Convicted for Making Racial Slurs, She Faces 8 Years in Brazilian Prison

Day McCarthy has made hateful comments. Her targets have frequently been children, particularly the children of celebrities. She has called one girl “ugly.” Another child “disgustingly skinny.”

And in one racist utterance that outraged this deeply diverse country, the Brazilian social media provocateur once took aim at the adopted Black daughter of two White celebrities, calling the 4-year-old girl a “monkey.”

“I say what’s on my mind,” McCarthy, who identifies as half Black, said in an interview. “I’m a polemicist.”

Brazil now has another name for her: criminal.

Seven years after her bigoted attack on the Black girl, a federal judge in August convicted McCarthy, 35, of the crime of racism and handed her the type of penalty traditionally reserved for violent offenders and drug traffickers: eight years and nine months in prison. McCarthy, who lives in Paris and rarely posts online these days, is appealing for a reduced sentence, and no arrest warrant has yet been issued.

The severe sentence, the longest ever meted out by the Brazilian justice system for the crime of racism, illustrates a mounting willingness in Brazil and across much of the world to criminalize racist speech and jail those who use it. In recent years, South Africa sent its first person to prison for racist speech. A court in Belgium ordered one man to spend 15 days in jail for sending racist messages to a television host. And earlier this year, Spain gave eight-month prison sentences to three men who yelled racist taunts at a Brazilian soccer player.

Few countries are pursuing with greater vigor the criminal prosecution of those who use racist language than Brazil, once touted by its elites as largely free of the racial divisions bedeviling others in the hemisphere, such as the United States. But a racial reckoning sparked by the 2020 George Floyd protests has prompted Brazil to account for its history as the top destination for enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, and the country has assumed an increasingly hard-line position against racist speech, which, unlike the United States, it considers a crime.

Between 2020 and 2023, the number of criminal prosecutions was up more than fivefold, according to government crime statistics, rising from 794 to 4,871. There is now a specialized military police unit in the largely Black state of Bahia that patrols for racists and people accused of racial intolerance. The public ministry in Bahia state has also empowered a prosecutorial team to focus exclusively on prosecuting bigotry.

“The gravity of the crime of racism in Brazil is so great that people can be arrested on the spot,” said Lívia Vaz, who directs the team. “When I started, it wasn’t that way. The police would go to the scene, and no one was arrested. Now they are.”

Criminal courts, she said, have traditionally been hesitant to convict racists, much less send them to prison. {snip}

But that, too, has begun to change.

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McCarthy’s victim was no ordinary child. She was Títi, daughter to television stars Bruno Gagliasso and Giovanna Ewbank. The celebrity family — three children, two adopted from Malawi — regularly graces magazine covers and television specials. Títi is so well known that in the Brazilian press she goes by that name alone.

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As the couple grew their family — adopting another child from Malawi, Bless, and conceiving a biological child — they became vocal advocates for racial justice, condemning structural racism in a predominantly Black and mixed society where economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of White elites. In interviews with Brazilian media, the couple spoke of grappling with that racial dynamic inside their own household.

“We’re aware that we, as White people, have an eternal debt to Black people,” Gagliasso told the newspaper O Globo. {snip}

But the family never personally experienced racism until November 2017, when McCarthy recorded and posted a video that swept the Brazilian internet. In the video, McCarthy made racist comments about Títi’s nose and hair, and said a Black girl couldn’t be a daughter to two “White people with blue eyes.”

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Gagliasso collected all of McCarthy’s online attacks, put them onto a thumb drive and went to a Rio de Janeiro police station to press charges.

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Brazil defines freedom of expression more narrowly than the United States. Here, threats against the Brazilian democracy and government institutions are considered illegal. So are personal attacks that offend someone’s honor. Racist speech, too, has been illegal here for decades.

So when McCarthy said her attack on Títi was protected by free-speech rights, the argument gained little traction. {snip}

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