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Trevi, who rose to fame throughout the 1980s and '90s with the bold irreverence of Madonna, was arrested Jan. 13 along with her longtime manager Sergio Andrade and fellow singer María Raquenel Portillo after being on the lam for almost 10 months. Charges allege that Trevi and her group, dominated by the cult-like leadership of Andrade, helped Andrade lure young girls under his musical tutelage, after which he would force sex on them and beat them. Trevi, Andrade and Portillo are all awaiting extradition to Mexico.

The day after their arrests, Trevi and Andrade's mug shots littered the Mexican press. Trevi, not yet 30 and still girlishly attractive after being on the run, appears relaxed and smiling, in freshly applied red lipstick. Next to her stands Andrade, fat and surly, attempting a weak smile at the cameras.

The nation has turned obsessively to analyzing the relationship between this unlikely couple, and Trevi's role as both victim and victimizer. The press, supplied with a seemingly endless amount of skimpy photos of Trevi retrieved from her racy calendar series, splashes her near-naked image on broadcasts and across front pages throughout the country.

Trevi as the devil, with tail in swing; Trevi in a baby carriage wearing nothing but a diaper, with her legs flared up in the air and her arms covering her breasts; Trevi King Kong-size, lying naked in front of miniature Mexico City monuments. The public does not seem to tire of her jaunty image, nor of her unseemly tale.

While Trevi fans search for an explanation, the scandal produces stunning new developments almost every day. Trevi's fall from feminist role model to male-dominated sex-peddler leads the news. Headlines scream "Nailed!" and "Trevi Cries, Claims Innocence." Both Mexico's first-ever democratic presidential elections and the country's paralyzing nine-month university strike are pushed to the back half-hour of TV newscasts. The torrid tale has not only soiled a national celebrity; it has incited finger-pointing at the country's powerful media.

The controversy began more than two years ago when Karina Yapor Gómez, a Trevi-Andrade musical prot<é>g<é> who was legally put under the couple's care at the age of 12, gave birth at age 15 to a baby boy. (The legal age of consent in Mexico is 14.) Yapor, who was by then living with the couple and half a dozen other young girls in Spain, claimed that the child was fathered by a young Spanish lover, not by Andrade.

But suspicions were aroused four months later when Andrade's ex-wife, Erika Aline Hernández Ponce de Leon, once a starry-eyed Andrade disciple herself, came out with a tell-all titled, "Aline, La Gloria por el Infierno" ("Aline, The Glory by the Inferno", a play on Trevi's nickname, "La Gloria"). The book described Andrade's dominance over Trevi and her entourage, and detailed the pair's sexual perversity. Furthermore, the bestseller accused Andrade of forcing sex on Trevi prot<é>g<é>s, provoking speculation as to the true father of Yapor's baby.

In a dramatic turn of events, Yapor abandoned her then 7-month-old infant in a Spanish hospital. Six months later, Yapor's parents went to collect the child. Upon their return to Mexico, they filed charges against Andrade, Trevi and Portillo, claiming that Andrade kidnapped their daughter and forcefully fathered her child, while the two women passively stood by. When the police began their search, the group had already disappeared.

Almost seven months later, Yapor called her parents, begging them to drop charges against Trevi and Andrade in return for her long-awaited return home. Her parents refused. Yapor then startled the nation a month later when she suddenly reappeared in Mexico on national television, defending the pair and again pleading to her parents to drop the charges.

"I owe them" -- Trevi and Andrade -- "a very big apology, because they were always very nice to me," Yapor said in a statement that local press described as wooden.

Yapor, now 17, returned to her family home where she immediately fell silent. The girl's ambivalence to say more about the scandal alarmed her parents, who stuck by their charges. In the latest turn of events, this week Yapor testified to a state judge in Mexico that Andrade did father the child, but she said he did not rape her. Lawyers say her testimony could prevent Andrade's prosecution on felony sex charges.

The dubious pair was finally tracked down by Interpol in Rio de Janiero almost 10 months after their disappearance. They were living with six women and three babies. One of the women was María Raquenel Portillo (known as "Mary Boquitas"), a former Trevi back-up singer who was arrested for collusion with Trevi and Andrade. The other five young women (one pregnant) are being investigated while the three babies are undergoing DNA tests to see if they, too, are possible Andrade offspring.

The scandal has only broadened since Trevi and Andrade's arrests. Five other young girls have come out of the woodwork, claiming that they too were taken in by promises of fame, only to become victims of Andrade's abuse and Trevi's indifference. The girls claimed that Andrade bullied them into orgies -- even prostitution -- while Trevi silently stood by.

A Chilean accuser, who recently filed rape and kidnap charges against Trevi and Andrade in Chile, says she is willing to travel to Mexico to testify against the couple. The girl joined Trevi's group in 1995 when she was 12, and claims that she was later repeatedly raped and beaten by Andrade.

Next page | In a world of bubble-gum starlets and machismo, Trevi was an edgy, streetwise role model