Ana Orantes

Ana Orantes Ruiz (February 6, 1937 – December 17, 1997) was a Spanish woman who was a victim of gender violence. After her testimony was shown on a television program, she was killed by her ex-husband, José Parejo Avivar, on December 17, 1997 at age 60. Her death provoked a national reckoning about gender violence, and as a consequence, legal protections against gender and domestic violence were added to the Criminal Code of Spain.

Parejo began abusing Orantes soon after they married, and the behavior intensified over the course of the next 40 years. Although she tried to escape and report her husband to the police, there were no laws to protect victims of domestic violence in Spain, nor in much of the rest of Europe. Instances of his physical and emotional abuse included punishing her if another man looked at her, isolating her from her family, forbidding her from attending the weddings of her siblings, inappropriately touching their young daughters and countless near-death beatings.

Parejo was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the murder of his ex-wife. However, seven years after the murder, on November 17, 2004, José Parejo died at the Hospital Ruiz de Alda, in Granada, after suffering a heart attack in prison.

Orantes was the fifty-ninth identified victim of domestic abuse-related murder in Spain in 1997.

Orantes's sons also claimed to have been abused by Parejo.