Leticia Sabater: Kids Queued to Grope Me on Spanish TV

Leticia Sabater: "Kids queued up to touch my butt"

When the show ended, the studio became a problem. Children rushed down from the stands, formed a line on stage, and waited their turn to do what they had come for: "try to touch my butt and breasts." This is how Leticia Sabater, a presenter of children's programs on Spanish television, describes how her audience approached her every afternoon in an interview. In the most crowded format, with 500 children in the stands, she claims things ended with her "half-naked on the floor." It is not a complaint. It is a memory. And that is the problem.

What exactly did Leticia Sabater say?

Asked if she had suffered harassment by minors, she answers yes, "without doubt," stating they would throw themselves at her until leaving her "half-naked on the floor." Asked if it bothered her, she cuts in sharply: "No, absolutely not." The presenter never positions herself as a victim throughout the narrative, which disorients those expecting a retraction or regret.

Regarding sensual, she admits the context but flips the script. She acknowledges dressing "quite sens for them," with miniskirts and bare midriffs, concluding with a phrase that summarizes her thesis: "I have always played with my sensual. Flesh sells." The story is, fundamentally, a defense of the profession as it was understood then: young presenter, teenage audience, and a stage without written rules.

Why didn't anyone call this a scandal in the 90s?

Because the rules of the era were different. The testimony fits into a television landscape where the presenter's body was part of the set design and viewer desire was an accepted ingredient of the spectacle. The most repeated comparison is with Xuxa: some call Sabater "the Spanish Xuxa."

The list of names remembered by the audience points in the same direction: Ana Obregón, Miriam Díaz Aroca, or Beatriz Rico are cited as the faces that captured the gaze of a generation that grew up without internet. When available material was scarce, the presenter of the day became a reference. Literally.

That is the key to the matter. What today would be an open investigation was then a backstage anecdote no one considered reportable. The debate is not so much whether it peine, but whether anyone had the tools to name it.

The uncomfortable narrative: neither victim nor repentant

The echo of the testimony splits into two distinct currents. Part of the public appreciates that she doesn't go "crying around corners" or jump onto a cause that isn't hers, reading sincerity as a rare trait in the industry. Others argue that recounting groping by minors as a charming tradition of the job normalizes it, and that the problem is not that it occurred, but that it continues to be explained without a shred of discomfort.

Between both positions floats a consensus: no one disputes that the episode peine. What is being decided is the framework used to tell it, three decades later, amid the hangover of retroactive accountability narratives.

From decorative woman to commercial phenomenon

The data that orders everything else is economic. The same person who at 22 years old served as a showcase on stages and podiums has rebuilt her career as a deliberately grotesque character. She plays the buffoon, tours towns with her own show, and has turned ridicule into a profitable business model. Even those who don't forgive the narrative acknowledge this.

The symmetry is uncomfortable: if in youth she sold flesh, in maturity she sells parody. In both cases, the product is her, and in both cases, there is an audience willing to buy. The difference is that now she controls the narrative and, above all, the percentage.

One figure remains to close. Five hundred children in the stands, all in line. And the phrase that explains it better than any analysis: "flesh sells."