With a score of 5 to 2, TRE-SP (Regional Electoral Court of São Paulo) sentenced the federal deputy (PL-SP), on Thursday (30), due to electoral disinformation in the context of the election of 2022.
The punishments are the cancellation of the mandate and ineligibility for eight years, counted from the year of the 2022 election.
The final decision of the Paulista Court is the final decision to the (Superior Electoral Court), and the effects of the decision of the São Paulo Court are only valid after the exhaustion of appeals. In December, the court had already formed a majority in this regard, but the trial had been suspended due to a request for view (more time for analysis).
A was moved by federal deputy Sâmia Bomfim (PSOL-SP).
In a statement, the parliamentarian said she received the result with serenity and classified the trial as a “attempt to nullify the voice of the 946,244 citizens of São Paulo”.
“This decision has no immediate effects and I will continue to act as a federal deputy, with a staunch position against the current misfortune, until the end of appropriate resources,” he said. “It is clear that political persecution in our country, against conservatives, is visible as the noon sun.”
Zambelli was one of the best known allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) throughout his term and one of the main voices in the discourse against the electronic ballot boxes and the one adopted by pockets.
She was in the country in the last elections, with 946,000 votes, behind Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) and (PSOL-SP).
The winning vote in the trial was Encinas Manfré, who is an electoral regional corregedor of and rapporteur of action against Zambelli. He understood that there was the practice of abuse of political power and misuse of media by the deputy.
Manfré quoted, during a vote in December, different speeches of the parliamentary relating to the polls and the electoral process. Among them, a video in which Zambelli said there was “manipulation” of ballot boxes in a union building in Itapeva, in the interior of São Paulo.
He also cited, for example, the deputy’s statement saying that a restricted group of servers would control “all source code without any external control” and that this would create in the hands of some technicians “an absolute power to manipulate the results of the election without leaving any trail”.
According to the magistrate, by constantly sharing misinformation content, Zambelli was abusively used the political power that holds the position of deputy to try to give credibility to what is disseminated.
Still in December, the rapporteur had been accompanied by judges Cotrim Guimarães, Langroiva Pereira and the President of the Court, Silmar Fernandes. With this, it had already been formed by the conviction. This Thursday, also Judge Rogério Cury followed the majority.
The magistrate Maria Cláudia Bedotti, who at that time had requested view, opened divergence in the resumption of the trial. His position was accompanied by Judge Régis de Castilho
For her, Zambelli surpassed the “legitimate limits of freedom of expression, assuming an irresponsible and demeaning character, placing the reliability of the Electoral Justice.” However, it added that it was necessary to verify that there was sufficient gravity in the conduct, citing elements such as legal relevance and proportionality, to avoid improper interference in the choice made by voters.
In Bedotti’s assessment, it was not proven that the videos cited in the initial petition would have been enough to compromise the fairness of elections and equality between the candidates.
She also points out that the plaintiffs did not prove what was the scope of the posts and that it is not enough to indicate just the number of followers that the parliamentarian had on her profile to do so. In this sense, he also argued that much of those who visualized their videos were already sympathizers of their ideas and that there is no proof of how many voters were influenced by their speech.
Different PL parliamentarians criticized TRE-SP’s decision in their networks. Nikolas was one of those who published a post that declares support for Zambelli and says that the votes given to parliamentarian may end up being “thrown in the trash because his candidate has issued opinions.”
Also Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro (PL-SP) said, in turn, that the decision “only reinforces the polarization and persecution to the right by giving an excuse ‘dissemination of fake news’.”
Zambelli’s defense said in the process that there was no unlawful act in conduct and also that his posts are supported by freedom of expression. He also argued that several of the posts made in the pre-election period would only be sharing of content from other vehicles and that the contents disclosed during the campaign were unlawful or untrue.
In oral support in December, lawyer Flávia Guth He pointed out that there is no proof of proof of parity breaking in the election, in order to break the isonomy among the candidates, nor the reach of posts and the qualitative and quantitative gravity of the conduct of the deputy.
In the past and oral support in December, the São Paulo Regional Electoral Prosecutor, Paulo Taubemblatt, defended the origin of the action.
“When she publishes known videos and reports in her networks to maintain a state of uncertainty about the definitive results of election – what she does before, after all, because everything is concatenated, what happened in Brazil is concatenated with this Type of action – it hurts the principle of equality between candidates. “
Zambelli was the target of another action of the same type in TRE-SP, whose focus is a video of the November 2022 deputy in which she went to generals, asking them not to accept the outcome of the election. In this case, magistrates by unanimous decision in September last year.
In addition to two actions on the TSE, which are still in process, the deputy is defendant in the Supreme Court (STF) by an episode in which she pursued a man with a gun on the eve of the second round of the 2022 election.
