The woman who accused former mayor of the Municipality A Jorge Meroni for sexual harassment will file a criminal complaint against him this Monday, informed his lawyer, Ignacio Duran.
The decision to report him to the prosecution was taken after “many months of analysis” of information, chats and callsindicated Durán, who also maintained that it was “meditated”.
Before reporting it, the woman consulted Alejandro “Pacha” Sánchez, senator of the Popular Participation Movement (MPP), who assured him that this situation “I couldn’t ignore it“. “It’s a decision that cost him a lot of time. She is very scared and anxious. These are facts that have nothing to do with the labor sphere,” Durán said in dialogue with Channel 12.
The defense attorney indicated that the messages he received “they were any time” in which he told them “not to hang out with certain people and to change your profile picture”.
“We are going to make all this available to the Prosecutor’s Office. Phones are people’s black boxes. We are going to provide my client’s phone number and some witnesses who are going to corroborate this,” Durán said.
The lawyer clarified that the woman is married “many years ago” and was not in a romantic relationship with Meroni. “Perhaps at some moments Meroni understood that there could be something. In the case of my client, she always kept her distance“, he claimed.
This Thursday afternoon, Meroni presented his resignation to the position before the Council of the Municipality A. At the same time, it was determined that Juan Carlos Planchot will be his successor since he appears as the first substitute in the list that led Meroni to the head of the municipality.
The defendant was deputy for the MPP in the previous legislaturemayor for two terms (2005-2015) –he came to chair the Montevideo Departmental Board in 2006– and headed the Broad Front Departmental Board between 2002 and 2005. The hierarch has been part of the MPP since its foundation in 1989 and is married to deputy Cecilia Cairo.
Meroni had been elected mayor of Municipality A in September 2020 with 30,531 votes – more than double those gathered by the opposition – in a bastion of the left within Montevideo.
