Two women have accused the Spanish singer Julio Iglesias of sexually assaulting them while they were working for him and allege that he “normalised abuse” in a coercive, threatening and violent environment.
The allegations, made in reports by Spanish news site elDiario.es and US outlet Univision, are being investigated by Spain’s judiciary.
The singer employed the two women at his properties in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, and Lyford Cay, in the Bahamas. According to their testimonies, the sexual assaults took place in 2021.
Iglesias, who is 82, has been a household name in Spain since the 1960s and has sold millions of records worldwide.
According to elDiario.es and Univision, Iglesias and his lawyer did not respond to repeated requests for a response to the allegations ahead of their publication.
However, a woman identified as a manager of one of the singer’s Caribbean properties said the claims were “nonsense”.
The BBC has attempted to contact Iglesias’s representatives for comment, but has not yet received a response.
One of the women interviewed, a domestic worker whose name was changed to Rebeca in the reports, said he would regularly call her to his room at the end of the day and would touch her inappropriately with his fingers without consent.
“He used me almost every night,” she said. “I felt like an object, like a slave.”
Rebeca, who is Dominican and was 22 when the alleged events described took place, also alleged that Iglesias had forced her to take part in threesomes with another female member of staff. She also described the singer slapping her in the face and grabbing her genitals.
The other woman, a Venezuelan physical therapist named as Laura in the article, said Iglesias had touched her breasts and kissed her on the mouth against her will. She added that he constantly threatened to fire her, controlled how much food she ate and asked her about when her period was due.
“He always said I was fat and had to lose weight,” Laura said, describing a working environment of “normalised abuse”.
Although she said she had frequently rejected his sexual advances, “there were girls who couldn’t say no. And he did what he wanted with them”.
elDiario.es and Univision, which investigated the case together over a period of three years, state that the allegations are backed up by documentary evidence, including photographs, phone records, text messages and medical reports.
Their reports cite other former employees of Iglesias who describe a threatening, highly stressful atmosphere for those working for him.
It has emerged that Rebeca and Laura filed a legal complaint on 5 January against Iglesias for sexual assault and human trafficking before the national court, which investigates crimes allegedly committed beyond Spain’s borders.
An old friend of Iglesias, Jaime Peñafiel, labelled the accusations “absolute lies”.
Another ally, the journalist Miguel Ángel Pastor, said he had never heard “any suggestion that he might have committed this kind of act”.
However, the equality minister in Spain’s Socialist-led government, Ana Redondo, said she hoped the case would be investigated “all the way”.
“When there is no consent there is assault,” she posted on social media.
Ione Belarra, leader of the far-left Podemos party, called for an end to “the silence” in cases of sexual assault by “famous assailants who are protected by their money”.
Last month, a woman filed a legal complaint alleging that Adolfo Suárez, a former prime minister who was revered for his role during Spain’s transition to democracy, had sexually abused her from when she was 17 years old.
Suárez, a conservative, died in 2014 and police are investigating. Jesús Villegas, a magistrate, said that the case against Suárez was unlikely to flourish and that it was politically motivated.
The president of the Madrid region, the conservative Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has come out in support of the Spanish singer.
“The Madrid region will never contribute to the vilifying of artists and even less so to that of the most universal of all singers: Julio Iglesias,” she posted on social media.
Iglesias’s biographer Ignacio Peyró and the author’s publishing house, Libros del Asteroide, have also responded, saying they will update last year’s biography to include the allegations. They have also expressed their “support and solidarity for the victims”.
