Supreme Court Orders “Immediate Release” for Filmmaker Nicolas Lopez, Convicted of Repeated Abuses

This afternoon the Supreme Court, with four votes in favor and one against, accepted the appeal for amparo presented by the defense Nicolás López and annulled the precautionary measure of preventive detention that weighed against him since May 20.
López was deprived of liberty for 10 days, first in the premises of the Santiago 1 Preventive Detention Center, then he was in the Casablanca prison.
According to information consulted by La Tercera, the Supreme Court accepted the appeal because the measure of preventive detention had already been rejected previously, and had no new grounds when it was decreed.
“The resolution challenged by the present appeal that decreed the preventive detention of the protected, had as bases the same antecedents that were taken into consideration to deny the precautionary measure in the hearing held on April 26, 2022,” reads the ruling.
The filmmaker’s lawyer, Paula Vial, argued that the fact that López has been convicted is not enough to decree preventive detention. The Supreme Court welcomed this point and added that only 20 days had passed since the last review of precautionary measures, so it was too little time for it to be changed.
The brief supports the decision based on the fact that “the Code of Criminal Procedure requires the concurrence of new antecedents to decree the preventive detention that was previously rejected”.
Meanwhile, Minister Manuel Antonio Valderrama, the only one who voted against releasing Nicolás López, based his vote on the fact that “the existence of a conviction issued against the protected, even when it is not enforceable, is a sufficient and serious precedent that justifies the dangerousness required by law for the origin of the precautionary measure of preventive detention.”
Read the full ruling here.
The case
The complaints against the filmmaker were made known in June 2018, through a report in the magazine Sábado, which made visible the years of sexual assaults experienced by the complainants, who were women who frequently worked for the accused in various audiovisual projects. 

According to the investigation, the victims reported that the filmmaker made inappropriate touches and comments to the actresses of his films. As well as, invitations to have sex were usual. 
In the process, 2700 What’s App messages were recovered from the convict’s cell phone, and through them, it was revealed that he himself recognized the facts presented in the Oral Trial: that he has touched “the breasts of his victims, that he has persecuted them and that one of them left his apartment traumatized.” 
In addition, a pattern of behavior was identified: he is the one who contacted all his victims through Twitter, Instagram and email, always in a work context, through which he offered them to be part of his productions. 

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Original source in Spanish