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Journalist sued Brazil's president Bolsonaro. She won
Bolsonaro, the right-wing president who has been in office since 2019 and has a Trump-like disregard for journalists, said in February that Campos Mello had offered sex to a source in exchange for negative information about him.
A court in Brazil ordered president Jair Bolsonaro to pay compensation to journalist Patricia Campos Mello after he made objectionable comments about her work ethics. Campos Mello, an award-winning reporter who works for the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de S Paulo, hailed the court’s decision as a "victory for all of us women". “Judge asks Bolsonaro to compensate Folha reporter for moral damages - Judge found that the president is guilty of carrying out sexual offences against Patrícia Campos Mello - the first instance of such a decision. It is a victory for all of us women,” she tweeted in Portuguese.
The Journalists against Harassment group said that the ruling was a “great day” for women reporters. “Great day for women journalists. Great day for professional journalism,” the group said in a tweet.
Case against Bolsonaro
Bolsonaro, the right-wing president who has been in office since 2019 and has a Trump-like disregard for journalists, said in February that Campos Mello had offered sex to a source in exchange for negative information about him. The Folha newspaper for which Campos Mello works said in its report that the president had said that Mello “wanted a scoop" at "any price against me". This was in response to a series of investigative reports that Campos Mello had written about a group that was using the social media platform WhatsApp for Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign. Campos Mello brought legal action against Bolsanaro for his comments. The judge said that Bolsonaro’s remarks damaged the journalist’s honour and asked the president to pay 20,000 reais ($3,500) in damages.
Not the first win for Campos Mello
This is the second win for Campos Mello within three months as in January she had won an almost identical case against Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who is a member of the parliament in Brazil's lower house of Congress.
She had filed a case against Eduardo, who had suggested in a YouTube video last May that the reporter had ‘tried to seduce’ a source for damaging information against his father. He was ordered to pay 30,000 reais ($5,200) to the journalist as compensation.
