A woman who cut off her boyfriend’s penis with a pair of garden shears has been handed a 13-year prison sentence for attempted murder.
Brenda Barattini, 27, was arrested in November 2017 in the city of Cordoba in north-central Argentina for using the garden tools to cut off the penis of her then-lover, Sergio Anibal Fernandez 40 years old at the time.
The news site TN reports that the Superior Court of Justice of Cordoba rejected Barattini’s appeal and confirmed her 13-year prison sentence yesterday, 27th October.
Sergio was reportedly married at the time of the incident but was having an affair with Barattini.
He reportedly told a court in 2019: “We started to have sex and she told me she was going to give me a little surprise. She put a mask on me, a velvet one.
“After that, she told me to guess what she was touching me with. She also wanted to tie me up, but I didn’t want her to. She started to perform oral sex on me. Suddenly I felt something. She wanted to kill me in that second.
He added:“I felt like I was going to die, I didn’t know she had cut me. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to get up, I pulled up my trousers and instinctively grabbed by mobile phone to call an ambulance. I wanted to leave and she started to insult me. She grabbed my t-shirt, my hair, she wouldn’t let me leave.”
At the start of the investigation, it was revealed that she tried to claim he had raped her, but this was later proved to be untrue.
Barattini ex-boyfriend Gonzalo Rodriguez, who she was reportedly still with at the time, testified in court saying that he had received a call on the night of the incident from a neighbour saying “your girlfriend has been raped”.
He says he then rushed to her house before the police or ambulance arrived and found a “river of blood”. He reportedly told the court: “She was semi-nude. I don’t know if she had her bra on but she was in her knickers. I asked her what had happened and she said he had come to look for a battery and that he had raped her.”
“I shouted at Sergio F. ‘what did you do!”. He didn’t answer. I went back to Brenda and she was waiting for me with a scalpel or a sharp object. She said to me: ‘Kill him, kill that son of a b*tch!”
The new site M1 reports that Barattini accused Sergio of rape earlier in the case but later withdrew the accusations.
She told the court that Sergio treated her like an ‘object’ during her time together but she said that she only wanted to hurt Sergio not kill him. Her lawyers wanted the attempted murder charges reduced for this reason.
The judge disagreed with Barattini’s defence and on top of the 13-year sentence ordered the defendant to pay ARS 493,665 (GBP 3,608) for the loss of earnings suffered by the victim.
