In one of the first high-profile sexual assault cases in Latin America following the #MeToo reckoning, Chilean director Nicolas Lopez, who was renowned for his raunchy box office comedy hits Sin Filtro, No Estoy Loca, and the Que Pena trilogy as well as collaborating with Eli Roth in writing and directing the 2012 movie Aftershock and Roth’s 2015 film Knock Knock starring Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas, has been sentenced to five years and one day in prison for two cases of sexual abuse.
The judicial investigation of Lopez began after local newspaper El Mercurio published a story in mid-2018 in which eight women, including three actresses, came forward and accused him of harassment, rape, and sexual abuse. The court dismissed the charges of rape but found Lopez guilty of the latter charge. The sentence coincided with what was requested by prosecutors after a court found him guilty at the end of April. In that verdict, the court absolved Lopez of rape charges because judges determined there was not enough proof. Lopez has also been banned from coming near his accusers and is permanently disqualified from running for public office. He’s expected to file an appeal on May 20.
He was convicted of abuse in incidents that took place between 2004 and 2016, with reports of Lopez taking advantage of work meetings and his superior status to attack the ladies with force. During the trial, prosecutors said Lopez took several months to hand over his mobile phone to investigators and did so only after deleting 2,700 messages from the messaging platform WhatsApp. Law enforcement was able to recover the messages in which the filmmaker referred to the instances in which he was accused.
Lopez has denied wrongdoing, but the investigators recovered text messages that later supported their case. After his conviction in April, his lawyers asked for a far lesser punishment and requested a reduced sentence saying he should receive two sentences of 61 days each that would not require time behind bars.