In recent hours, many journalists have responded to the threats made by the leader of the Desokupa company, Daniel Esteve, against journalists and coordinators of the Investigative Team program, which is preparing a report on him. Esteve has been recording and publishing videos for several days in which he boasts of having obtained personal data from both La Sexta journalists and their families: “I already have with my ID addresses, telephone numbers where they take their children to school, the address of a second home…”, Esteve says with a laugh in one of his videos. “You don’t know what’s happening to you, seriously,” he says before declaring that he contacted a group of squatters who have expressed their intention to illegally plunder the second homes of the program’s workers.
One of the first to react was journalist and contributor to Todo es Mentira Sarah Santaolalla, who claimed to have received “threats, insults, humiliations and a lot of virtual violence” every time she appeared on television to talk about Esteve. “I am not surprised that today the mafia boss warns that he is going to attack all of us,” he said in a post on the social network X one of the Desokupa leader’s videos. Retired journalist Rosa Villacastín also reacted to the threats by asking “and the police?”, to which she added: “This is pure mafia.”
Other journalists such as Ángel Munárriz (El País), Adolfo Arias (Cuatro), Enrique Clemente (La Voz de Galicia), Manuel Cuéllar (Asombrario), David Bollero (Público) and Marco Schwartz (elDiario.es) have also questioned the threats of Daniel Esteve or the recent agreement with the police union SUP for the training of police officers in self-defense techniques. Adolfo Arias, a journalist from Cuatro who also followed the investigative team’s program, also sent his support to his former colleagues.
The spokesperson of the Facua, Rubén Sánchez, also participated in an interview with the journalist Jesús Cintora in which the journalist and presenter of television programs such as Les Matins de Quatre or Les Choses Claires said he had also received insults and threats: “For some time, they have been threatening me in private, serious threats,” Cintora detailed.
Sánchez assured that some media “have created a monster”, but he presented Esteve’s videos in “fear”: “this video is the result of fear, of knowing that the investigation team is going to publish things that have never been revealed.” light, “said Rubén Sánchez, who pointed out that Esteve himself confirmed that he had a criminal record in one of his videos. Precisely, it was the program La Sexta that, in 2020, confirmed that the founder of Desokupa had a criminal record for nightclub fights (he was a security doorman) or extortion.
This Thursday, the Association of Investigative Journalists (API) described as “absolutely intolerable” the threats published by Daniel Esteve against the journalists of La Sexta and their families, expressed its support to them and asked the authorities “to act in the matter.”
This is not the first time that journalists or media collaborators have reported receiving direct threats from Daniel Esteve or his supporters while discussing the Desokupa issue. In August, the police officer and regular collaborator of the program En boca de todos Carlos Segarra has already revealed the hatred and threats he received on social networks. After confronting the leader of the eviction company in an interview on the program Cuatro, he received attacks “on a personal and professional level” as well as insults that he says he does not understand, “all based on anonymity and many saying that they are police officers.
