The trouble began once he returned. He kept her under strict surveillance.

“If I got near to a window and opened the blind, and if by coincidence a man looked at me, he would ask, ‘Why is this guy looking at you?’” she told the television interviewer.

He told her that she was too illiterate to be allowed to speak, and he forbade her to attend the weddings of her own siblings. She said she would visit her own mother in secret, “because I was not allowed to see anybody from my family.” When her mother asked her about her bruises, she told her that she had accidentally hurt herself after fainting because of her low blood pressure.

“I had nowhere to go,” she said. “I just had to put up with one beating after another, just put up with it.”

One of her daughters, who was 10 at the time, said her father had inappropriately touched her thighs under the table while they were having dinner. When Orantes confronted her husband, he accused his daughter of fabricating the story and then hit his wife, warning her not to file a complaint. After that, “my daughter got scared and never told me anything more,” Orantes said.

In another episode, Orantes had taken her 8-year-old son to a doctor in a medical emergency. When she got home, she found the house shuttered and her husband waiting for her, surrounded by their other children. When she explained where she had been, “he gave me a beating that could have killed me,” she said. He accused her of going “to sleep with all the guys of the neighborhood” rather than visiting the doctor.

At the end of Orantes’s TV appearance, the presenter offered her encouragement. Orantes responded, “The only thing that weighs me down is not having done this before.”

Orantes said she had gone to the police more than a dozen times to report the beatings. But there were no laws in place to help her. Divorce had been legalized in Spain only in 1981, and when Orantes tried to leave her husband, he persuaded the judge to deny her divorce request.