A Survivor’s Courage and the Palma Case: Truths in the Courtroom

The man is nervous. She guards her privacy with a fierce tenacity built over decades, and the thought that a slip could unravel it all weighs heavily. He agrees to meet face-to-face with a journalist and a media outlet for the first time, and to allow a press photographer to document the moment. He does not fear the photo will steal his soul, but the image captures a delicate shift in her defences, the walls she has raised to protect herself and her four children beginning to crumble. The photographer’s craft isolates this nuance without revealing who they are, preserving identity while exposing truth.

Erinia is a fictitious name; the woman he uses for prostitution is less elaborate, one of eight known survivors who endured a sexual relationship with the serial killer Jorge Ignacio Palma Jacome. He awaits sentence as a jury weighs his guilt. Five long weeks pass with the belief that Palma is guilty of three completed murders — Arliene Ramos, Lady Marcela Vargas, and Martha Bald — while six more cases are still under trial. One victim fell from a horse during the proceedings because Palma could not bear to relive the nightmare; another charge of attempting to kill was not included. Erinia is among those six survivors.

Accepting guilt, he admitted he was satisfied with his decision. Anyone watching this recap has been urged to stay calm; condemning him feels unavoidable to many. Yet there is a thin thread of possibility hovering in the air. The sense that someone cannot simply walk free. The danger—”that is real.”

The day Palma was due to testify, fear, anguish, and anger overtook him. It marked the first and only time he spoke with another woman who was scheduled to testify that same day. In a room ten meters from the courtroom, they traded glimpses of their nerves and fear about stepping inside. Was he dangerous? “Partly yes. I have met him three times. I could see the pure, high-grade cocaine he carried, the way she dressed, the threats she uttered… When I last saw her a few days before Marta, she left saying she would shoot me and a friend who came to defend me. That man is a drug dealer. And he is Colombian. If I’m free, I know you’ll come for me. And for other girls.”

fear of disbelief

Yet she also feared the jury would doubt her, that she would be treated as someone linked to prostitution rather than as a victim. Palma was found guilty by nine members of the people’s court who weighed the facts, not the person, and they convicted him of the 30 serious charges laid against him. He harmed lives and bodies, and forced non-consensual abuses by smuggling cocaine into victims and trafficking while coercing others into substance use.

She had prostituted herself for two decades, driven by necessity. At seventeen she was kicked out of home and became pregnant in a brief relationship that offered little room for dreaming of a stable family. When prostitution became the means to feed her child, personal freedom slipped away as another path vanished.

With years in that world behind him, he could guide his children toward education he never imagined as a child. Listening became learning. Had a prostitute ever offered or tried to insert cocaine into her genitals? “Never. After so many years and so many clients. Never. The party with white powder, that is what they wanted, but he did not. He never used cocaine during a sexual service. He would only be asked to pull it inside or flip it onto himself.” He insists he would never permit it, never. He would not tolerate it, and he would never settle for less.

In her case, Palma had three meetings with Erinia. The first two happened in a brothel in Campanar. The initial encounter unfolded with unsettling normalcy; there was no cocaine that day. During the second meeting, the wolf’s teeth emerged. She resisted persistent pressure to use cocaine and Palma grew angry when she refused, leaving in a flash. Erinia recalls the fear, quietly admitting she had never felt this threatened in years in the trade. She stepped back and got out of danger.

“Is that stupid or what?”

Months passed before the third and final meeting. By then Erinia had become independent, renting a room in a Grao hotel in Valencia. She found it through an advertisement. When she arrived and realized who was waiting, she was repelled. Palma tried to take her to Manuel, and plans quickly spiraled toward danger in late October 2019. A little more than a week later, Marta was killed. Palma had already claimed Arliene and Lady Marcela, though only he knew the full scope.

They entered the room, and as soon as a relationship began, she found him putting cocaine into her vagina. “I lifted a heavy stone as big as a grape seed and said, ‘Don’t do this to me.’ He acted as if nothing mattered. He repeated it, and Erinia grew truly frightened. She fled, half-dressed, screaming for help through a window. He stood there, dizzy and still, watching as she ran. She thought, ‘How stupid is this?’

Palma chased them into the street. His friend confronted him; threats followed. The woman changed her phone and location, terrified beyond measure. Weeks later, the full extent of that episode surfaced.

“I turned white when I saw your face”

The survivor shifted away from the prostitution world to work as a manager on a senior dating floor. A partner showed her news about Marta on a computer in December. She looked at Marta’s face, trying to find a match, only to realize the truth. Marta was not the person she previously believed. Shock gave way to resolve. She reported Palma to the police and filed a formal complaint the next day. She believed that the truth of what Palma had done to Marta needed to be known, that Marta’s family deserved it, and that justice should not be denied.

And Palma found his fate through police and court proceedings. A hard-won lesson in courage and solidarity for those who have the most to lose. Without them, the outcome might never have taken shape.