Uncovering modern slavery in D.C.’s suburbs

How a reclusive heiress’s past in suburban D.C. sparked a true-crime sensation in Brazil — and a national reckoning over modern-day slavery and the status of household servants. 

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Margarida Bonetti was a mysterious figure in São Paulo, Brazil, for more than two decades. She was often seen walking her dogs (Ebony and Ivory) through the streets of the Higienópolis neighborhood or peeking through the stained-glass windows of her crumbling mansion — her face covered in a layer of white cream. 

Journalist Chico Felitti couldn’t stop thinking of the woman rattling around her abandoned house, and wanted to know her life’s story. A story that has now become an obsession in Brazil. 

In the Portuguese-language podcast “A Mulher da Casa Abandonada,” or “The Woman in the Abandoned House,” Chico Felitti tells Margarida Bonetti’s story — from privileged daughter, to expat, to accused criminal and international fugitive. 

The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia dug deeper into Margarida’s past, and in hundreds of pages of court documents discovered some surprising names, such as now-Supreme Court Justice Brett  M. Kavanaugh. 

Manuel Roig-Franzia walks us through what he learned from Chico Felitti’s podcast and his own investigation into the life of Margarida Bonetti.