Salsa singer La India won’t press charges against her boyfriend, who police suspected assaulted her, leaving her with a broken nose and a hematoma with internal bleeding, the Puerto Rican press report.
Police say La India, the stage name of Linda Viera Caballero, did not press charges against Javier Padilla González, saying that she was attacked by an American couple.
"He's a person that has always helped me," Caballero said of her boyfriend, according to El Vocero. "He never hit me. He tried to defend me."
Caballero said an American couple attacked her at a loud bar in San Juan, accusing her of cutting in line to use the bathroom, pulling her hair and throwing her to the floor. When her boyfriend tried to intercede, she says, the couple attacked her as well.
La India's lawyer Leonardo Rosario also said the singer was attacked in San Juan while she was out with Padilla.
“They’re going to keep investigating,” Rosario told Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día. “The prosecutor determined that, since she says that the boy never attacked her, then there’s no case against him."
When asked by reporters who hit her, Rosario said “a third person, I’m not getting into it.”
Police found Viera Caballero, 44, in her boyfriend’s house early Monday morning when responding to a 911 call. They sent her to the emergency room to treat her injuries from a beating.
The police suspected the attack had resulted from domestic violence, though a person close to La India told El Nuevo Día that the singer had been attacked “by some gringos” earlier in the evening.
La India played the 30th annual National Salsa Day at the Hiram Bithoron stadium in San Juan on March 17.