Safra’s 2011 book was banned in Brazil over allegations that it defamed the dead. The court battle landed me in the middle of a national debate on the legality of unauthorized biographies. Brazil’s constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech, but the Civil Code protects the right to privacy and prohibits the dissemination of any personal information that can “damage the honor” of an individual. In the past, some of the country’s biggest celebrities have been able to use this right to privacy to ban unauthorized biographies of themselves before they even hit the shelves. My publisher faced a $50-per-book fine if “Gilded Lily” showed up for sale in Brazil. Incidentally, “Gilded Lily” was never published in Brazil nor was it translated into Portuguese. But that didn’t stop the Brazilian court from serving me in both Brazil and the US, and seeking a global ban of my work. Just to make sure that I got the message, I was served twice: In New York, through letters rogatory — an official request from a foreign court to the Department of Justice — and in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre during that city’s international book festival when two process servers showed up at my hotel with a sheaf of documents as thick as an old New York City phone book. The whole process was so unsettling that I haven’t returned to Brazil, a country I Ioved and where I worked as a foreign correspondent for more than seven years. Musk is enmeshed in a similar battle, with far higher stakes. Like the author, Elon Musk’s X was also banned in Brazil, and is now inaccessible to its 215 million inhabitants. REUTERS