First lady of Brazil, Rosângela Lula da Silva, commonly referred to as “Janja,” swore at Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk over the weekend at a G20 event in which she called for the regulation of social media.
Brazil is the host of this year’s annual G20 summit. G20 member nations are presently gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the two-day gathering.
On Saturday, the Brazilian first lady participated in Cria G20, a sideline weekend event that, according to its website, sought to connect digital creators, activists, and communicators to “discuss hunger, inclusion and the climate emergency.”
Janja da Silva attended on Saturday and delivered a lengthy speech in which she called for the regulation of social media to help stop the spread of “false information” on the internet.
According to Reuters, a ship’s foghorn sounded while she was speaking. She responded by joking that Musk was sounding the foghorn to drown out her speech.
“I’m not afraid of you!” she said in Portuguese, before adding, “fuck you, Elon Musk” in English. The Brazilian first lady then reportedly looked towards influencer Felipe Neto and said, “You said fuck you, I can too,” to which the man responded, “You can, you should.”
Musk responded on his social media site Twitter, first in a message that read simply “lol,” an internet acronym meaning “laugh out loud.” He then shared a comment reading, “they will lose the next election.”
Over the past year Twitter and the Brazilian judiciary have been embroiled in a lengthy feud that started over Musk’s initial refusal to comply with censorship orders issued by Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) Minister Alexandre de Moraes, resulting in Twitter’s roughly one-month-ban from Brazil in late August.
Despite his initial refusal to comply, Musk ultimately caved and had Twitter comply with de Moraes’ censorship orders, paying some $1.8 million in fines before the service was ultimately restored in Brazil in early October.
Janja da Silva claimed during her speech that de Moraes had been invited to participate in the weekend social event but could not attend due to security concerns after a man killed himself in a suicide attack outside of Brazil’s supreme court last week.
“We invited Minister Alexandre de Moraes [but he didn’t come] because of what unbelievably happened in Brasilia this week, and the bigot there ended up killing himself with fireworks, but anyway? Incredible. We laugh, but it’s serious, people, it’s serious. Look what social networks do to people’s minds,” the Brazilian First Lady reportedly said.
Hours after his wife’s speech, Brazilian radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reportedly appeared to refer to his wife’s words — without directly mentioning her — in remarks at the G20’s Global Alliance Against Hunger, stressing that “we don’t have to insult anyone.”
“I’d like to tell you that this is a campaign in which we don’t have to offend anyone, we don’t have to swear at anyone. We just need to outrage society, outrage the people who have won the right to eat, that we have to bring together those people who don’t have enough to eat,” Lula said.
Janja, 58, is the 79-year-old Brazilian president’s third wife, having started a relationship in 2017. The two reportedly dated throughout Lula’s conviction and imprisonment on multiple charges of corruption. The relationship reportedly became public in May 2019, when Lula confirmed it to economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira during a prison visit. Lula would eventually reveal that Janja frequently visited him in prison and was included as “family” on the prison’s authorized visit registry.
The couple married in May 2022. The socialists threw a lavish nine-hour party at a luxury venue featuring high-end wines. Reports published at the time indicated that Lula had banned staff from using cellphones out of fear of images and footage from the party potentially leaking.
Lula’s previous wife, Marisa Letícia Casa, died in 2017 after a stroke. His first wife, Maria de Lourdes Ribeiro, died of hepatitis in 1971.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.