For three and a half years, we worked in secret. Our families didn’t know what we were doing. Neither did our friends. We were making a film about the case that had triggered Spain’s 2018 #MeToo movement and secrecy was how we could best protect the survivors and participants. We also needed time to slowly and methodically build a documentary powerful enough that it could make something invisible – the universality of sexual violence against women – visible.
The story at the heart of our film began at the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, famous for the “running of the bulls”, where in 2016 a woman was sexually assaulted by five men who called themselves “the wolf pack”.
The case and the subsequent trial made international headlines. In Spain, it caused nationwide shock and triggered huge street protests. Eventually, the outcry led to a change in the law on sexual assault.
But because investigators, prosecutors and family members declined to speak publicly during the proceedings, TV talkshows filled the vacuum with studio discussions that gave an extraordinary media platform to the defence. Defence lawyers were able to plant seeds of doubt about the victim, implying that she was lying, that she had actually consented and thus that there had never even been an assault; the type of argument is all too familiar. This explains how, even though the men (one of whom was a police officer) were eventually convicted, the version of the case that was laced with “doubts” is the one that entered the collective memory.
We wanted to deconstruct this narrative, filter out the noise and re-examine it from a survivor’s perspective. (In this age of false equivalences, it’s important to note that this wasn’t going to be just another “version”: it would match the finding of facts as ratified by each court that heard the case, including Spain’s supreme court.)
Soon we found ourselves piecing together a mosaic inlaid with two other stories: another sexual assault committed in southern Spain by four of the same men in the Pamplona case (for which they were also convicted), and the murder of 20-year-old Nagore Laffage during the San Fermín festival in 2008. Nagore’s death had led Pamplona to bring in a series of measures to counter sexual violence.
We first sought permission from the victims and their families – our guiding principle was that the film should do no harm – and then worked with their court testimony, letters and other materials, plus on-camera interviews with 18 people who had lived the process from the inside. We were determined to make a film that was respectful, rigorous and avoided sensationalism. Above all, we hoped that if viewers could be shown a different perspective, they could arrive at a different understanding of this story, and the world around them.
As the mosaic took shape, we began to see the breadth and depth of sexist attitudes in the media, the judiciary and in Spanish societal responses, which included (not uniquely to Spain) relentless questioning of female victims, even in the face of strong, clear evidence. During the trial of the man accused of Nagore’s murder, her grieving mother was asked: “Was your daughter a flirt?”
The defence in the 2016 San Fermín case commissioned a private detective to report on the victim’s life in the months after the assault, to try to demonstrate that she hadn’t experienced any trauma because she appeared to be continuing her life “as normal”.
But what made the “wolf pack” case different from thousands of other cases of sexual violence was the reaction that it provoked in Spain. When in April 2018 the men were cleared of sexual assault and given a more lenient sentence for the lesser crime of sexual abuse (because, the court argued, there had not been violence or physical intimidation), a million women and girls took to the streets chanting, “Sister, I believe you”, and to social media with a campaign called #Cuéntalo (“Tell your story”), sharing more than 160,000 personal experiences of sexual harassment, sexual abuse and sexual assault.
The case itself was a watershed moment in Spain. In 2019, Spain’s supreme court overruled the lower courts to convict the men of rape rather than sexual abuse, and increased their prison sentences. Across society, there was a big leap forward in attitudes; suddenly in classrooms, workplaces and families across the country, people were talking about sexual violence more openly. The government passed a new law (known as the “only yes means yes” law), making consent the central factor in crimes of sexual assault, eliminating the crime of “abuse” under the law, and establishing other measures of support for victims.
On a personal level, Spain’s first #MeToo movement transformed our understanding. Studying the torrent of accounts that women shared as part of #Cuéntalo forced me (Almudena Carracedo), as a woman, to make a list of the various kinds and degrees of sexual violence I had experienced from my teenage years. The realisation that my lived experiences took place within a continuum of planet-wide sexual violence was sobering. In any group setting – family, co-workers, a school meeting – know that there will be women present who have experienced this violence too.
For me (Robert Bahar) as a man who had always considered myself to have a social conscience, and to support women’s rights, this was about understanding just how little I had previously understood. After going through thousands of accounts of sexual violence, you review your life and rethink your actions to see how you could have done better. And you wonder, are there things my mother never told me that happened to her? What about my sister? And did they feel alone? Would they still today?
All of the changes the “wolf pack” case engendered in Spain were seen and felt around the world last summer with the swift public outcry when Luis Rubiales grabbed the World Cup football champion Jenni Hermoso and kissed her on her lips. Women again took to social media to declare #SeAcabo (“It’s over”) and share more experiences of sexual harassment and violence.
Our once-secret film has now premiered in Spanish cinemas and launched globally on Netflix as You Are Not Alone: Fighting the Wolf Pack. It has been seen by millions in Spain, and millions more around the world. Just as the “wolf pack” case catalysed change in Spain, we hope the film can hold up a mirror to us all and be a tool for change. The message it sends is that whatever you have experienced, you are not alone because millions of women have gone through it before you. You are not alone because this story is being told in families, among friends, on social media and in films. And you are not alone because millions of us are by your side.
Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar are Goya, Peabody and three-time Emmy winning film-makers. Prior to You Are Not Alone they made The Silence of Others
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