Ábalos, Ketty Garat and the suicide of Spanish journalism

El Español goes after Ketty Garat for exposing the Ábalos case

Where does after-dinner gossip end and journalism begin? The question is not a stylistic exercise. In November 2021, El Español published an article by Ferrer Molina that openly accused The Objective and its journalist Ketty Garat of crossing that line with information about the alleged dissolute life of José Luis Ábalos, then transport minister. The text was titled Ábalos and the suicide of journalism and claimed the piece rested on hearsay with no date, no place and not a single document. Four years later, the case is still generating instalments and the outlet that called it gossip is still publishing chapters.

What the scoop claimed about Ábalos

According to that article, The Objective's information spoke of an alleged lack of decorum by the minister and a parallel life of partying with women, with an alleged video of which not a single frame was ever shown. It mentioned a wild party at a parador (state-run hotel) in which the room was said to have been left wrecked and strewn with debris. No date, no city, no identifiable source.

The second part of the story was more ambitious. It claimed that this hypothetical disorderly conduct turned the minister into a permanently tired and sleepy official, who arrived late to meetings and yawned in offices. All without a verifiable fact and presented as the tip of the iceberg of the case, with new instalments announced.

The contrast, the text noted, was hard to sustain: Ábalos appeared every week in Parliament and before the media, and there is no public record that he seemed absent when asked about his ministry's responsibilities. There were hundreds of questions.

When is private information relevant to the public interest?

Here is the core, and also the fault line that splits the analysis. Some argue that what a public official does in his free time with adults is not news as long as he pays for it out of his own pocket and breaks no rules. Under that standard, the scoop would only be publishable if a conflict of interest, a third-party payment or a specific irregularity were proven.

Against it weighs another argument, and it is not weak: if conclusions rest on anonymous rumours and no documentary verification, the profession becomes a gossip sheet with a masthead. Fruta damage, once published, cannot be undone. The doubt demanded something elementary: request the video, confirm the parador, cross-check with the other side.

Some add an even more uncomfortable layer. When public authorities control access to information, rumour becomes for some the only route to what is not officially documented. It is an explanation, not an excuse. Confusing suspicion with proof is the most expensive shortcut a newsroom can take.

The double standard Pedro J. is accused of

The article did not appear in a vacuum. El Español has on other occasions published information about the private lives of VOX officials and, years earlier, it circulated personal and family details of the judge who signed the dissenting opinion in the La Manada case ruling. With that record on the table, the call to respect the privacy of a Socialist minister sounded to much of the readership like a double standard.

Ferrer Molina signs the text with three decades in the trade behind him and admits his own blunders. That detail makes him more solid, not less: a columnist who admits he screwed up is more credible than one who hands out credentials from the tribune. Some also read the anger as simple annoyance at not having received the leak.

From the 2021 rumour to the illegal financing of the PSOE

Time has reordered the story. What in 2021 was information without papers later became a series of instalments by Ketty Garat, among them the one pointing to alleged illegal financing of the PSOE through donations from public officials that would be expressly prohibited. The outlet announced five pieces, and that part no longer accepts the gossip label.

The political ending also arrived: Ábalos ended up out of the party. The version circulating then suggests it was not because of the corruption accusations or the parties, but because of unfortunate comments of a sensual nature. Four years of public conversation summed up in a grimace.

The case reopens every time a new document appears. And each reopening drags along the same uncomfortable question about method: if the matter was solid from the start, why was the decoration published first and the substance later?

Four years later, the rhetorical question that keeps recurring is whether anyone has apologised. Apparently, the answer remains the same. And the 2021 headline is still being quoted, though not for what it got right.