2023-07-22 22:22:15
Luis ‘Alvise’ Pérez introduces himself as a political analyst. A position that he holds in various media outlets, although the bulk of his public activity in recent years has to do with his Telegram channel and his Twitter account: that is where he disseminates information about politicians, journalists and businessmen who, according to him, contributes to the fight against stablishment before his more than 200,000 followers. Photos having dinner, insinuations without evidence about fiscal irregularities or, directly, hoaxes and falsehoods, which have just cost this young man from Seville his fourth appealable conviction by civil law. What the ultra agitator sells to his more than 209,000 followers as a fight against “the mafia” for the judges is to harass public figures, violating their fundamental rights.
Agitator Alvise Pérez sentenced to pay Ábalos 60,000 euros for publishing photos taken without consent in his home
Further
Pérez jumped into public life when at the end of 2018 Ciudadanos appointed him advisor to Toni Cantó in the Corts Valencianes. By then this young man already had a large legion of followers on Twitter and had falsely blamed a group of street vendors for running over a child on a pedestrian street in Valencia. A year later, Alvise was removed from his position as Cantó’s chief of staff and launched his career as an agitator on social networks, claiming to be at the service of no one and targeting, above all, immigration, feminism and progressive politicians and journalists, although without renouncing to target other political sensibilities.
During the pandemic, he focused his criticism on the action of the Government and the sanitary restrictions. For example, spreading a bus shelter with the face of Pedro Sánchez and the phrase “trust your government, a good citizen obeys”, or calling an “online demonstration” against the executive with hundreds of thousands of users. He has also strongly opposed the use of masks. And in recent years, after being banned from Twitter, he has focused his spread on Telegram, where he communicates directly with more than 209,000 people who follow, comment and share his posts. In some he spreads hoaxes, in others he airs information that supposedly shakes the pillars of the rule of law and, in many others, he watches over the “mafia.”
This marking usually translates into disseminating photos of politicians or journalists in their private lives, having dinner in a restaurant or at a music festival, but accompanied by a message that suggests that they are doing something unspeakable. One of his clearest obsessions is Óscar Puente, former mayor of Valladolid and head of the PSOE list for the province for Sunday’s elections. Recently, Pérez released an image of the politician at a festival “hunted” with a mysterious woman, whom he describes as a “friend”. A “friend” who, in reality, is his underage daughter.
Also photos at the Chamartín station with his pet or messages stating that he is on a plane on his way to Switzerland. Alleged cases of corruption that have never resulted in judicial proceedings. The strategy is repeated with other public figures, especially from the left, in what the analyst sells as a fight against the “mafia”.
The judges, however, consider that this fight against “the mafia” is actually a constant dissemination of hoaxes and intimate photos of public figures that have nothing to do with their work and do not reveal any suspicious conduct. So far he has received four convictions through civil proceedings, still pending appeals before the Supreme Court and the Madrid Court, while he has never been tried or convicted through criminal proceedings.
They are sentences that give a different perspective of his cyber-harassment of left-wing personalities. In general terms, the judges reproach him for not checking what he publishes, for disseminating images of people’s intimate spheres and, furthermore, when he is summoned to court, he either does not appear or does not even ask that what he says be verified as true.
accusations without evidence
One of the most notorious cases was that of Manuela Carmena. On March 31, 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic, the health authorities recorded 9,000 new infections and 849 new deaths due to the spread of the virus. In a context of extreme lack of medical and hospital resources, Pérez posted a photo of a van on Twitter and stated that the former mayor of Madrid had just received a respirator from a private company at her home, like the ones that are so badly needed in hospitals across the country.
That statement cost him a still not firm sentence of 5,000 euros. He launched an accusation that did not contrast in the slightest, neither on Twitter nor in court, the magistrate said that he signed his sentence. And even though he is not a journalist, he added this sentence, he has the obligation to check if what he says is true since at that time he had 145,000 followers on this social network. His dissemination capacity, for a long time, is above that of many media.
He was sentenced in similar terms by the Provincial Court of Madrid after defaming the journalist Ana Pastor. In this case, both he and a youtuber disseminated information about the Newtral company, which Pastor runs, to question his accounts and whether he paid the taxes he owed. The response of the judges was the same as in the case of Carmena: neither he nor he had evidence when he published the tweets nor did he ask for it when the case came into the hands of Justice to prove his innocence.
This sentence outlined the ‘modus operandi’ of Luis Pérez when it comes to targeting alleged illegalities. His tweets about Newtral and Ana Pastor were “stuffed with insinuations”, presenting the evolution of the company as “suspicious” but “without verifying” the information and with “insufficient data”. The result, compensation of 1,000 euros for the journalist. A sentence similar to that received by another agitator from the far-right orbit: Cristina Seguí, former leader of Vox in Valencia, was sentenced for insulting Ábalos on Twitter.
Photos that show nothing
Another of its lines of action is to obtain photographs of politicians, journalists or businessmen in their private sphere, or data on what they are doing at a given moment, and spread them with a halo of mystery to make it pass off as something suspicious. It happens with Óscar Puente – the ultra digital medium EDAtv has released a photo with his underage daughter, insinuating that she is a lover – but also with other personalities.
He did it, for example, with the former minister José Luis Ábalos, another of the focuses of his messages on Twitter and Telegram. In January 2021, he broadcast an image of the socialist politician on the terrace of his house in Valencia accompanied by a message that highlighted that he had been looking at some birds for several hours. Insinuating, ultimately, some mental health problem.
That message deserved the highest sentence to date: compensation of 60,000 euros. The Madrid Court criticized that these photos had nothing to do with Ábalos’s work as a minister, that they belonged to his “most private sphere” and that, finally, they had been obtained and disseminated without his consent. The message, finally, contained a “highly vexatious” insinuation.
His fourth sentence from another section of the same Provincial Court has arrived in this way, accompanied by compensation of 10,000 euros. Again for a tweet about Ana Pastor, this time with a photo of her having dinner with her husband, also a journalist Antonio García Ferreras, in the Balearic Islands with Óscar Camps, from the NGO Proactiva Open Arms.
Again, according to the judges, the photo did not contribute anything about Ana Pastor’s journalistic profession, nor did it illuminate any supposed “mafia”, as Pérez stated in his messages that accompanied the image. “How tense is the mafia when they are the ones being observed, persecuted and naked before public opinion, right?” he wondered.
There was actually little mystery behind that photo. A few weeks before its publication, in the summer of 2020, Camps and Pastor had appeared together in Palma to present a documentary about the NGO that had been produced by Newtral, the journalist’s company, shot in Senegal. There are photos of the moment published by the state agency EFE, like the one that accompanies this information.
It remains to be seen if the civil jurisdiction declares these sentences firm, annuls them or qualifies them in the coming months. According to Luis ‘Alvise’ Pérez himself, the Supreme Court has already admitted at least one of his appeals against one of them. Through criminal proceedings, several judicial actions against him have failed while a court in Barcelona continues to investigate him for allegedly disseminating a false PCR test from the then Minister of Health, Salvador Illa. This case, according to legal sources, is awaiting information from the company Twitter.
Deep throat in court
According to the information that he himself disseminates on his Telegram channel, Pérez has been appealing his sentences, in some cases he claims to have learned from the press that the trial was held without his presence and, on other occasions, he predicts a result that later does not correspond to reality.
In the case that confronted Manuela Carmena, for example, the agitator stated that he had found out thanks to “the indiscretion of a judicial operator” that he had won the case because no one had notified him that the lawsuit had been dismissed. This statement reached the judge who handed down the sentence, who dedicated a few lines to it in the resolution before sentencing: “It is notorious that the previous information issued through a widely disseminated social network is not true either,” said the magistrate.
In other cases, the judges limit themselves to affirming that if they have not found out about the holding of a trial, it is because they are in “default”, a judicial term used when someone does not appear in court or does not appear in person at the proceedings. His latest sentence for publishing photos of Ana Pastor, for example, confirms that she is in “voluntary rebellion.”
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