Police are probing the suicide of a 32-year-old mother of two in Spain after hundreds of colleagues at a local factory saw an intimate video involving her.
The woman committed suicide at her home on Saturday, a police spokesman said Wednesday, adding officers in Alcala de Henares near Madrid were probing “whether a privacy offence was committed.”
According to Spanish media, an intimate video in which the 32-year-old appeared, filmed five years prior, had somehow been shared on WhatsApp and seen by many of the 2,500 employees at a factory near Madrid where she worked.
The factory belongs to Italian industrial vehicle maker Iveco.
Investigators will try and determine whether those who shared the video can be held responsible for her death, the police spokesman said.
It is unclear who shared the footage, but so-called “revenge porn,” when ex-partners share intimate photos or videos without permission, has become a global problem.
Ivan Cancho, one of her colleagues, told television reporters in Spain that people started looking at her, there were “people who went to see her at her work station to see who the colleague was (in the video), she suffered big
pressure.”
According to Spanish media, the woman was married and had two young children.
Iveco was not available for comment on Wednesday.
In a statement, the factory’s works council expressed “pain and dismay” on behalf of the employees and denounced “the irresponsible use of social networks which has tragic consequences.”
The CCOO union, which the woman belonged to, said the incident could constitute sexual harassment and announced it would make a complaint to the health and safety executive to denounce “the company’s inaction.”
“The company, which knew from May 23 that the woman was being harassed by a colleague, did nothing to avoid it,” it said in a statement.
According to Spain’s criminal code, sharing audiovisual recordings involving a person without his or her consent can carry three months to a year in jail “when this disclosure seriously undermines that person’s personal privacy.”
