Heloísa de Carvalho and the fight against the dragons of evil: Olavo's daughter was a great woman.

Since the morning of Thursday, January 8th, I have been receiving messages about the death of Heloísa de Carvalho. She was my source in several reports about Olavo de Carvalho, her father, and about events linked to the far right, such as the arrest of Fabrício Queiroz. I confess that I resisted writing about her death because of the probable cause—suicide. But the image of Heloísa hasn't left my mind. Not as a disturbance, but as a call from conscience and the moral duty to write about someone marked by integrity, genuine commitment to the public cause, and a rare personal responsibility: caring for her husband, who was ill and much older, until his death a few months ago. Heloísa, who leaves behind an adult son, was a great woman.

According to police records, on the evening of Wednesday, December 7th, a friend, Marco Follmann, went to Heloísa's house in Atibaia, about 50 kilometers from São Paulo, where he lives. Noticing that the dogs were very agitated, he decided to go inside. He found his friend lying face down (prone position), with blister packs of medication next to the bed. In the kitchen, there was an open can of beer and open bottles of liquor. He called the SAMU (emergency medical service), which confirmed her death. Heloísa was buried in the São Sebastião cemetery in Atibaia, the city where she lived for approximately thirty years. The police report also states that, the previous day, she had been admitted to an Emergency Care Unit in the municipality for attempted suicide.

Upon learning the details of the tragedy, I recalled my first contact with Heloísa, in a virtual meeting during the pandemic. At that time, she presented me with documents that pointed to the connection of siblings—also children of Olavo de Carvalho—with a fuel distribution company belonging to the family of the contractor Cecílio do Rêgo Almeida (now deceased), in the state of Paraná. Suspicious of her motives, I questioned why she had decided to expose her own family. It was then that she spoke of her left-leaning political background, similar to that of her father in the 1960s, when he was a member of the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party) and later active in the counterculture movement.

Unlike Olavo, who would become an ideologue of the far right, Heloísa never changed her position and began to denounce what she considered contradictions, lies, and alleged crimes of her father. The break, however, was not solely due to political differences. There were deep resentments, dating back to childhood. Olavo, whom she always referred to by his first name, projected on social media the image of a courageous man and defender of gun ownership. An episode that occurred when Heloísa was about eight years old, however, marked the opposite for her.

On that occasion, Olavo left home with his wife, leaving his children alone. Upon returning, he realized the house had been broken into, but instead of going inside to check if the children were alright, he called the police and remained outside. The children were locked in a room after the thieves had taken everything. “That day I met my father. If I had been responsible, I would have gone inside immediately to see if the children were alright,” he recounted.

It was when she was nearly fifty years old that Heloísa publicly exposed Olavo for the first time, in an open letter published on Facebook in 2017, before the election of Jair Bolsonaro, when he was already an established influencer of the far right.

“Where was the father of the ‘perfect family’ who, when he found out I had been sexually abused, did absolutely nothing and who, about four months ago, even blamed me for the abuse? I think you forgot that I was only 9 years old,” she wrote.

In another passage, he added: “Everything I wrote is a message for you: change while you still have time to transform yourself into a decent human being. And don't say I joined forces with the devil. That has always been your right alone. I don't need to join forces with anyone to talk about you. And you can be sure that I remember much more.”

Olavo didn't change. With Bolsonaro as President, he even recommended ministers and accompanied him on a visit to the White House during Donald Trump's first term. His career was cut short by death, which Heloísa attributed to complications from Covid — a disease whose severity he denied, which, according to her, contributed to hindering the fight against the pandemic in Brazil.

After the open letter, Heloísa intensified her accusations against her father. She was sued and began receiving threats from Olavo's followers and, later, from Bolsonaro. She did not back down. It was she who indicated the location where Fabrício Queiroz, identified as the operator of the kickback scheme involving Flávio and Jair Bolsonaro, was hiding: the office of lawyer Frederico Wassef, in Atibaia.

When the police arrested Queiroz, Heloísa was in front of the office with a friend, squeezing oranges and drinking in front of the cameras. “I do a lot of parallel investigation. I pass it on to journalists, and one or two follow the tips and end up discovering a lot of things,” she said, with a glass in her hand.

The last time I spoke with Heloísa was in Brasília, in May 2024, at a shopping mall café, after she left the Federal Police accompanied by her lawyer, Talitha Camargo. At the time, she had denounced a brother for maintaining a sect allegedly created by Olavo de Carvalho, responsible for recruiting women and distributing child pornography.

Living in financial difficulty, Heloísa had lost teeth and, therefore, wore a mask, even after the end of the pandemic, to hide the gaps in her teeth. She was excited, however, by the promise of a dentist friend to perform free implants.

It's difficult to comprehend the extreme act of the 7th.

A friend recounts that a neighbor, seemingly aligned with the far right, used to provoke her with loud music and insults. Heloísa even sought legal counsel with the intention of suing her. There wasn't time.

According to lawyer Talitha Camargo, who attended her funeral, Heloísa may have ingested an excessive amount of medication in an attempt to sleep, to rest from the constant struggles. Whether or not that was the motivation, the fact is that Heloísa will be missed.

The law firm honored her in a social media post. "We recognize and respect Heloísa's career, a woman who, in her own way, lived in a context of intense debates and who, like many Brazilian women, was involved in the complex struggles for women's rights and democracy in our country," they stated.