Glenn Greenwald Describes ‘Harrowing’ Armed Robbery: ‘I Was Relieved Their Motive Was to Steal’
Just one day before Glenn Greenwald’s birthday this year, he was robbed by five men at gunpoint.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and political commentator described the “harrowing” experience in an interview with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of The Interview podcast.
One night in March, Greenwald was at a farm house about an hour from his home in Rio de Janeiro, a place his family would escape to during the pandemic. At around 9:30 p.m., his dogs started “barking incessantly,” which isn’t typical, so he went outside to find out why.
“As soon as I went outside, there were three men wearing masks, not like generous Covid masks, scary horror film black masks covering their faces,” Greenwald said. The men were pointing guns at him.
“They ordered me into this room where I saw that two more armed men had already detained the security person, an off duty cop that was with me that night,” he continued. “And they kept us hostage for about an hour.”
Greenwald is used to being under threat. His reporting on corruption in Brazil has turned him into a target of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. He was even charged with cybercrimes last year, an indictment that was decried as an attack on free press, and was fortunately tossed by a judge soon after.
Even still, Greenwald said he has not left his house in more than a year without armed security. He was relieved, as a result, to find that the attack in March was a simple matter of theft.
“I was very relieved that it was clear from the start that their motive was just to steal as opposed to some targeted political assassination,” he added. “But it was very, very harrowing as an experience.”
Greenwald is based in Rio with his two kids and husband, David Miranda, who is a member of Congress in Brazil. Fortunately, the rest of Greenwald’s family was still in Rio on the night of the attack.
Greenwald offered some context to the robbery:
Brazil has always been a country plagued by extraordinarily high levels of crime, even before the Covid pandemic in 2018 and 2019, the chances that if you were a Rio de Janeiro city police officer, you would be killed is higher than the chances that a US soldier occupying Iraq at the height of the conflict in 2005, 2006 would be killed. So there’s war zone levels of violence. It has obviously been severely exacerbated by the covid pandemic that has caused already people who milled by the millions who are barely hanging on to lose whatever sustenance they had that has caused them to resort to crime. You know, and we have been targeted with a lot of very specific threats about our family as a result of the work that we had to take very seriously.
Greenwald and McLaughlin also discussed the Trump and Biden administrations, his media criticism, and why he appears on Fox News.
Download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
