A Brazilian Federal court sentenced Bruno Aiub, a political podcaster locally known as “Monark,” to one year and two months in prison for “slandering” Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) Minister Flavio Dino by calling him a “fatty,” Brazilian outlets reported Tuesday.
Dino, prior to his appointment as a member of the top Brazilian court in February 22, served as far-left President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s justice minister between January 2023 and February 2.
During his tenure as justice minister, Dino made several calls for the regulation of social media and claimed that platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and others were responsible for a series of deadly school attacks that took place across several Brazilian cities during early 2023.
The STF minister sued Aiub last year for slander and defamation over two videos reportedly published by the podcaster between May and June 2023 in which Aiub insulted the then-justice minister. According to the Brazilian outlet G1, the videos were published on the video platform Rumble.
In the videos, Aiub reportedly reacted to statements issued by Dino at a meeting with representatives from different social media platforms in April 2023 where he criticized the use of social media to promote “hate speech.” According to G1, Dino made his assertions within the context of an attack on a kindergarten that took place in Blumenau, Santa Catarina, in April 2023, in which a 25-year-old man killed four children with an ax and injured five more.
During the response, G1 stated, Monark called Dino “perverse” and criticized his remarks over freedom of speech, claiming that the minister wanted to “enslave” people.
Aiub reportedly said in the video:
That fatty wants to enslave you. You’re going to be enslaved by a fat man. This guy, alone, you put him out there on the street, he won’t last a second, he can’t even run a hundred meters. Put him in the forest to see if he can survive the lions. Are you going to let this guy, who in real life is a piece of shit, be your master? And you’ll be his little slave. Is that what you want? Is that why your parents fought to give you an education, a home, food? They raised you, they sacrificed themselves for you to serve this son of a bitch? That’s not the fate I want for myself.
The Brazilian outlet Poder 360 claimed on Tuesday to have obtained a copy of the court sentence. According to the outlet, the federal judge Maria Isabel do Prado considered Aiub’s intention to offend Dino’s honor to be “evident” and highlighted the “use of social media to amplify the reach of the offenses.”
“With regard to the two crimes of slander, at the end of the evidentiary investigation, I understand that the materiality and authorship of the facts were proven beyond any reasonable doubt by the secure and cohesive oral evidence collected in the criminal investigation,” the sentence reportedly read.
According to Poder 360, the Brazilian judge ruled that expressions used by Monark to describe Dino – such as “perverse,” “malicious,” “damned,” “unscrupulous,” “tyrannical,” and “authoritarian,” as well as other claims made by the podcaster – were interpreted by the court as a “clear attempt to attribute bad character” to the former justice minister.
According to the court ruling, Aiub “tried to portray Dino as someone dishonest and capable of committing abuses of power.” Poder 360 reported that the judge acknowledged that “freedom of expression is a fundamental right,” but stressed that “it has limits, especially when it conflicts with the protection of other rights, such as honor.”
While the court dismissed the defamation charges, it found Aiub guilty of slander on October 3. In addition to the prison sentence, which Aiub can reportedly serve in a “semi-open regime,” the podcaster must pay Dino 50,000 Brazilian reais (roughly $8,900) in moral damages.
Prior to suing Aiub, Dino was at the center of a similar controversy days after taking office in January 2023. At the time, Dino demanded that two local radio anchors retracted comments issued on January 17, 2023, where they described him as an “hypocrite,” an “obese communist,” and “Dinosaur family” in reference to the American sitcom Dinosaurs that aired between 1991 and 1994.
“Dino, that one is total hypocrisy. Nothing against obese people, but he is an obese person,” one of the radio anchors said at the time. “And an obese communist is something. Three or four families could eat with what he eats daily.”
Dino was a member of the Communist Party of Brazil for 15 years until 2021, when he became a member of the Brazilian Socialist Party. According to local media, Brazilian President Lula da Silva himself has made several public jokes about Dino’s obesity, with one such public occurrence taking place during a meeting of ministers in June 2023 broadcast live on state media.
“This meeting will last at least six hours or a little more. We will not have lunch. Lunch will be a light meal served here at the table, no one needs to get up. While one speaks, the others eat and so we will take turns tasting our food at lunch time,” Lula reportedly said to his ministers.
“Flavio Dino too, but we’re going to bring him little food,” he added, eliciting laughter from those present, to which an unidentified participant responded by reportedly saying, “that’s bullying.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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