A Brazilian Amazon has sued the New York Times, claiming that the US daily newspaper portrayed its tribe members asbeing addicted to porn after gaining internet access, a report by the Guardian stated.
The Marubo tribe of 2,000 people who live in the remote Javari valley has filed a defamation lawsuit in Los Angeles against the newspaper and sought $180 million in damages. It also named TMZ and Yahoo in the lawsuit, accusing them of amplifying the report.
The lawsuit says the 2024 story spoke of how the group was introduced to the internet through Elon Musk’s Starlink and “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography”.
“These statements were not only inflammatory but conveyed to the average reader that the Marubo people had descended into moral and social decline as a direct result of internet access. Such portrayals go far beyond cultural commentary; they directly attack the character, morality, and social standing of an entire people, suggesting they lack the discipline or values to function in the modern world,” the lawsuit read.
The New York Times has stated in a statement to the Associated Press that it intends to defend against the lawsuit, claiming that a “fair reading of this piece shows a sensitive and nuanced exploration” of the internet by the tribe.
However, once the story went viral with an emphasis on pornography, the NYT published a follow-up, which read: “The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article.”
But this failed to appease the tribe, which said that “rather than issuing a retraction or apology, the follow-up downplayed the original article’s emphasis on pornography by shifting blame to third-party aggregators.”
The lawsuit also said that the article’s author claimed to have stayed with the community for a week but only spent 48 hours with them, which was not enough to “respectfully engage” with them.
Community leader Enoque Marubo and Brazilian journalist and sociologist Flora Dutra, who were instrumental in bringing the tribe the internet connection, said that it has had many positive effects, including facilitating emergency medicine and the education of children.
“The fallout from the publication was not limited to public perception,” the suit said, “it destroyed lives, institutions, and culturally significant projects.”
