The first time he showed up at Barcelona’s poster-plastered La Cinètika – a former cinema turned squatted anticapitalist social centre – was in mid-2020.
Friendly, funny and flirtatious, he introduced himself as Dani, a recent transplant to the city who was scraping by installing air conditioners, and said he had stumbled across the centre after searching online for a cheap place to work out.
Over the next two and a half years he became a fixture on the city’s vibrant anarchist scene; facing down police at protests and anti-eviction blockades, dropping by a popular plaza for hours of beer-fuelled conversations and striking up intimate relations with at least eight women.
That is, until the man with the mohawk, collection of antifascist T-shirts and a chaos symbol tattooed on one knee was alleged to be an undercover police officer.
Six of the women he was involved with during this time are now pursuing legal action, accusing the alleged officer and his superiors at Spain’s national police force of continued sexual abuse and inhumane treatment along with breaches of their privacy and fundamental rights. The legal challenge also takes aim at Spain’s home ministry, arguing that it is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the country’s police forces.
“I feel I was raped,” one of the women told La Directa, the Barcelona-based newspaper that first published the allegations. “I’ve been with someone who I now realise I didn’t know and that makes me genuinely afraid.”
She first crossed paths with Dani in late 2020, when a group gathered at La Cinètika to work on a guide aimed at preventing and confronting patriarchal violence. The two hit it off quickly, going on to date for nearly a year.
The allegations, revealed more than a year after he abruptly broke off the relationship, left her fending off a mix of anxiety, disgust and powerlessness. “If I had known he was a cop, I would have never had a relationship with him. I wasn’t able to make that decision,” she said.
In recent weeks she had grappled with a barrage of flashbacks, reliving the many times she had introduced him to her closest friends and family and eased his entry into the city’s tight-knit activist community. “Nothing justifies the state and the police interfering in my life,” she said.
Spain’s national police and interior ministry have yet to publicly address the allegations. Neither would speak to the Guardian; the police did not reply to a request for comment while the ministry said it would not comment, nor would it confirm the existence of “this alleged case”.
Police sources, however, have confirmed to a handful of Spanish media that Dani is a police officer, linking him to a division focused on intelligence gathering.
At the heart of the women’s legal challenge is the question of whether these women were able to provide free and informed consent, said Sònia Olivella, a lawyer with Barcelona-based rights group Irídia and part of the legal team representing the women.
“It’s clear that the consent was flawed. It’s not just that a person lied about one facet of their identity, but rather the whole identity was false,” she said. “And it was given in the context of an asymetrical relationship between activists and a state official who was carrying out orders.”
The legal complaint also calls for clarity as to who – and on what suspicions – the undercover operation was approved. “Because we know there is no legal framework that would allow this breach of fundamental rights,” said Olivella.
While Spanish laws include a judicial process that can allow police to infiltrate groups suspected of organised crime or terrorism, this operation seemingly targeted anarchist and libertarian movements as well as workers’ rights groups.
“We’re talking about grassroots movements that have tremendous transparency in their assemblies,” said Olivella. “So we don’t understand what the justification could be, beyond criminalising the right of association and protest.”
Instead she saw the case as part of a broader pattern of “institutional violence”. Similar allegations have emerged involving two other cops; one said to have infiltrated groups such as Catalan separatists and housing activists and another who moved through Valencia’s anarchist and antifascist circles, according to La Directa.
The allegations began surfacing weeks after it was revealed that Pegasus spyware had been used to target more than 60 people connected with the Catalan independence movement. “These are practices that are connected to each other,” said Olivella.
In crafting the legal challenge, the team in Barcelona looked to the UK for a modern-day precedent of what they described as “sexualised institutional violence”; the “Spy cops” scandal, in which it was revealed that at least 20 undercover officers had deceived women into intimate relationships that at times spanned years. Four officers are known, or are alleged, to have fathered children with women they met during covert deployments.
As the women in Barcelona wait to hear whether the court will agree to hear their case, their search for justice has been closely watched by Police Spies out of Lives, the group representing women in the UK who were deceived by cops.
“We note that the Spanish state has crossed a line in terms of the violation of fundamental rights, exploiting intimate and sexual relationships to monitor political dissent,” the group noted in a statement of support signed by 87 other organisations from around the world. “As in the UK, this case should generate public debate on the limits and control of policing in a state governed by the rule of law and democracy.”
