The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence of a woman who denounced in a report broadcast in 2017 on the RTVE program La Mañana that she could not sleep due to the noises related to her neighbor’s sexual “fierceness”.
The young woman mentioned in the report broadcast in 2017 on public television sued both the neighbor who appeared in the report and RTVE itself. The Court of First Instance number 5 of Salamanca dismissed the claim, but in July 2021 the Provincial Court of Salamanca upheld the appeal filed by the girl’s lawyer and sentenced the girl to compensate the girl with 10,000 euros.
Now, in its sentence, the Supreme Civil Chamber rejects the appeal of the woman who was sentenced together with the Spanish Radio Television Corporation to jointly and severally pay compensation of 10,000 euros to the neighbor mentioned in the report for interference illegitimate in their rights to honor, privacy and their own image.
The neighbor mentioned in the report, which lasted about 10 minutes, alleged in her complaint that data had been provided that allowed her to be identified and that the information disclosed that a young woman had been fined by the City Council for making noises that exceeded decibels. allowed.
It was also stated that the noises came from the bed of the neighbor upstairs, due to her nocturnal activity, which caused things to fall from the complainant’s shelf.
In the report -according to the lawsuit- a woman appeared who complained that she could not sleep because of the “fieryness of her upstairs neighbor”, she showed the cracks in her house and explained that even the radiator vibrated, she gave details of the expressions that he heard; and the possibility of the practice of prostitution was pointed out.
The woman affected by this story denounced the facts in a court in Salamanca, which dismissed the lawsuit in which she requested compensation of 20,000 euros. The court’s decision was based, among other reasons, on the fact that the woman’s revelations in the report were protected by freedom of expression.
When appealing this decision, the Provincial Court of Salamanca partially upheld the claim and sentenced RTVE and the woman, in addition to paying 10,000 euros in compensation, to publish, at their expense, the ruling in La Gaceta de Salamanca, as well as to read it in the program in which it was broadcast or in another similar one that could have replaced it or, failing that, in the primetime newscast.
This court understood that the information and expressions issued did not refer to matters of public relevance or general interest and that only morbidity caused aspects of the intimate life of a person to become news with repeated insinuations that the noises were related to his sex life.
Now, the Supreme Court confirms the sentence and appreciates that the weighting judgment carried out by the Provincial Court, for which the right to honor and privacy of the respondent prevails over the freedom of expression of the appellant, is correct.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court indicates that, despite the fact that the appellant insists on the news nature of noise pollution, it shares the criteria of the appealed ruling “when it states that the demonstrations are embedded in neighborly relations, with little relevance public”.
It understands that although it was legitimate for the appellant to report the noise, “it is not justified and it is disproportionate for her to air on a television program that the acoustic disturbances produced could come from the intense sexual activity of the neighbor plaintiff now appealed.”
“Such statements, due to the way they were made, imply an attack on both the privacy and the personal reputation of the plaintiff in such a way that they objectively cause her discredit,” observes the Chamber, which also rejects the argument that it was limited to respond to the journalist, who, given the story “in such detail,” warned him that the program was being broadcast in children’s hours.
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