable) dramatized a very similar true story that happened in the United States. The series showed how a police investigation can aggravate the trauma of rape victims, subjecting them to suspicion and blaming them. That production explained how two police detectives took on the cases with the necessary rigor, establishing essential protocols. They demonstrated how respect for the victims was essential to find the culprits.

Despite the six-year gap between the two series and the geographical distance separating the real events, they portray the same decade and share the same denunciation and message. Black Cab focuses on the story of four of those victims and reproduces their emotional journey over the years. While Unbelievable emphasized the initial police negligence and the contrast with the careful work of the two inspectors, this one always revolves around the victims and their point of view. The core is the institutional lack of protection they suffer, which is narratively accentuated in the last two episodes, when they fight against the police and judicial system that has ignored them. The violence involved in not being believed is explained. This has a direct implication on the construction of the protagonists' characters. They are not just victims. They are mothers, daughters, wives, students, nurses... and in each of these spheres, the impact of the rape has consequences and generates comments from those around them. Each character faces her situation in different ways, which shows that there is no defined model of a victim. Actor Daniel Mays plays the rapist, a delicate role because one must find the balance between explaining the modus operandi and giving prominence to the criminal. In this case, his role serves to make explicit the behavioral subtleties of sexual predators and the strategies to evade justice.

Based on their original titles, both Unbelievable and Black Cab emphasize the importance of the credibility of the complainants, and this turns the series into a magnificent manual on victim care that, unfortunately, is worth remembering from time to time.