Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship Mediumship, divination, and fortune-telling Abadiânia, Goiás, Brazil · 2019

Brazil: 'João de Deus' — the medium whose healing consultations produced hundreds of complainants

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

  • 2026

    Aggregate sentence reduced from ~489 to ~211 years; STJ review pending — NOT final.

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

self-proclaimed medium and curandeiro of the Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola, Abadiânia

Organization

Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola, Abadiânia

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

CORE, and the strongest healer-authority nexus in the corpus: hundreds of women travelled to him because he was believed to heal, and the assaults happened inside the consultations that belief brought them to.

  • Spiritual healing or treatment
  • Guru or spiritual-teacher authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2019-12-01 · convictions across seventeen actions; aggregate reduced on appeal; further appeals pending

    Goiás courts; Tribunal de Justiça de Goiás. João Teixeira de Faria, known as João de Deus, was first sentenced in December 2019 for four rapes, and was ultimately convicted across seventeen criminal actions arising from abuse of women who came to him for spiritual healing at Abadiânia. In 2026 the Goiás high court reduced his aggregate sentence from roughly 489 years to around 211 years; several cases remain under special-appeal review at the Superior Tribunal de Justiça.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • abuse committed during 'passes' and spiritual consultations
  • international reputation as a healer drawing women seeking cures

Cited record

Sources

official court release verdict release Tribunal de Justiça de Goiás: all actions judged at first instance.

The state court's own release.

legal news court reporting appellate outcome report Direito News: the 2026 appellate reduction explained.

Legal-press report of the appellate outcome.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Retrieval
2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis
https://www.direitonews.com.br/2026/05/quase-480-211-anos-entenda-pena-joao-de-deus-foi-reduzida-pela-metade.html Corpus classification: legal-news-court-reporting; evidentiary role: appellate-outcome-report. SHA-256 6b70c5463a53b1a806a3a2633d5340fc06c0d3cfc728e37b11ee930f6871f178
Retrieval
2026-07-20 · Preserved
Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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