When your aggressor commits suicide before trial

Barcelona / El MasnouKarla took fifteen years to make the move. Half her life. It was a long time of silence. Also of shame. Even of fear. Hours of psychologists to gradually put the pieces back in place. Until she was ready to report the man who sexually assaulted and tortured her when she was just a fourteen-year-old girl.

He was the family doctor. The man who had cared for her grandmother. The friend who helped the single mother with her teenage, rebellious daughter. And just when she had gathered the courage to confront her alleged abuser and the legal proceedings were advancing towards trial, everything suddenly stopped: Joan P. committed suicide in the summer of 2021, the day after receiving a second complaint for abuse of a minor.

It all began the day Karla didn't want to go on a school trip with the youth group. The tantrum of a thirteen-year-old girl who was starting to talk back and come home late. Her mother, who had raised her without a man in the house, went to the family friend who was a doctor. Joan P. was left alone with her and defined a family therapy based on the serious and minor infractions Karla committed. For each number of infractions, there were punishments, which he carried out on weekends, when he would stay alone with the girl for a while to conduct the therapy. He would apply what her mother "didn't have the courage" to do, he confessed to her.

In several sessions, the man beat the girl with a belt while tying her hands and covering her mouth. "They were punishments with brutality," Karla recalls. But the physical violence was also accompanied by sexual violence. According to documentation accessed by ARA, he assaulted her several times, caused her great pain, and while doing so, he lectured her. It lasted for more than a year, until she turned fourteen. After the sessions, one or two a month, the girl would emerge completely "annihilated." Her defense mechanism was to "forget and move on." And even more so when she thought her mother knew and, despite that, left her alone at home with that man, who also took her to his clinic in the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona.

In October 2004, everything escalated. The issue arose one day when the girl was with two friends. The Pandora's box was opened. After an argument with her mother, Karla threw a reproach at her: “With what you let me do”. She was not able to verbalize anything else. But she did write it down on a piece of paper that was later submitted as evidence during the legal proceedings. The therapies with Joan P. ended abruptly, even though the mother never confronted the doctor. They had a very strong bond: they had spent more than one Christmas Eve at his home, with his family; they vacationed in one of his apartments; he was a renowned doctor who had cared for her grandmother for years.

They visited the Vicky Bernadet foundation for advice and explained what had happened. But all that girl wanted was to get away from that man. Talking about trials terrified her. Especially, seeing him again. Furthermore, he was a relatively public figure. Little by little, the issue was put aside. It was not talked about. Locked in a little box. But the wound remained open.

The complaint

Once again in a safe space, with friends, as she was about to turn thirty, Karla once again verbalized the aggressions and torture by Joan P.. A friend accompanied her to report it. It was January 2020. She began therapy at the Vicky Bernadet foundation, although four years earlier she had already seen a psychologist from Social Security for problems in her sexual relations.

The judicial procedure moved forward. Statements. Reports. Evidence. The investigation was coming to an end. In March 2021, the preliminary proceedings were transferred to the Provincial Court of Barcelona. The indictment writings were missing. They were on the verge of determining, if the judge considered it, the date of the trial, but everything collapsed at once. In July 2021, Karla learned that the case was being dismissed. In June 2021, the man committed suicide, the day after receiving a second complaint for abuse of a minor.

According to what ARA has been able to confirm with police sources, it concerned “inappropriate touching and comments” to a girl, who verbalized it when she was thirteen years old, although the events happened earlier. The doctor's family admits the veracity of this second complaint: Joan P. admitted to having told the minor that they would get married when she was older and that she was his “slave”. The touching, according to the family's version, was “tickling”, but in no case sexual assault. “He was not an abuser, the comments were out of place, we would never have expected him to say that to a child we loved, but they are incomparable to the seriousness of the first complaint,” they defend and recall that the man had occasional contact with minors.

“When he commits suicide, I feel relieved because I am aware that he will not do it to anyone else again, but I was empowering myself and I would have liked a trial and a sentence, it would have been reparative,” Karla recounts. During those months of the summer of 2021, she went through “all possible phases”. She even felt sorry for him because she knew the doctor's wife and son. Her lawyer, Carolina Gallego, made her open her eyes: “His wife has the right to know who she sleeps with”.

Gallego considers that once the case had become a summary, “it was difficult for it to be dismissed” because “there were enough indications” to go to trial, such as the testimonies of the mother or friends, or visits to the Vicky Bernadet foundation and the public psychologist to whom Karla had explained the events. They also had the forensic reports in their favor, which highlighted the girl's “coherent, explicit, and detailed” account, gave “credibility” to her narrative, and did not point to either “fabulation” or prior “animosity” against the doctor.

However, the man's family denies Karla's accusations. “It couldn't have happened, it was too monstrous a thing, he told us it was false,” they argue. In fact, they assure that the doctor was considering breaking professional secrecy to defend himself and prove his innocence, and that days before taking his own life, for health reasons, he had already informed the family that he wanted to “euthanize himself.” “The complaint was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition,” they emphasize.

With the accused's death, the Court of Instance number 31 of Barcelona extinguished criminal responsibility, but left the civil route open, and claimed responsibility from the heirs. They even drafted the lawsuit, but found no jurisprudence: there were no similar cases, as the man had not yet been prosecuted. While considering this possibility, and risking the economic costs it entailed, Karla also tried to seek mediation with the family. She sent a burofax to his wife, with no response; and that of the heirs was negative. In November 2025 she requested mediation, which was rejected in February of this year.

“I spent money, it was a symbolic reparation. I didn't want the family's forgiveness, who have done nothing, but rather the acknowledgment that what happened, happened. That would be healing,” explains the girl. The deadlines to file the lawsuit expired and, in this way, the possibility of undertaking any legal initiative vanished. What Karla also never knew was what had happened with that second complaint, nor who that girl was who had suffered abuse like her.