Celebrities

Brazil’s biography laws smack of censorship

In the early 1960s, when Brazilian leaders threatened to go to war with France over French fishermen poaching lobster off the South American country’s coast, Charles de Gaulle famously declared, “Brazil is not a serious country.”

I thought about his dismissive declaration last week as I found myself enmeshed in a national debate about censorship in Brazil. My book about philanthropist Lily ­Safra, “Gilded Lily,” was banned by a Brazilian civil court last summer and has now landed in the middle of a long-simmering legal and political battle in Latin America’s biggest democracy.

The unserious question? Should unauthorized biographies be ­allowed.

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 biographies before they even hit the shelves.

I wonder if Glenn Greenwald knew any of this when he chose to live in Rio de Janeiro eight years ago. The reporter who champions free speech by reporting on the leaked NSA documents had other reasons for moving to the country (his partner couldn’t get a US ­immigration visa because of the Defense of Marriage Act). But now he lives in a state that some prominent Brazilian journalists are comparing to Iran or Russia for its ­attempts to limit journalism.

There is some hope. A bill before Brazil’s congress seeks to rewrite two articles in the Civil Code that protect privacy and is expected to be voted on in the next few days. The matter is also before the ­supreme court, where the country’s biggest publishers are fighting to overturn the biography ban.

But with some of the country’s most popular musicians on a pro-censorship footing, few expect anything to change.

Earlier this month, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso joined a coalition to uphold the ban. Their group, Procure Saber (Get Informed) is seeking amicus curiae status in the supreme court case. In a bizarre spirit of compromise, the federal minister of culture has suggested that biographers split royalties with their ­subjects.

All of these musicians have near legendary status in Brazil, largely because they were such outspoken opponents of the country’s military regime, which ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. Leaders of the Tropicalismo movement in music and art, Gil and Veloso were considered subversives. They were arrested and forced into exile in England in the early 1970s.

Buarque was the most militant of all — writing songs that protested military torture of dissidents and lack of freedom of speech. In the 1970s, the generals prohibited his songs and even his images from appearing on TV Globo, the country’s largest network.

Now Buarque has changed his tune. “Some artists . . . want to preserve their privacy,” he told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper before he stopped giving interviews on the subject last week. “I don’t think that’s an aberration. I think it’s a right.”

The “Battle of the Biographies,” as one newspaper called it, is not new in Brazil, although it has reached fever pitch in the last month.

In 2006, Roberto Carlos, a musician so popular that he is known simply as “The King” in Brazil, managed to get an injunction to yank thousands of copies of his ­unauthorized biography off store shelves. But not content to bring a civil suit against his biographer, Paulo Cesar de Araujo, who had spent 15 years working on the book, Carlos also sought a criminal complaint. No Brazilian publisher dared reprint the Carlos biography, which can now be obtained on the Internet for about $200 a copy.

In my case, my book was not even available in Brazil when it was banned. Worried that my biography of the Brazilian-born Safra might make its way to bookstore shelves in Brazil, her nephew sought to ban it.

My book isn’t even translated into Portuguese or available in Brazil, yet last July a state court of appeals in Curitiba ruled that I was guilty of “moral aggression” and committed “damage of a moral ­nature” to Artigas Watkins, Safra’s brother, who was long dead when the book was published in 2010.

I have been ordered by the court to remove passages that offend the character of Watkins, and my publisher, HarperCollins, faces a fine of $50 per book if “Gilded Lily” shows up in Brazil.

While this smacks of censorship to me, others see the biography ban in a different light.

“It’s a lie that we are trying to be censors,” said producer Paula Lavigne, who founded the pro-censorship coalition. “All we want is to protect our privacy. Journalists just don’t need to be so aggressive.”

Isabel Vincent is a reporter for The Post and author of “Gilded Lily: Lily Safra: The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows” (HarperCollins).