On his first full day in jail, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro told a judge on Sunday he had violated his ankle monitoring the day before at his house arrest because of a nervous breakdown and hallucinations caused by a change in his medication.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the 70-year-old leader’s preemptive jailing Saturday for he is considered a flight risk. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September for attempting a coup to remain in the presidency after his 2022 electoral defeat.
“(Bolsonaro) 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 change in his medication last week. He once again denied that he intended to escape.
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.
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