Imprisoned since July 2017, accused of purposely infecting his sexual partners with the HIV virus, the minister of the Federal Supreme Court, Gilmar Mendes, denied the defense request for freedom from Rio businessman Renato Peixoto Leal Filho. In the decision, Gilmar says that the way the businessman acted and the number of women he infected, represents a high degree of danger to society if Peixoto is free. “The dangerousness of the agent is evident from the modus operandi and the number of infected victims. In this sense, only precautionary custody can prevent the repeated commission of new crimes,” he says. Imprisoned since July, after a month on the run, Renato has been the target of investigations since August 2015, when one of the women who accuse him of intentionally transmitting the agent that causes AIDS, sought out the police to report the crime. According to the report of Peixoto's victims, he approached them on social media and convinced them to leave. Later, without informing them about their HIV status, they encouraged them to have sex without a condom. The businessman's victims gathered audio recordings of threats made by him and videos, all of which were handed over to the police. At the time of his arrest, the accused confessed, in an interview with the newspaper Extra, that he was HIV positive and had transmitted the virus to ex-partners. He denied, however, the accusations that he insisted on having sex without a condom and without any kind of warning about his HIV status. According to Brazilian law, intentionally transmitting the HIV virus to another can result in up to 4 years in prison.
