Ballet Rose

A series that resurrects one of the biggest skeletons in the closet of the Portuguese Second Republic.

Unlike the monarchist times, where the sexual antics of kings and queens fluctuated between the picturesque and the grotesque, the successive republican regimes in Portugal were very weak of bedroom peccadilloes. We don't have things like that French president who died in a sexual act with a mistress in the Presidential Palace, nor do we have anything like the scandal that shaken Bill Clinton's term in the White House. We are a very moralistic, Catholic country, which gives importance to appearances and which seeks to keep their peccadilloes in the intimacy of closed walls. Therefore, the impact of the Ballet Rose Case is understandable, and also the way in which, even today, it is discussed in a low voice. It is one of those cases where power breeds impunity. It involved several crimes, such as prostitution, pimping, sexual abuse of minors, pedophilia, abuse of power and obstruction of justice, and affected several high figures within the Salazar government, who was furious with all of this, dismissed (or coerced his dismissal) those people and tried to hush things up: thus, as the Police investigated, supported by the Minister of Justice, João Antunes Varela (who would resign in protest against the cover-up), the political police tried to cover up all that.

The details of the case are still very shocking today, and are even worse if we consider the conservatism of values proclaimed by the so-called "Estado Novo": in addition to resorting to prostitutes, who encouraged other women to prostitute themselves, young pre-adolescents and adolescents girls were also recruited, some of them taken by their mothers, to parties where they danced almost naked or ran through the gardens with the men, in erotic games where they were later “initiated”. The list of presumable regulars of these parties included the Minister of Economy, José Correia de Oliveira (one of Sa...