Judge sends Raúl Asencio to trial for spreading sex videos

BarcelonaRaúl Asencio will sit in the dock. Court No. 3 of San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria) has agreed to open oral proceedings against the Real Madrid defender and the other three former Real Madrid players accused of having distributed without permission the sex video of two young women, one of them a minor. According to the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, the judge is now requesting bail of €20,000 for Ferrán Ruiz, Juan Rodríguez, and Andrés García, the other suspects in the case, while he is seeking bail of €15,000 for Asencio. The difference in the amounts is due to the fact that the Real Madrid center back is not accused of recording the video, only of distributing it.

From now on, the case will be referred to a criminal court in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to set a date for the public hearing, as there is no room for appeal. The minor's defense is seeking four years in prison for Asencio, while the prosecution is seeking two.

To understand the events, we must go back to June 15, 2023, at the Beach Club on Amadores beach, south of Gran Canaria. There, the footballers, who were between 20 and 21 years old, met three girls, one of them a minor. They spent some time in the club's pool, until, at one point, the 16-year-old girl and an 18-year-old agreed to go to a private room with Ferrán Ruiz, Juan Rodríguez, and Andrés García and had consensual sex. Asencio, meanwhile, did not follow the others and stayed in the facility's pool with the third girl.

But the initial consent ended when, as the evidence collected indicates, Ferrán Ruiz allegedly began recording the sex scene without asking the girls' permission and without them knowing he was recording them. According to the court order that concluded the investigation, Ruiz then handed the cell phone to Rodríguez so he could continue recording the scene from another perspective. This alarmed the girls, who discovered they were being recorded. The girls then left the room in search of their third friend. Before having sex, according to the released order, the minor had told the four defendants that she was 16, so everyone knew her age.

Asencio's involvement in the case didn't come until a few days later, when one of the defendants sent one of the videos to his cell phone, which he showed to a friend, presumably knowing that they had been recorded against the will of the girls appearing in it. In fact, the Real Madrid center-back himself acknowledged this in a WhatsApp message recovered by the Civil Guard from his phone, in which he said: "Hey, bro, I showed it to you because Juan [Rodríguez] gave it to me."