In yet another reminder that women can never really be protected from unwanted harassment, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was meeting people on the streets of Mexico City on Tuesday when some drunk dude put his arm around her, leaned in to kiss her neck… and groped her from behind.
Sheinbaum was walking from Mexico’s National Palace to the Education Ministry—a five-minute walk compared to a 20-minute car ride—when she stopped to interact with citygoers. In a video of the event that circulated across social media, she’s seen uncomfortably trying to shrug off the offender’s advances before peeling his slimy paws off her body. After he was pulled away, Sheinbaum is heard saying, “Don’t worry.”
🇲🇽 Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was sexually assaulted on Tuesday, while interacting with passers-by on the streets of Mexico City. pic.twitter.com/8K2u1XMJyl
The man was reportedly arrested overnight, and at her daily press briefing on Wednesday, Sheinbaum announced she was pressing charges. “This is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we as women experience in our country,” Sheinbaum said. “If I do not file a complaint, where does that leave all Mexican women? If they do this to the president, what happens to all the other women in the country?”
She also said this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened (even if it was the first time as president). She told journalists she had experienced similar advancements as a 12-year-old student on her commute to school. “No man has the right to violate that space.”
Violence against women in Mexico has surged in recent years, and in 2024, the Atlantic Council found that more than 70% of the country’s women over the age of 15 have experienced some form of such abuse. One of the reasons for the mistreatment has to do with machismo, as well as a lack of effective institutional responses to prevent—and punish—gender-based violence.
Sheinbaum is Mexico’s first female president and was recognized in 2024 as Forbes’ fourth most powerful woman in the world. In her inauguration speech in October 2024, she credited the country’s “anonymous women,” who’ve had to fight for their dreams in silence, despite oppression. “I am not alone, we are all here,” she said. “I will not let you down.”
Beyond her advocacy for women’s rights, she’s also earned international recognition for her masterful diplomacy in working with Trump, winning her the nickname of the “Trump whisperer.” In October, she denounced the U.S. airstrikes across the Caribbean Sea, and she’s managed to put off tariffs against Mexico multiple times. In January, when Trump joked about renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, she coolly responded that we should rename North America “América Mexicana.”
“Even if you’re the president, any guy believes he has the right to touch you,” Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, a journalist for a feminist publication in Mexico, wrote on Instagram of the event (translated by the Guardian). “When they ask what the patriarchy is, this is it.”
