The Santo Domingo de Independiente property is in the town of Villa Domínico
An employee of the Independiente de Avellaneda club reported having been abused by a collaborator of the professional soccer team, not a soccer player, sources in the case explained to Infobae.
The sources consulted by this medium also said that the Avellaneda club, which has a Gender department, was aware of the case from the first moment and that it was the one who asked the victim to go to court to file a complaint, then that she said that she did not want to have work contact with him.
The alleged attacker admitted to the authorities of the sports institution that he did kiss her, but denied having lowered his pants, as the woman reported in court, they detailed.
Although the complaint was filed at the end of last week in UFI No. 2 of the judicial department of Avellaneda-Lanús, in charge of María Laura Carballal, everything would have happened on August 29 in the afternoon at the Santo Domingo property, located in Ortega at 5000, in the town of Villa Domínico.
According to the victim, an employee of the club’s women’s soccer team, the worker who collaborates with the professional soccer team led by Julio Vaccari wanted to “forcibly kiss” her and groped her. Given this, she said that she tried to walk away and he “ran her with his pants down” until he caught up with her and entered her manually.
In her story, the woman says that she screamed, that she asked him to leave her and that she was scared. He also commented that, given this situation, the accused allowed him to leave.
Meanwhile, the accused was removed from his position by the club, as indicated by protocol.
The statement from the Independiente club
Faced with this, the Independiente de Avellaneda club issued a statement, in which they reported that the denounced man was suspended from his duties. “Through an internal presentation, an employee of our institution (whose data and further details are omitted in order to preserve her identity), informed the Department of Gender, Women and Diversity of a fact that could constitute a crime against her integrity. sexual activity carried out by a club employee,” the text begins.
In that sense, the statement continues: “Immediately, the institution activated the current Gender Protocol and suspended the employee in question from his duties.” In this way, they indicated that this measure remains in force to date, and that the complainant was informed that she had the right to make the corresponding criminal presentation. “The only one who can file a criminal complaint is the victim,” they clarified.
As reported, the man was suspended from his duties
“The corresponding administrative process is in the stage of preparing the internal summary that will allow our entity to adopt a decision in the next few hours according to the seriousness of the event,” the statement closes.
This is not the first incident in Independiente. In mid-August there were new developments in the case that began to be investigated in April 2018 for sexual abuse in the Lower Divisions of the club. The Court resolved the jurisdiction of the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) No. 3 of Lomas de Zamora to process the trial against the two defendants.
The decision comes after an extensive analysis of judicial jurisdiction in relation to these crimes that include the promotion of aggravated prostitution, corruption of minors, grooming and possession of child pornography.
The case was discovered in March 2018, when a 14-year-old youth player told the head of the club’s psychologist department, Ariel Ruiz, that he and several teammates, at least 15 and all minors, had had sexual relations with adults. in exchange for money, boots and all kinds of sporting goods in departments of La Plata, Sarandí, San Isidro and the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo.
Martin Bustos
Prosecutor Soledad Garibaldi carried out the investigation and charged six suspects: soccer referee Martín Bustos; the public relations specialist Leandro Cohen Arazi, the player representative Alberto Ponte, Alejandro Dal Cin -owner of football ventures-, the businessman Juan Díaz Vallone and Silvio Fleytas.
In March 2022, with the case already brought to trial and filed in TOC 3 of Lomas de Zamora, the judges in the case considered that the episodes against the sexual integrity of the minors had been independent of each other, and that strictly speaking there was no a trafficking network that would force the facts to be treated in a unified manner. For this reason, they dismembered the file.
In this context, on December 29, 2023, that same court sentenced Bustos to 12 years in prison for the crimes of promoting prostitution aggravated by being committed through abuse of a situation of vulnerability and the victim being under 18 years of age, in competition real with promotion of prostitution aggravated by being committed through abuse in a situation of vulnerability.
Vallone, Dal Cin and Fleytas, meanwhile, agreed to an abbreviated trial and obtained 10 years in prison for promoting aggravated prostitution.
The TOC 3 of Lomas de Zamora referred the actions linked to Cohen Arazi and Ponte to the jurisdiction of the Federal Capital, in whose homes the minors would have suffered abuse between the months of March and December 2017. However, the Oral Court in National Criminal and Correctional No. 12 rejected the jurisdiction: a series of procedures would have to be reiterated that would affect the health of the “young victims.”
The conflict escalated to the Supreme Court, where ministers Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz, Juan Carlos Maqueda and Ricardo Lorenzetti unanimously agreed with the opinion of Attorney General Eduardo Casal insofar as “it is beneficial to concentrate the process before a single court to favor the good administration of justice, avoiding what could mean a traumatic repetition of identical procedures in different venues and, finally, the possibility of the issuance of contradictory sentences.” And he sent the case to TOC No. 3 of Lomas de Zamora.
Cohen Arazi is charged with the crime of promoting prostitution, in its simple and aggravated form, because the victim is a minor and because of her state of vulnerability, in real competition with the crime of corruption of minors. He was also charged, in a subsidiary manner, with the crime of sexual abuse with carnal access, in real competition with corruption of minors.
While Ponte was charged with promoting prostitution, aggravated by the fact that the victim was a minor, in real competition with corruption of minors, grooming and possession of child pornography. The crime of sexual abuse with carnal access was also subsidiarily attributed to him.