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For the third time, Judge Joana Ferrer acquitted the former Minister of Culture, Manuel Maria Carrilho, of the crime of domestic violence of which he was accused by his ex-wife, the presenter Bárbara Guimarães. But he maintained his sentence for a crime of defamation for which he must pay a fine of 900 euros. He must still pay three thousand euros in compensation for moral damage, according to the sentence revealed this Wednesday.
The judge considered that the versions of the two were “absolutely contradictory and incompatible” and that there was no evidence that Manuel Maria Carrilho attacked Bárbara Guimarães. “The evidence that exists goes against the objectivity of the charges.”
As in the first sentence of December 2017, Manuel María Carrilho was acquitted of twenty-one crimes of defamation. The conviction for defamation was due to the fact that he made allusions in the media to events “that should have remained in the private sphere,” the judge considered.
Judge Joana Ferrer had tried again for the second time, in 2019, an episode related to a death threat in the couple’s attic, in which, due to a lapse in the prosecution, she questioned the accused on the wrong date. To ask Manuel María Carrilho about the indicated day, he had to be authorized by the Court of Appeals, he justified. He acquitted him again, for the second time, on March 15, the MP appealed and Carrilho was acquitted for the third time.
Bárbara Guimarães wanted to remove Judge Joana Ferrer from the process, for suspecting the magistrate’s partiality, due to the expressions used in the first session of the trial, on February 12, 2016. Judge Joana Ferrer also requested her removal, but the Court of Appeal of Lisbon maintained it.
This was not the only case of Manuel Carrilho for domestic violence: at the end of 2017 he was convicted of assault, injuries and domestic violence, among other crimes, against his ex-wife, his ex-boyfriend, Ernesto “Kiki” Neves, and a friend, Ricardo Pereira .
In the sentence, Judge Joana Ferrer wrote that Carrilho “has a criminal record”, but related events and episodes that occurred “exactly in the context described above, following what happened on October 18, 2013, and referring to a group of circumscribed people” . He concludes: “The accused acted in this way in circumstances that do not need to be judged, since they speak for themselves. A dramatic turn in his life that suddenly, on October 18, 2013, deprived him of everything: access to his wife, access to his children, home, books, goods. The most painful was, visibly, the deprivation of contact with their children (…). And the Court saw before him, in the trial sessions in which he gave statements, how Manuel María Carrilho’s voice drowned and his eyes filled with tears at all times when he alluded to his children. “
This afternoon, the former minister sent a statement summarizing the sentence and acquitting him of the crime of “domestic violence” of which “he had been slanderously accused.”
