Maria Christina: ‘Valdemar said Bolsonaro was stupid’ – 02/04/2023 – Mônica Bergamo

Maria Christina Mendes Caldeira is the first to admit: she was born to be a socialite. Coming from a family of contractors in São Paulo, she had an exquisite education. She learned several languages ​​and traveled the world. “All this to someday be the ideal woman of a rich and powerful man”, she says.

She had three husbands, and the third fits this description: he is federal deputy Valdemar Costa Neto, leader of Centrão and president of the PL, current party of Jair Bolsonaro. By the way, it was thanks to him that the name of Maria Christina began to appear in the press outside the society columns.

Already separated from the parliamentarian, she gave a scathing statement to the CPI of Mensalão, in 2005, denouncing fraud that she would have witnessed while they were married. Valdemar ended up being sentenced to seven years and ten months in prison, and arrested in 2012. In 2015, he was pardoned by the STF (Federal Supreme Court) and resumed his political career.

Maria Christina moved to the United States in January 2017, where she claims to have been granted political asylum. “There are 22 criminal complaints filed against me by the PL. I suffered three car accidents. In one of them, in May 2009, I overturned four times, after being hit by a vehicle traveling at more than 100 km per hour. And I had a revolver pointed at my head ten times. It was a modus operandi. Before each operation broke out, someone would threaten me: ‘If you say anything, we’ll kill you’.”

But despite the threats she says she has suffered, she has always spoken out. And she still speaks today. In a live broadcast on social media on November 18 last year, Maria Christina again attacked her ex-husband. She was outraged by the request that the PL had made to the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) to disregard the votes cast in “old” ballot boxes and count only those from the “auditable” ballot boxes, which would supposedly give Bolsonaro victory in the second round of elections. presidential.

“Hey, Valdemar, spare me, won’t you, darling? I’m your ex-wife. I was married to the owner of the Congress brothel and I know how you move”, she says in the video. And she finishes: “I’m going to make your life hell”.

Maria Christina met Valdemar in 1992, when she was already separated from her first husband, businessman Fady Saad Tabet. The meeting took place at the Roppongi restaurant, in São Paulo, where she was going to have dinner with a friend. Valdemar was instantly enchanted, says Christina. But it was not reciprocated. At the time, she was dating Gilberto Miranda, a former senator from Amazonas.

“I would visit Gilberto in Congress, and Valdemar would follow me through the corridors”, he says. For years, he says, the deputy insisted on sending flowers and dinner invitations. “Once in a while I would go, but I would take a friend along to see if he was interested in her.” They ended up getting out of sight. Maria Christina married American lobbyist James Rubin, then spokesperson for the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State, and moved in with him in the US. Rubin would later spend 20 years married to CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour.

In 1999, separated again, she returned to Brazil and asked Valdemar for help to repatriate furniture and personal objects, which were stored in Miami. “He ran the airports,” she says. The two went out to dinner and, this time, there was an atmosphere. “Like any good politician, Valdemar is very seductive. He is not a cultured man, but he is focused, smart, very intelligent. And he was absolutely crazy about me.”

With the biological clock ticking away, Maria Christina felt it was time to settle down. “I wanted to have a child, I wanted to have a family,” she says. The two moved in together in 2002 and made their marriage official the following year in Las Vegas.

But they weren’t even married when they made the news together for the first time. It was on January 4, 2003, when they were returning by jet from Buriti Alegre (GO), where they had attended a party hosted by the then PT treasurer, Delúbio Soares, a few days after Lula’s (PT) first inauguration as President of the Republic.

The plane slid over a sheet of water on the runway at Congonhas airport, in São Paulo, fell from a ravine and only stopped on the sidewalk of Avenida Washington Luís, injuring a popcorn maker and damaging the popcorn cart. Valdemar and Maria Christina ran out of the aircraft and took a taxi, without going through the airport terminal. “Valdemar was drunk”, laughs Maria Christina. “He couldn’t do an interview in that state.”

For some time, Maria Christina hosted the meetings that Valdemar held with politicians at his home in Brasília. “I served passion fruit juice made with exorcised water. It wasn’t holy, it was actually exorcised, by a priest from Brasilia, one of the few exorcist priests that existed in Brazil.”

The idyll, according to her, began to dissipate in February 2004, during an official trip to Taiwan. “We were guests of the government there, other politicians were there too”, she says. “At a luncheon at the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the minister asked me to translate into Portuguese what he was going to say in English to Valdemar. And I almost fell over backwards. The guy said: ‘We gave you US$ 2 million [cerca de R$ 11 milhões pelo câmbio atual] to open a Taiwanese commercial office in Brazil. And to this day, nothing’. Valdemar had pocketed the money. I had gone to sleep with Martin Luther King and woken up with Al Capone.”

“That was the first ‘red flag’ [bandeira vermelha, em inglês, expressão que significa sinal de alerta]. From then on, I started to get involved with everything. She would see a suitcase and ask: ‘Where did it come from? Where you go? What have inside?’.”

“At Easter that year, we went to Punta del Este [no Uruguai] with a group of friends. When I came down from the room and entered the hotel’s casino, they told me: ‘Valdemar has already lost a million dollars’. I was outraged, I wanted to leave. But he complained: ‘Where are you going with my luck, you sod?’ The marriage ended there. I went up to the room, he followed and even slapped me. Then he went back to the casino and spent the whole night gambling.”

“We broke up for good in June 2004. To make a fuss, Valdemar had the light cut off at my house. He did, right on a pole. So I hired a generator truck, the kind you use at parties.”

“The following year, Roberto Jefferson called me to testify at the Mensalão CPI. He wanted to screw with José Dirceu and José Múcio Monteiro [atual ministro da Defesa do governo Lula]. He sent me a script, but I’m not an actress. He also sent a suitcase with R$ 700 thousand. Of course I didn’t accept. If I wanted money, I would have married a European prince.”

“Lúcio Funaro tried to buy me so I could speak ill of Valdemar, but I only speak the truth”, she says, referring to the money changer who was involved in several corruption scandals and ended up becoming a whistleblower in Operation Lava Jato.

“Lúcio was the most dangerous of all. Remember the lawyer Beatriz Catta Preta? One day she got home, and there was Lúcio playing with her son in the living room. With a revolver in his hand.” Maria Christina also claims that Catta Preta, defender of several Lava Jato defendants, abandoned her career claiming that she received veiled death threats – but this is contested by the lawyer (see below).

Valdemar’s ex-wife guarantees that she doesn’t resent the congressman —”he was the greatest teacher I’ve ever had”—, but her own family. According to her, her two brothers and her uncle are maneuvering in court so that she does not have access to her father’s inheritance, who died in 2009. “I am a victim of patrimonial violence”, she complains.

She even suspects that her relatives are in collusion with her ex-husband, who would have influence in the São Paulo Court of Justice, where the estate’s action is taking place.

“Valdemar put a lot of things in the party’s name that were mine before we got married. And he still wants more.” The PL files a lawsuit to receive BRL 408,000 from the estate of Maria Christina’s father. The amount would have been spent by her on various expenses, during the period in which she was married to the deputy.

“Ciro Nogueira, Roberto Jefferson, Valdemar, they are all the same. They act in the same way. They are not politicians. They are businessmen.”

And what does she think of the deputy’s recent alliance with the now ex-president? “Valdemar always said that Bolsonaro is stupid and from the lower clergy. But he made a political account. Today he is leading these far right crazies. He is an eagle, he already knew how many votes he would get in each ballot box even before the election. But I don’t know how long this arrangement will last. After all, Bolsonaro is equivalent to five women with PMS at the same time.”

Maria Christina’s rotary machine gun also hits Michelle Bolsonaro. In a live, she even suggested that the former first lady, years ago, had a relationship with Valdemar before marrying Bolsonaro, in 2007. The speech had wide repercussions. “He took some outings,” she repeated to the column. “Michelle was what people call Maria Emenda. Girls who come from around Brasília, or even from the interior, after powerful politicians in the capital.” And she shoots: “Everything that Bolsonaro has as a donkey, she doesn’t have.”

Today Maria Christina Mendes Caldeira defines herself as a political activist. She is also a realtor in Miami, but complains that the market is at a standstill. In times of greater financial tightness, she even worked as an Uber driver. The function yielded an article in Correio Braziliense, which, according to her, ended up harming her.

“I went for a job interview at one of the biggest real estate agencies in Miami, and they turned me down. They said that the fact that I drove an Uber was very bad. An honest job! Does that mean that it would have been ok if I had accepted millions of bribes?”

His plans for 2023 include a political science course at American University, where he says he won a scholarship. But first he will remove a lump from a breast. “I need to take better care of my health. My cortisol level is very high, typical of people who have lived through situations of extreme stress, such as a war.”

Politically, Maria Christina describes herself only as “pro-democracy”. She declared support for Lula in the last elections, but says she is neither left nor right. “And, by chance, do left and right exist in Brazil?”

OTHER SIDE

The column sought out the people cited by Maria Christina Mendes Caldeira to comment on her statements. Until the publication of this text, the advisors of Valdemar Costa Neto and Michelle Bolsonaro had not commented.

Lúcio Funaro and Beatriz Catta Preta categorically denied the episode in which the lawyer caught the money changer playing with her son, with a revolver in his hand.

“I never received death threats or anything like that”, says Catta Preta. “I never stopped advocating. I only left Lava Jato cases to preserve my family and clients. Just like I never left the country, as was reported at the time. I continue my work as always”, she says.

Funaro is even more blunt. “As for buying Mrs Maria Christina Mendes Caldeira, in my life I have never bought second-rate merchandise with an expired period, which is the case with her. As for her just speaking the truth, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard such rubbish big.”

The Court of Justice of São Paulo, in turn, states that the judge Luiz Antonio Costa “has no connection with the PL and has never been affiliated with any party”. And he adds: “Judges are prevented by the Organic Law of the Judiciary from expressing their opinion on cases in progress”.

The adviser to former congressman Roberto Jefferson says that “Roberto will not speak out, as he is in prison”.

The column also sought out lawyer Eduardo Lazareschi, who defends Maria Christina’s brothers and uncle, but had no response.