Elon Musk and I have one thing in common: We are both banned in Brazil.
On Monday, the country’s Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold a ban on Musk’s X, which is now largely inaccessible through the web and its mobile app in Latin America’s largest democracy — a country of more than 215 million people.
The suspension, which officially began Saturday when Musk missed a deadline to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, is a long time coming and began well before Musk stood up for freedom of speech when he fought to allow supporters of former right wing President Jair Bolsonaro to air their views on X.
Like Musk, I found myself on the frontlines of the battle for free speech in Brazil.
In 2012, a civil court in the southern state of Curitiba banned my book, “Gilded Lily: Lily Safra, The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows.”
The book, published in the US two years earlier, is an unauthorized biography of the Brazilian-born philanthropist, who died in 2022.
My book was banned after the court found that I had defamed one of Safra’s siblings, who was long dead when my book was published in 2010.
In America, you can’t defame the dead; in Brazil, you can.
Still, my publisher Harper Collins fought the lawsuit with a small army of lawyers in New York, Washington and Rio de Janeiro.
We lost, and a state court of appeals in Curitiba ruled that I was guilty of “moral aggression” and committed “damage of a moral nature” to Safra’s brother.
The court battle landed me in the middle of a national debate on the legality of unauthorized biographies. Brazil’s constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech, but the Civil Code protects the right to privacy and prohibits the dissemination of any personal information that can “damage the honor” of an individual.
In the past, some of the country’s biggest celebrities have been able to use this right to privacy to ban unauthorized biographies of themselves before they even hit the shelves.
My publisher faced a $50-per-book fine if “Gilded Lily” showed up for sale in Brazil. Incidentally, “Gilded Lily” was never published in Brazil nor was it translated into Portuguese.
But that didn’t stop the Brazilian court from serving me in both Brazil and the US, and seeking a global ban of my work.
Just to make sure that I got the message, I was served twice: In New York, through letters rogatory — an official request from a foreign court to the Department of Justice — and in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre during that city’s international book festival when two process servers showed up at my hotel with a sheaf of documents as thick as an old New York City phone book.
The whole process was so unsettling that I haven’t returned to Brazil, a country I Ioved and where I worked as a foreign correspondent for more than seven years.
Musk is enmeshed in a similar battle, with far higher stakes.
While readers curious about the meteoric rise and storied wealth of one of their own were merely denied reading my book in Brazil, Musk’s ban affects 40 million X users in the country.
He faces daily fines of more than $8,000, and has made intractable enemies in both Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Marxist President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, whose main purpose in banning X is to deny their political enemies on the right the ability to express their opinions in a free forum.
In banning X, Brazil joins Venezuela, China, Russia and Iran as paragons of “democracy.” All have banned X.
Brazil emerged from nearly 20 years of dictatorship in 1985, but the battle over free speech proves it has never shaken off the legacy of repression that came with coronelismo, the political machine that propped up Brazilian dictators for centuries.
“The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich,” the Brazilian president told CNN this week.
Maybe it will be Musk with his millions who finally saves Brazil from itself, and puts it on the difficult path to true democracy once and for all.
