Man Arrested for Sexual Assault After Publicly Groping Mexico’s President

Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said she will press charges against an intoxicated man who groped and attempted to kiss her as she moved through a small crowd in Mexico City.

The incident, which occurred on 4 November as she walked through the city’s historic center traveling from one meeting to the next, was caught on several personal cell phone videos and shared widely. Sheinbaum said afterward that she did not understand the extent of the violation until seeing it herself on video, and that is when she decided to press charges.

“If I don’t file a complaint, then what message does that send to all Mexican women,” The New York Times reported she said in a press conference. “If this can happen to the president, what’s going to happen to all the young women and women across our country?”

Addressing the big security elephant in the room: Where was President Sheinbaum’s security? How could such an incident have occurred?

Despite regular political violence, including the cartel assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Mexico, on 1 November and the murder of the personal secretary and advisor of Mexico City’s mayor in May, Sheinbaum follows her predecessor’s practice of eschewing close protection in most instances.

At the news conference where she announced the man would be charged with sexual harassment, Sheinbaum addressed her personal protection: “As for my security—we’re not going to change who we are. We can’t be far from the people. …To isolate ourselves, to ride around in a van—we have no known risk that would justify that,” the Times reported.

Sheinbaum would much rather focus on the security of women. Reuters reported that Mexico experienced 821 femicides in 2024 and 501 through September this year. Femicide is the murder of women for gender-based reasons, which includes crimes where there is evidence of sexual violence prior to a woman’s death and domestic violence, among other criteria. There are some researchers that argue these numbers vastly undercount the actual number of femicides.

The same Reuters report said about half of Mexico’s states do not have a specific crime for sexual harassment.

“It’s reprehensible, it must be denounced, it must be named, because it’s an act of violence, but it’s also a significant event and symbolic of what women experience every day,” Sheinbaum said, and noted that sexual harassment needs to be a “criminal offense, punishable by law” everywhere in the country.

News site El País said national statistics show that 45 percent of women in Mexico have been victims of street harassment.

“Women’s rights groups and feminist commentators have said the incident shows the extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman,” the BBC reported.

Mexico is a developing country, according to the United Nation’s economic categories, and countries in this category tend to have high rates of violence against women. However, the issue is a problem worldwide. According to researchers analyzing World Healthcare Organization data, 6 percent of North American women experienced “physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner violence” in the last year, and 25 percent have experienced such violence in their lifetime. In Western Europe, the rates are 4 percent and 20 percent respectively.

The #MeToo movement burst on the scene when actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted in their lifetime to self-identify to show how widespread the problem was. She did this in light of the dozens of allegations that surfaced against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The movement had actually started more than a decade earlier by Tarana Burke, who thought the shared experience of women could help them understand and manage the feelings associated with assault, and, importantly, influence societal change to combat the problem.

The momentum brought positive changes. More then 200 “prominent” men lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment, according to a 2018 article in The New York Times. A Forbes article noted that 24 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., had passed more than 80 workplace anti-harassment laws.

However, the problem is malignantly stubborn. Research in 2024 from Tulane’s Newcomb Institute found “no change in the prevalence of sexual harassment since the last survey in 2018” despite “increased awareness and legislative action in the wake of the #MeToo movement.” And an intoxicated man walked right up to the president of Mexico in a city street and groped her this week, proving the point.