“You have no fucking idea what you’re getting yourself into.” Melchor Miralles began to investigate the Kote Cabezudo case with a call to a friend, a former police officer in the Basque Country, and the first advice he found was to leave it: “The GAL, state terrorism, were a joke compared to this And I warn you that this is a matter for which there are people who kill “.

He did not give up: “If a journalist is aware of a matter like this, he is obliged to tell it.”

Kote Bighead’s name may not tell you anything, and that’s what this story is about. It is, however, one of the biggest sexual criminals in the history of Spain.

Finally, after a long and tortuous road, Miralles premieres on Netflix this Friday, May 26, ‘In their name’, the documentary series that returns to the case of this photographer from San Sebastián who, for 30 years, abused and raped his young models, often minors, and produced and distributed child pornography.

It is not, however, the first time that a platform announces this series. Disney was already promoting it in November 2022 as its own production. But to everyone’s surprise, the day of its launch there was only silence.

Someone high-ranking told them: ‘You can’t release it’

“There are no precedents in the world,” says Miralles, co-executive producer of ‘In their name’, “someone high-ranking told them: ‘You can’t release it.’ For the victims it was terrible.”

Three one-hour chapters trace the chilling story of the victims of José Juan ‘Kote’ Cabezudo Zabala, his control mechanisms over them and the coercion they suffered later, during the judicial investigation, when they had the courage to denounce him.

Miralles warns the viewer: “He is going to witness something that nobody could imagine in 21st century Spain. The catastrophe, the indignity of justice, the re-victimization to which these women have been subjected in the courts of San Sebastián is unsuspected They say it themselves: “We have felt more violated by the judge than by Kote Cabezudo.”

Disney’s was just one of the stones in the path of an investigation called to disappear.

“Jesús Cintora prevented me from talking about Kote Cabezudo on his program and, when I did, he fired me. Risto [Mejide] did not allow me to either,” denounces the journalist, who attributes the general silence to an extremely effective protection network woven by the photographer thanks to the compromising images he has of influential people: “He says it himself, he has material from the police, military, ertzainas, lawyers, journalists, judges… He has caught a lot of people.”

‘In their name’ covers the nine years of very long investigation that concluded last year with the sentence of Kote Cabezudo to 28 years and two months in prison for crimes of sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, production and dissemination of pornography child and various crimes of fraud between 1992 and 2013, a sentence ratified this spring by the Supreme Court.

The admission of Kote Cabezudo to the Martutene prison does not close, for Miralles, the last page of this twisted story: “If all those who are part of his protection structure think that with his sentence, the case is over, they lose all hope. Because this is just beginning.”

According to the criteria of The Trust Project