“I told them: if you want, you can kill me, and if not, they can fuck you in the ass.” Fate has wanted Julián to be alive, not even he can explain how he managed to return home and why he now remembers in front of a camera that a few years ago he met a beautiful Latin girl on a dating app and ended up tortured and locked in a trunk somewhere near Zaragoza.
Also, that the worst thing was not living that nightmare but discovering when he woke up that he had not been the first and that, a week after his miraculous liberation, another middle-aged man would excitedly go on a date with a beautiful Latin girl whom he loved. I had met on an app. The latter, on the other hand, would never return home.
Carles Porta has changed the headphones and microphone for the laptop, and his classic catchphrase today appeals even more to the surrealism of the crimes he tells. Gone is the radio narrator who ordered the respectable person from his studio in the heart of Barcelona: “Let’s begin.”
The king of true crime in Spain today releases his umpteenth twist on the format that has earned him the nickname of the Catalan Truman Capote with the same warning as always, everything we will see is real, but a new confirmation: “It looks like a movie but it is real”. Light in the Dark marks the return of the journalist from Lleida to Movistar Plus after the success of Crímenes, with two new cases that blur the borders between fiction and life.
My goal is to encourage the public’s curiosity, but never morbidity. Even murderers deserve respect
A local reporter by vocation, Carles Porta has done practically everything a communicator can dream of, from covering wars like Bosnia or Rwanda to composing “an intimate portrait” of Carles Puigdemont, a friend from his youth, to writing eight essays and two young adult novels, produce and direct five documentaries and, of course, forge an entire imaginary and even a vocabulary of his own throughout almost 200 episodes of his Crims podcast.
“I have always been a trench journalist,” he summarizes an entire life dedicated to events under a sonorous motto: rigor, respect and narrative rhythm.
“Even murderers deserve respect,” emphasizes Porta, sitting next to a simulated fireplace in the reception of his favorite hotel in Madrid, of course, the Catalonia. “That respect is perceived by the viewer when we tell things without aggressiveness or sensationalism, but with elegance and pulse,” he says, “I like to be liked, I like to seduce the more people the better, but my goal is to satisfy curiosity, not morbidity.
It won’t be the last time I speak in the plural. Not in vain, his creations have behind them the work of the 25 people who investigate the cases in his production company True Crime Factory.
I was able to interview Rosa Peral and I didn’t want to. I don’t see what it can contribute to a case that is already sentenced.
Moved by this desire for testimony, Porta spent months talking to Julián, the man who went on a date and ended up tortured, to convince him to star in his own double episode, the one that opens Light in the Darkness. “What do I gain from this?” he asked her. We make your doubt ours.
The latest controversy surrounding the reporting of events did not have Carles Porta as the protagonist, but as a collateral victim. The Netflix premiere of The Tapes of Rosa Peral, the first interview that the woman convicted of the crime by the Urban Police grants from prison, has unleashed a whirlwind of passions and criticism, and has returned to the top ten the double chapter that Porta premiered on the case in January 2022.
