David Romero Ellner

David Romero Ellner (died 18 July 2020)^[1] was a Honduran journalist, lawyer, politician and sex offender. He was director of Radio Globo and Globo TV.^[2] He was known for his investigations into corruption in the country and for sexually abusing his own daughter in 2002, a crime to which he pleaded guilty in 2004.^[3]

He died on 18 July 2020, from COVID-19 that he contracted in prison during the COVID-19 pandemic in Honduras.^[2] Earlier in 2020, CPJ and 190 other agencies urged world leaders to release all journalists imprisoned for their work due to the threat of incurring COVID-19 in prison.^[4][2]

Convictions

In 2002, Romero Ellner was charged with raping his daughter.^[5] On 30 July 2002 he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and office.^[6][7] In 2004, he pleaded guilty to raping his daughter and was sentenced to ten years in prison.^[8][9] He was released early, and the prosecutor who tried him has accused him of then embarking on a harassment campaign against her and her family, for which he was tried and found guilty on sixteen counts of libel and defamation in 2016.^[9] In January 2019, the Honduras Supreme Court upheld a previous conviction of the journalist; he charged a public prosecutor with corruption in 2016.^[2] On March 28, 2019, after exhausting all of his appeals, including the Supreme Court of Honduras and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, he was arrested by the National Honduran police in a raid on Radio Globo as he was on the air.^[9]