How I Hunted My Sex-Assault Suspect Online and on the Streets of Mexico Andrea Noel - The Daily Beast
go to original March 13, 2017

Update: The Web Nailed the Wrong Man for My Sex Assault in Mexico (The Daily Beast)

“If anyone recognizes this idiot please identify him,” I had tweeted, along with the surveillance footage of myself being sexually assaulted in public.

To my surprise, within just a few hours, among the slew of messages of both hate and support that flooded in, came dozens of comments from social media users who thought they indeed knew who this “idiot” was.

Within days, he would - officially - become The Suspect.

Concerned from the beginning about labelling a stranger a sex offender, I wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the insinuation until more than a month later. I would avoid the question when asked, and fight off the temptation to acknowledge the hundreds of messages that would tie him inexorably to my case.

But I was shocked when I found out that there was a group of well-known and resoundingly disliked pranksters in my neighborhood whose modus operandi matched exactly the incident involving me.

They called themselves the Master Trolls, and their eponymous television show would premiere, just two days after my assault, on Telehit - an MTV-like station under the umbrella of Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish-speaking media company.

The main cast were a pair of two loud pranksters. One, the long-haired, cowboy-hat-wearing “Grupero King,” who took his stage name from the popular grupera genre of northern rancher music. The other, a former bullfighter named Andoni Echave.

“Andoni and the Rey Grupero of the Condesa roam Mexico City pulling viral pranks more extreme than anything ever seen on the Internet or television,” read the show’s official description.

It was the culmination of years of pranks pulled on YouTube, and dozens of guest segments on Televisa subsidiaries, that would finally land them their very own TV show, which they had been busy filming in the weeks and days surrounding The Incident.

This is the second in a three-part series looking at a single sexual assault that became a viral sensation in Mexico - and its many surprising results. In the first installment, Andrea Noel wrote about what happened when she reported on Twitter and to the police that a man rushed up behind her in broad daylight in a quiet Mexico City neighborhood and pulled down her panties.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast

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Related: Mexico Lawmakers Reject Gender Alert Despite Rise of Femicides (teleSUR)

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