One Video Criticizing Moraes’s Wife’s Law Firm Left a Brazilian Lawyer Bankrupt and in Exile

RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian lawyer and businessman who once posted a single video questioning the law firm owned by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes says that video cost him everything: two civil judgments larger than his entire net worth, a five-year prison sentence in a criminal case in which Moraes himself sat as assistant to the prosecution, and a rushed escape to the United States with his pregnant wife. Alexandre Zibenberg told the story on Tuesday on the Pleno Time program, as reported by Pleno News.

Zibenberg, a Rio de Janeiro native with more than 20 years of practice, says that in 2020, while redesigning his own firm’s website, he came across the firm of Viviane Barci de Moraes, which advertised itself as “specialized in superior courts.” He found it strange and said so on camera. “You are a civil lawyer, a criminal lawyer, an electoral lawyer, a military lawyer, but nobody is specialized in the Supreme Court,” he said in the interview. That was the whole offense.

How one opinion became a ruin

According to Zibenberg, two civil lawsuits were then filed against him in the São Paulo Court of Justice, even though he lived in Rio de Janeiro at the time. Both ended with maximum damages that exceeded everything he owned and pushed him into bankruptcy. “I saw no legal defect that would justify an indemnity, nothing, only an opinion of mine,” he said.

He was still paying when, in 2023, a criminal case over the same video was filed by state prosecutors in the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice, with Moraes as assistant to the prosecution. Zibenberg says the justice attended a hearing by video link and was represented by his daughter, attorney Juliane Barci de Moraes. The case ended with a five-year prison sentence. “I left Brazil immediately, in a hurry, my wife pregnant, I left my whole life behind,” he said. He had never planned to emigrate and now describes his situation as exile.

Why it matters

Zibenberg’s account fits a pattern that the Watch Post Daily has documented again and again: under the Lula regime, the courts have become the main instrument against Brazilians who stand in opposition, from the electrician jailed for 14 years over Jan. 8 to Flavio Bolsonaro, who left the country in what a former justice called self-defense. What sets this case apart is how personal it is. The target of the criticism was the justice’s own family business, and the justice, his wife’s firm and his daughter all appear on the side that won. An American federal judge with that kind of stake would be expected to stay far from the case. When criticizing a judge’s relatives can end in bankruptcy and prison, the line between rule of law and political persecution has been crossed, and the Brazilians fleeing it are arriving in the United States.

The record

The facts in this story come from Zibenberg’s own account. The Watch Post Daily has not reviewed the court files in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, and the amounts of the civil judgments were not disclosed. Moraes’s role in the criminal case and the five-year sentence are as Zibenberg described them. The original report carried no response from Moraes, his wife’s firm or the courts involved.

If one sentence about a law firm’s advertising can wipe out a man’s estate, end in a prison term and send him across the hemisphere, the problem was never the video. It is a justice system that protects its own and punishes those who ask, at a moment when the institutional drift toward the Venezuelan model is no longer a warning but a description, under a government whose 2022 victory remains disputed by millions of Brazilians who allege electronic ballot fraud.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: interview with Alexandre Zibenberg on the Pleno Time program, as reported by Pleno News on Nov. 3, 2026.

Featured image: Sessão da Primeira Turma do STF by Antonio Augusto/STF, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.