The filmmaker from Gran Canaria, Armando Ravelo, announced this Monday that he is retiring from cinema and public life after a Canarian artist, Koset Quintana, accused him on social networks of inciting her to sex and offering her drugs and porn when she was 14 years old. Other testimonies from more Canarian artists have been added to this first complaint.
The filmmaker, who has acknowledged these facts to EFE but denies that they can be considered sexual violence, has indicated in statements to Radio Nacional that he himself "has assumed that this complaint will have implications for his career" and that, therefore, he has decided to take them himself and retire from cinema and public life, "from the life as he knew it until recently."
According to what Koset Quintana has published on her Instagram account, she was encouraged to denounce Ravelo, whom she met in 2014 at a film workshop when she was 14 years old and he was 31, after reading "the testimonies hidden for so long against Carlos Vermut", a Madrid director and screenwriter who won the Golden Shell of San Sebastián in 2014 thanks to his film 'Magical Girl', in which three women have accused him of subjecting them to sexual violence between May 2014 and February 2022.
Quintana has also stated that she knows "much more serious testimonies" about Ravelo than the one she has posted on social networks, where she shows screenshots of alleged telephone conversations held with the director from Gran Canaria.
Regarding this complaint, Ravelo has said in statements to EFE that in 2014 he "was very high and believed he was immune", which, together with a manifest addiction to sex, which he claims to have overcome after going to therapy, led him to "do a lot of damage to many women" with whom he had "lasting relationships."
In addition to emphasizing that when he met her in person, he thought Koset Quintana was "an adult", so he thought she was joking with him when she told him she was a minor, Ravelo denies having exercised sexual violence against her, nor any physical contact of that nature, but a "reprehensible" behavior that he understands should be denounced.
Moreover, he encourages anyone who has suffered a situation like this to do the same, although he asks "not to put everyone in the same bag, nor all situations."
