Beauty queen disfigured by boyfriend's acid attack raises her voice for victims

When brutality is embodied in a person, one of the most common weapons he uses is acid. Curiously, this is used to attack women. For this reason, Gessica Notaro's story is turning the eyes of the world towards gender violence.

Edson Tavares, the ex-boyfriend of Miss Italy finalist, was convicted last year for the violent attack that left the beautiful woman disfigured. But the court decided to combine the penalty with the crime of harassment, which also suffered Notaro for two months.

Tavares was sentenced to 18 years in prison after the brutal attack in January last year, but after an appeal, his sentence has been reduced to 15 years.

Currently, Notaro is a star of a show on television thanks to her appearance in a dance contest. The girl of 29 years is the flag of many ladies who suffer physical and psychological blows and are afraid, perhaps, to denounce.

The aspiring singer was also sprayed with hydrochloric acid on January 10, 2017, and all after breaking his relationship with Tavares and reporting him to the police a few months before. Follow us on Twitter for more @amomama.

Her left eye suffered irreparable damage, while her face had to be operated several times. The trauma was incredible. She had to absent herself for months from her job as a sea lion trainer.

"I want you to see what he did to me. This is not Love. While the acid ate my face, I was on my knees begging God to take away my beauty, but at least leave me with my eyes," said the model, while thousands of followers in Italy looked at her bandaged face and really affected for the attack.

The media immediately gave coverage to the complaint by Gessica Notaro, igniting the alarms due to the increase in the abuse of women in the country of pizzas.

In Cape Verde, Tavares was sentenced to 10 years for the crime of disfiguring this girl and eight for harassing her, but his defense lawyers tried to appeal the conviction to join, as they were decided in separate trials. In all, the man should spend 18 years in prison.

However, the paperwork favored Tavares, subtracting time from his sentence, and now he will be 15 years, five months and 20 days behind bars. "Gessica is satisfied from a human point of view and I from a judicial point of view," said Alberto Alessi, the legal party of the attacker.

The lady of admirable strength placed her case on the mat to make women aware and now her eye covered with a patch is a symbol of this struggle, worldwide. "I'm a crazy hypochondriac, but when something like that happens to you, you have to choose to live or die and I chose to live," she said.

From the Maurizio Bufalini hospital in Cesana, in northern Italy, Gessica began to offer statements to create the impact she wanted after deciding to fight for her existence.

"I saw that he had a plastic bottle in his hand, he was dressed in black. Without saying a word he threw the liquid at me and fled. I followed him, screaming in pain. I was confident that my current boyfriend was still there, but he was already gone. I ran home and called my mother from the intercom and said: Eddy has thrown me acid," she narrated with deep pain.

Her mother remembers the man who changed her daughter's life and indignant says he was welcomed into the family as "another child".

Gabriela Botturi, the progenitor of the Miss, explained that the same day of the attack, Eddy called her to know about Gessica and that her tone of voice was calm and like someone who wanted to apologize.

The young people met at the same marine zoo, since they shared positions there. They came to live together for a while and in the month of May, Gessica decided to end the relationship. But he did not accept it and months later he was denounced for violence and harassment.

"She is an incredible girl. It is she who raises our morale, never losing good humor. She is very happy because she has seen again with one eye," said Botturi.

LEGAL VICTORY

A liter of sulfuric acid was responsible for disfiguring the face and part of the body of Natalia Ponce de León, 35, a beautiful Colombian woman who suffered harassment by a psychopath. The event occurred in Bogotá in March 2014.

After fifteen operations with artificial skin brought from the Netherlands, the woman standard of rights for women discovered her face after two years of treatment, nothing less than to inform the country that the nation will have a special law to condemn up to 50 years in prison to attackers who use this type of weapons.

In that country, the criminals who hurt their victims in this way served up to 6 years in prison and some did so in their homes.

This story also reminds us of Katie Piper, whose acid attacker is going to be released soon despite his life sentence. Back in 2008, the criminal followed Piper's former boyfriend's, Daniel Lynch, orders and threw the corrosive substance at her face, leaving her disfigured.

At the time of the trial, Sylvestre and Lynch were described as being 'the face of pure evil,' but the former is being considered a changed man given his exemplary behavior behind bars for the past nine years.