UPDATE
Nov 24, 2025 6:42 PM CST
Brazil's Supreme Court upheld former President Jair Bolsonaro's incarceration on Monday, after he admitted to trying to break his ankle monitor while under house arrest. Bolsonaro was taken into custody early Saturday and put in a cell. A four-member panel of the court, including the justice who issued the arrest warrant, unanimously ruled that Bolsonaro should remain under preemptive arrest, the AP reports. Justice Alexandre de Morae wrote in his decision that the former president had shown "repeated non-compliance with precautionary measures (that allowed him to stay in house arrest) and evident disrespect to the court."
Nov 23, 2025 4:00 PM CST
On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge on Sunday that he had violated his ankle monitoring the day before while on house arrest because of a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in his medication, the AP reports. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old's preemptive jailing Saturday, deciding he's a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for attempting a coup to keep him in the presidency after his 2022 electoral defeat by now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The former president "said he had 'hallucinations' that there was some wire tap in the ankle monitoring, so he tried to uncover it," assistant judge Luciana Sorrentino said, as reported in a Supreme Court document published on Sunday shortly after her online meeting with the former president. Sorrentino added that Bolsonaro told her he "did not remember having a breakdown of this magnitude in another occasion," and speculated it might have been caused by a recent change in his medication. The document also says Bolsonaro also told the judge he hadn't been sleeping well and was feeling "a certain paranoia" that stimulated his curiosity into opening the ankle monitoring device. He again denied that he intended to escape. On Monday, the same panel will vote on the preemptive arrest order.
Lula made his first comments about his predecessor's jailing at the G20 group of nations meeting in South Africa. "The court ruled, that's decided. Everyone knows what he did," Lula told journalists. Outside federal police headquarters Brasilia over the weekend, pro-Bolsonaro protesters held banners calling for Lula and de Moraes to be removed from their posts, while detractors of the former president celebrated his jailing.
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