My part in Jair Bolsonaro’s downfall

When I first began writing about politics in 2005, my Brazilian husband, David Miranda, was not remotely interested in the subject. When politicians or journalists would visit us in Rio and invite us to dinner, he would always try to get out of it: ‘I’m not going; you’ll talk about nothing but politics the whole night and I will be desperately bored.’ In 2013, David was detained at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act 2000. I’d been working on the Edward Snowden story, uncovering the extent to which the NSA and GCHQ surveil their own citizens, and David had travelled to Berlin to help with a documentary about the investigation. British intelligence learned he would be travelling back home through London and detained him, threatening to arrest him, before eventually releasing him. After a few weeks back in Rio, David was still furious. Countless American and British journalists with far more proximity to the Snowden story had travelled through Britain without the slightest problem. Fast-forward nine years and David is a Brazilian congressman, having been elected in 2016 as the first openly gay man on the city council. He insists he hasn’t changed but, as he puts it: ‘You may not be interested in politics, but politics is always interested in you.’ 

I always wanted politics to remain separate from my personal life but I had about as much success in that resolution as David had in his. Few individuals were as responsible for that failure as Jair Bolsonaro. David and I always had bizarre interactions with Bolsonaro, even long before he became president. In 2014, we decided to write a profile of him for my news organisation the Intercept. We argued it was shocking that someone with his history of statements could even be a member of Congress.