Tamara Fernández Varela: drugged, raped and filmed by her husband

She could hardly believe it. Sitting at home, Tamara Fernández Varela kept reading and re-reading the letter from the court in Carballo, in Spain’s northwestern Galicia region, notifying her that her ex-husband had drugged, raped and photographed her. It included six images. In some she appeared completely naked. “I kept looking at them and saying: it can’t be me. Such brutality doesn’t fit inside your head. A woman looking dead in a bed. And it’s me,” recalls the 43-year-old woman. Her mother and she both began to scream. They screamed so loudly that a frightened neighbor called an ambulance.

Tamara had just been told in writing that Alessandro Pompeo, who had been her partner for eight years and from whom she separated in 2018 — the same man who gave her roses every month on their anniversary — was being investigated as her aggressor. And the piece of news arrived in a notice as impersonal as a speeding ticket. This happened in 2022. Two years later the man fled. Since then he has been missing. The trial was put on hold. The Provincial Court of A Coruña has repeatedly rejected requests from the public prosecutor’s office, most recently in February, to activate an international warrant.

“Do you know how disappointed I was the day before the trial?,” the woman snaps, widening her dark, heavily lined eyes and thick eyebrows. When she gets angry, she switches to the Galician language without realizing it. Tamara drives around A Coruña, where flags and shirts are still being hung up after the local soccer club Deportivo’s promotion to First Division. The city is celebrating and life goes on, but not hers. She feels in limbo. “I wish I could be as strong as I used to be. To still have the vitality to say, ‘Mom, today we’ll go wherever the car takes us,’” she laments. Now she does not like driving anymore, nor does she enjoy the city.

After receiving the notice she went to the courthouse. There she learned there were more photos and eight videos. The National Police found the material after raiding Pompeo’s Carballo home in 2020 when they discovered he had downloaded 70 files of child pornography. Tamara recognized the furniture and bedding in the photos and recordings. She had to listen to herself snore. Some recordings dated from when they lived in Switzerland, where they met in 2009; others were from later, after they moved to Carballo, Tamara’s hometown. The accused admitted the facts, but “he said I had consented to everything. Not even the judge believed him,” she says. She says the magistrate apologized for the letter the court sent her, saying it had not been the proper way to summon her.

She loathes the photos, but they could serve as evidence that chemical submission occurred — something that, without images, is hard to prove. In the case of Gisele Pelicot, a 73-year-old Frenchwoman who was drugged and raped by her husband and at least 50 other men (those the police were able to identify), the fact the assaults were filmed proved crucial to uncovering the crime and proving it at trial.

Tamara says she was initially ashamed to leave the house because she thought someone might have seen the photos. Pompeo’s case is not unique: from time to time a new Telegram group or platform emerges where men send videos of their girlfriends or sisters, swap tips on how to drug women and on which substance and dose to use. Underwear and piercings can also be relevant evidence. “I have that filth stored at home because I had to take it to the judge, but since there was no trial...,” she laments.

In June 2022, Alessandro Pompeo was convicted for possession of child pornography — the reason police went to his house in the first place — and sentenced to eight months of supervised freedom, a fine of about €700 and disqualification from any work involving contact with minors for two years. In January 2023, according to the court documents EL PAÍS has obtained, the Provincial Court indicted him for “continued sexual abuse with abuse of superiority and carnal access” against Tamara Fernández Varela, for which the prosecution sought 14 years in prison.

Her lawyer requested pre-trial detention and that his passport be withdrawn, but the justice system issued only a protection order for her. The police have not found him in more than two years. He holds Italian and Swiss nationality; he lived in Zurich from childhood, where he had a son with another woman and where Tamara met him. They were married a year later.

“He was affectionate; if he’d been harsh, shouted at me… But he never did that kind of thing,” she notes. He was a blacksmith. She remembers him as a “very attentive” man who “wouldn’t break a plate.” They liked going to the pool, eating at the Chinese restaurant, walking in the woods and picking mushrooms. “Nothing seemed strange to me at the time. Now it does, everything adds up. We were at the table, we were on the sofa, and I would wake up in bed,” she recalls. He’d tell her she had fallen asleep. They lived with the daughter Tamara had with her first husband, who at the time was a minor. She is tormented by the thought that the accused may have done something to her as well and that she may never know.

They decided to move to Galicia at the end of 2017 because Tamara’s father was very ill. They separated six months later. Tamara survives on state aid, although she has always worked as a waitress: “I loved to laugh, to have a good time with customers; many people now tell me I’ve become boring.” She suffers from depression and has attempted suicide more than once. “He has killed me while I’m still alive,” she says, the only time all day her voice breaks. She thinks of how he violated her most intimate security — the safety of being in her own home with someone who supposedly knew and loved her most. “I’m not capable of having a partner now because it scares me, it overwhelms me. I distrust everyone,” she adds.

The last time they spoke was at the gas station where he began to work after they separated. She, who already knew everything at that point, went to fill her tank and look him in the eye to see how he reacted. She relives it in horror: “He says to me, ‘How beautiful you look, long time no see, your short hair suits you so well.’ I didn’t even know how to answer. I gave him the money and left.” She was never able to locate him again; he changed phones and closed his social media accounts. Fernández Varela says the images that the police showed her included other women. She says she only recognized his first wife and tried to warn her via Facebook, but the woman blocked her. This newspaper has not been able to determine whether the ex-wife has been notified or is aware of the ongoing judicial process.

“I’d stake my life that he’s still doing it. One day in the future there will be news that he’s done this to others and it could have been avoided,” she laments. The Provincial Court rejected requests for an international arrest warrant because it felt that “there are no sufficient indicative elements, beyond the foreign nationality of the accused, that he is in a foreign country.” The crime he has been indicted for prescribes after 15 years.

“Until he shows up and pays for what he has done, I will not be at peace,” the woman repeats. Tamara never found the right words to talk about this violence with her daughter. A few weeks ago the latter turned 18 and told her she was proud of her, and that telling her story was what she had to do. The support from those around her gives her courage: “I felt guilty for not realizing what was happening, but we don’t have to hide.”

At the moment, Tamara Fernández Varela is moving house. While putting things away at home this past Thursday, she found the court notice that started the nightmare. The one she looked at and cried over so much. She had put it away so carefully that she had never come across it since. But something told her she would find it again.

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