or
a woman who had spent the past 25 months in a Brazilian prison,
using a hole in the floor for a toilet and a knee-high spigot
for a shower, Gloria Trevi looked magnificent.
It was February in the Hospital Regional da Saude da Asa
Norte, in Brasília, and the Mexican pop star was propped up by
pillows in bed, flanked by two enormous bouquets of roses. Her
eyes were shadowed, her lips were glossed and the pelo
suelto, or ''untamed hair,'' that gave a title to both her
hit single and her hit movie was brushed out across her chest.
Except for her very obvious pregnancy -- and the two federal
police officers guarding her door -- Trevi could have easily
segued into a photo shoot for one of her pinup calendars.
She got out of bed and dragged a steel chair over to the
window, where she was now backlit by the afternoon sun. She
draped her hair to one side, changed her mind, arranged it
forward again. Hair, makeup, lighting -- perfect. All this
stage-management was bewildering -- she was under guard in a
hospital, after all -- but effective in at least one way: she
looked a decade younger than her 34 years (she claims to be 32)
and unmarked by either the ordeal she'd been through or the one
that was rapidly approaching: later this spring, Trevi could be
sent home to face accusations of rape and kidnapping in what
would undoubtedly be Mexico's Trial of the Century.
''That is why I'm naming my baby Ángel Gabriel,'' Trevi
said, caressing her belly. ''So God will give him wings to fly
away from all these troubles.''
Gloria Trevi has been the biggest name in Mexican entertainment
for more than a decade, the multiplatinum singer who brought
Girl Power to Mexico and made herself an idol to millions of
Latin American teenagers. Following her debut album in 1989, the
''Mexican Madonna'' became a sensation whose every project --
movies, calendars, TV specials, a magazine devoted to all things
Trevi -- both provoked and sold tremendously well.
Trevimania was so intense, in fact, that authorities were
slow to react when stories began circulating in the late 90's
that something dark was going on with all those young girls in
her entourage. Rumor had it that her manager, Sergio Andrade,
was the head of a sex cult that abducted teenage girls. Trevi
was Andrade's henchwoman, some whispered; others claimed that
for all her wealth and she-devil stage antics, Trevi was
actually just Andrade's submissive pet.
But by the time the police set out to sort the villains from
the victims in 1999, Andrade and Trevi had vanished. For more
than a year, while the Mexican courts fielded accusations
against Trevi and Andrade of rape, statutory rape, kidnapping
and corruption of minors, one of the most recognized icons in
Latin America was invisible.
Finally, in January 2000, the police located Trevi and
Andrade in Brazil, in a beachfront apartment on Rio de Janeiro's
Copacabana, along with three teenage sisters and Maria Raquenel
Portillo, a bandmate of Trevi's known as Mary Boquitas. The
teenagers were returned to Mexico, and the three fugitives have
been locked up while Brazil wrestles with Mexico's extradition
request.
''It's all false,'' Trevi said tearfully when we met just
before she gave birth. ''Not a gram of truth.'' The scandalous
claims, she said, have been nothing more than a conspiracy by
television-industry enemies and a gold rush by ''girls who make
book deals, and tell five versions of the same story, and appear
on television with long nails and jewelry and new clothes, and
can suddenly pay off their houses.''
Trevi promised me she would answer any question -- except
one. She would not explain how, after a year in an all-women's
cellblock, she somehow got pregnant. And that child could set
Trevi free: thanks to longstanding custom, Brazil has never
extradited the mother of a child born on Brazilian soil. That
leaves the Brazilian Supreme Court confronting a difficult
decision: respect Mexican wishes and send Trevi home, or respect
national custom and turn her loose.
''Sometimes God writes straightforward in twisted lines,''
Trevi said. She smiled, wiped her tears, rearranged her hair.
''This baby I am expecting is Scripture directly from heaven.''
either Trevi's
lawyers nor the Brazilian police have much use for divine
intervention as an explanation. The lawyers claimed -- and still
do -- that Trevi was raped by prison guards. The police, on the
other hand, insisted that Trevi had impregnated herself with the
sperm of Marcelo Borelli, a notorious Brazilian gangster in the
men's cellblock, near Trevi's. According to the police report,
Trevi chose Borelli because he was marked for death, sure to be
shanked in prison for having tortured and raped a rival's
3-year-old daughter. With Borelli gone, Trevi would never have
to worry about him turning up as a free man and pressing a claim
on the family fortune.
The police report claimed that plastic baggies of Borelli's
semen were smuggled to Trevi inside glasses of warm milk,
thereby keeping it roughly at body temperature. Trevi then
inseminated herself with a syringe she had constructed from a
ballpoint pen. Borelli himself told IstoE, a respected Brazilian
newsmagazine, that he was the mystery child's father. He said he
sent Trevi at least five bags of semen.
Police suggested Trevi meant to follow the lead of Ronnie
Biggs, the Briton who robbed a train in 1963 and then spent
nearly another 30 years free in Rio after fathering a child with
a Brazilian showgirl in 1974. Biggs became an immediate folk
hero in Brazil, thanks to the former colony's soft spot for
outlaws, and his son was given a starring role on a children's
television program.
Trevi's lawyers angrily denied all this. They insisted that
prison guards raped her, then later tried to kill her and
Borelli as a coverup. As evidence, they noted that Borelli was
beaten nearly to death by his fellow prisoners one night when
his cell was inexplicably left unlocked. The day Borelli
returned from the hospital, a burning mattress was stuffed
inside his cell, starting a fire that severely burned him and,
according to Trevi's lawyers, filled the nearby women's cells
with choking smoke. ''There are people in that prison who have
something to hide,'' said Geraldo Magela, one of Trevi's
lawyers. ''They don't care if they have to burn the prison down
to hide it.''
The Supreme Court conducted a special hearing, but Trevi said
she was in too much danger to reveal the father's identity. She
refused even to confirm her lawyers' account that she had been
raped. The reason for her secrecy? Wealth and vulnerability, she
said. As long as she remained in prison, she was at the mercy of
the guards; once she was released, the child's father could
claim that the sex was consensual and argue for partial custody.
If she died, he would then have a claim to her money. So she
wasn't talking.
The Brazilian police, however, tried another means of testing
her story. On the day I was at the hospital to interview Trevi,
her lawyer Magela and I stopped to chat with the hospital
director in his office. Suddenly three men appeared in the
doorway. One flipped open a police ID, then squared his hands on
his hips, pushing back his suit jacket to reveal the pistol
holstered on his waist.
''We need an extraction of amniotic fluid from Trevi,'' the
officer said, apparently assuming that the lawyer and I were
hospital staff. ''Don't tell her what it's for. We want to
perform verifiable DNA testing on the child before it's born.''
''Ay ya!'' Magela exclaimed as he hauled his bulk off the
sofa. ''Absolutely not! That's unconstitutional! It's an
invasion of her privacy.''
''You want an invasion?'' the officer said. ''I've got a van
full of cops outside. We'll take this hospital by force if we
have to.'' Cellphones materialized and everyone started dialing.
Magela hit the Supreme Court on his speed dial; the hospital
director, shaken, called the minister of health. Soon, Magela
cried out -- Ha!'' -- and handed his cellphone to one of the
cops. The court had granted a stay. The cop slapped the
cellphone into Magela's hand and led his partners out.
''Oh, my God,'' Magela moaned, then repeated himself
victoriously: ''O! Deus! Meu!'' His elation was short-lived,
though; by the time we got to Trevi's room, he was preoccupied
again by her legal fight. The problem is, there's no solid
barrier to her immediate extradition, since the law that spared
Ronnie Biggs has since been taken off the books. Now it's just a
matter of sentiment -- albeit a powerful one -- as the Brazilian
government has broadly hinted. ''There was obviously a failure
in police procedures, and now it will be much more complicated
to extradite her,'' a Justice Ministry spokesman, Djalma
Nascimento Jr., told the Brazilian press in the fall, after
Trevi's pregnancy was revealed. ''The child will be a Brazilian
citizen and therefore cannot be extradited. And it is difficult
to imagine extraditing the parent without her child.''
Trevi might win even more sympathy if she were to do what
everyone has been expecting: separate herself from Andrade.
Almost no one has spoken up on his behalf -- including his
brother, Eduardo, a powerful Mexican senator -- and Andrade's
few public statements have been disastrous. In one interview he
admitted to having sex with a 13-year-old girl; in another he
conceded that he might have been a little tough on the girls to
make them better performers. (He was unavailable for this
article, his lawyers said, because of prison restrictions.)
But Trevi has so far remained loyal. When I asked point-blank
if Andrade was domineering, she sighed and said: ''During a
concert once, I was singing 'Los Borregos,' and because I was
dancing so much, my voice started to give out.'' She managed to
hide it, though, by pointing the mike at the crowd and having
concertgoers chant the chorus. ''When I came offstage, everyone
was shouting 'Bravo! Bravo! You are la maxima!'''
Everyone, that is, except Andrade. ''He looked at me and
shook his head. He said, 'It's shameless, to be the highest-paid
female performer in Latin America and have your voice go out
during a song about lambs.' I thought he couldn't tell. But he
knew.'' Andrade woke her up the next morning and made her run 20
times around the town square. ''People were watching me, and
they were all whispering, 'What an inhuman man, making Gloria
Trevi run like that.' But I did it.''
As shby age 5e finished the story, Trevi sat up straight and
threw back her hair. ''Sergio was a very demanding producer, but
they have misinterpreted that brutally,'' she said firmly.
''They have converted him into a kind of hypnotizer. Him into a
hypnotizer, and me into some dumb cow. It's all so false.
Anything I did, I did because I wanted to. That was the price to
be great. Ever since I was 7 years old, I wanted to be great. I
knew what I had to do.''
By age 5, Gloria De Los Angeles Trevino Ruiz had mastered a few
dance routines, thanks to her mother, a former showgirl who
supported the family as a dance teacher. By 7, she was onstage
doing local theater in Monterrey, her hometown not far from the
Texas border. ''The applause just made me crazy,'' Trevi said.
''It was all I wanted to do.''
The only next step, as every Mexican girl with applause in
her ears knows, was to get to Mexico City and fight for a spot
in one of the television training academies. When she turned 13,
according to Trevi, she said goodbye to her mother and four
younger brothers, ignored her abusive, semi-employed father and
set out alone with a single suitcase and a notebook full of her
poetry.
''Mexico is probably unlike any other country in the way it
develops entertainers,'' says Sam Quinones, author of the
cultural study ''True Tales From Another Mexico.'' Young talent
is recruited in the provinces, then taken to Mexico City for
years of training at a TV network ''star factory.'' For decades,
there was only one network, Televisa, so competition to get into
the performance schools was fierce. The start-up of a second
network, TV Azteca, in 1993, has only increased the intensity,
as the two networks now try to outscout each other by signing up
younger and younger performers.
''You don't freelance,'' Quinones says. ''You don't scrounge
around like Madonna, hanging out at clubs and hoping for a
record deal. The Televisa method for creating stars is to
seclude young girls in singing and dancing schools, then have
them emerge a few years later with a new name and appearance.
That's the only way to make it.''
Not surprisingly, it's a system ripe for abuse by the men who
run it, says Judith Enriqueta Chavez-Parks,
the former star known as Ga-Bi.
As a 15-year-old backup singer in the mid-70's, she was offered
a weekly spot on a Sunday variety show. On her first day of
rehearsal, while her mother waited outside, Ga-Bi says
she was raped by one of the producers in his office. ''That was
my first experience as a show-business professional,'' says Chavez-Parks,
who has described the attack in her memoir, ''Como Carne de
Canon'' (''Like Cannon Fodder'').
''Like thousands of other girls in Mexico, I kept my mouth
shut, because that is what we were always taught to do,'' says
Chavez-Parks, now 42. In 1978, after recording several hits for
CBS Records, Ga-Bi was put into the hands of a hot young
producer and classically trained pianist, Sergio Andrade. He was
very controlling, she says, and not just because of his
conservatory background: Andrade and his brother, Eduardo, had
parents whose discipline touched on the perverse. ''His father
would whip him, and then his mother would make him get down on
his knees, kiss his father's hand and say, 'I love you, Papa,'''
Chavez-Parks says.
That upbringing by a domineering father and a submissive
mother is Chavez-Parks's only explanation for the path taken by
Andrade. Both brothers seemed to internalize their father's
sense of command, but in emphatically different fashions:
Eduardo found his way into politics, while Sergio became known
as ''Mr. Midas'' for his knack at turning raw young girls -- and
only young girls -- into gold-record singers.
''But he really was a lovely man,'' Chavez-Parks insists. She
has reason to say so: their studio partnership turned into a
romance that lasted from 1978 until 1985. It finally ended, she
says, because of the teenage girls who had begun following
Andrade around like groupies. ''We were in bed once, and Sergio
said, 'I've got a girl waiting outside who will do anything we
want,''' she recalls. ''That's how I met Gloria.''
After she arrived in Mexico City in 1984, Trevi landed a
six-month scholarship at the Televisa singing academy. On the
day it expired, she learned that Sergio Andrade was putting
together a girl group. Trevi waited in his office lobby until 2
a.m. for her chance to audition. Then she went berserk, figuring
sheer energy was her only chance. It worked. At age 14, Trevi
became the last girl selected for the five-member group,
Boquitas Pintadas, the Little Lipsticked Mouths.
When the Boquitas disbanded in 1988, Trevi approached Andrade
with some songs she'd written. Her first solo album, ''Que Hago
Aqui?'' (''What Am I Doing Here?'') made Mexican pop history
when three of its singles took over the top three spots on the
charts. Everything Trevi turned to after that 1989 debut was
just as successful -- she sold out stadium concerts and had
top-rated TV specials, and her two campy bio-pics, ''Pelo Suelto''
and ''Zapatos Viejos,'' were among the most popular in the
history of Mexican cinema. Her first three albums together sold
more than five million copies, and her calendars with seminude
photos of the star and her backup singers sold more than a
million copies in three years.
A big part of Trevi's appeal was her image as a sort of anti-Ga-Bi.
Suddenly, after decades of saccharine sweethearts, here was a
wild thing belting out anthems of teenage freedom. She stripped
boys to their underwear onstage and whipped them -- so they'll
know how women feel when they're hit,'' as she has put it. She
sang about abortion in her hit ''Chica Embarazada'' (''Pregnant
Girl'') and released an album with the double-entendre title ''Mas
Turbada que Nunca'' (''Crazier Than Ever'' or ''Masturbating
Like Crazy'').
To Americans jaded by Madonna and Marilyn Manson, a topless
girl wearing bandoliers of condoms across her chest may be no
more exotic than a tequila commercial, but in a Catholic country
with only a single, conservative TV network, Gloria Trevi was
pure black magic. ''The thing about Gloria Trevi is she's
honest,'' Enrique Fernandez, a culture critic, has written.
''Here's a girl who likes sex and says that it's O.K.'' People
magazine called her ''the hottest Latin lover since Valentino.''
She became known as La Atrevida, the Bold One. Academics like
Carlos Monsivais and journalists like Elena Poniatowska argued
that Trevi's fresh thinking and chaotic self-expression were
good for Mexican girlhood. Not that Mexican girlhood needed any
encouragement -- Trevi imitators were everywhere, with their
idol's light-socketed hair and torn party dresses. As the star
brought more and more of these Trevites onstage, each concert
furthered the impression that she and her army of look-alikes
were taking the nation.
he trouble began
after Trevi brought these star-struck teenagers into her
entourage. In 1998, Andrade's former publicist, Ruben Avina, and
one of Andrade's ex-wives, a young singer named Aline Hernandez,
published ''Aline: La Gloria por el Infierno,'' (''To Heaven
Through Hell''). In it they depict Andrade as a wandering
pedophile who used Trevi's concerts as girl-hunting expeditions
and made his singers live together in a communal house under his
rules. Beatings were delivered for disobedience.
When she was a 13-year-old auditioning for Andrade in 1989,
Hernandez says in the book, Trevi took her into a side room and
told her to strip naked because ''we need to see what parts of
your body need work.'' When Hernandez grew sick of being just
one of Andrade's multiple sex partners and threatened to leave,
he offered to marry her. They wed in 1990, when she was 15 and
he was 34. Although Andrade ''mesmerized her,'' she writes, the
marriage lasted one month. Hernandez returned home to her
parents in Mexico City but did not mention the abuse because of
''shame and confusion.''
Trevi responded to the book by hitting the talk-show circuit
with a vengeance, dismissing Hernandez as a jealous singer and
bitter divorcee. Trevi wasn't romantically involved with
Andrade, she claimed; she was just speaking up for a good man
who happened to be sick with cancer in Europe (which only Trevi
seemed to know about). ''I haven't been 'kidnapped'; far from
it, I'm here, I'm sane and I don't belong to any 'satanic
cult,''' she said in one TV interview, laughing. ''If anyone
believes those stories, they're reading too much science
fiction.'' The public believed her, even though Andrade remained
out of sight.
But just as the scandal seemed ready to die, a family in
Chihuahua received a phone call from Spain. In 1994, Miguel and
Teresa Yapor enrolled their 12-year-old daughter, Karina, in
Andrade's performing-arts school. After Hernandez's book came
out in 1998, Karina disappeared and stopped calling home. The
next year, in April, the Yapors were notified that their
daughter had abandoned a severely malnourished infant at a
Madrid hospital. The Yapors recovered their grandchild, but
Karina was still missing. Her parents filed a criminal complaint
in Chihuahua accusing Trevi and Andrade of kidnapping and
corruption of a minor.
When Trevi and Andrade could not be found, an international
manhunt was begun. Just months after she'd appeared, giggling,
on nationwide TV, Trevi was now on a Wanted poster. Several
months later, Karina called her parents from Brazil and begged
them to drop the charges. They refused, so she and another of
Andrade's protegees, Marlene Calderon, returned to Mexico to
plead her case. As soon as they arrived, the 19-year-old
Calderon was arrested for kidnapping.
Interpol searched Brazil's visa records and found Trevi at an
address in Rio. She was gone by the time the police arrived, but
she was eventually located a few blocks away, living with
Andrade, Mary Boquitas and three young sisters. Two of them,
both teenagers, had babies they claimed were Andrade's. With no
charges against them, the three girls were sent home to Mexico,
but on their arrival, the eldest was charged with kidnapping and
locked up until she turned state's evidence.
The suspects were in custody, but the Mexican authorities had
a problem: all they had was a book by an angry ex-wife and four
girls who swore they hadn't been kidnapped. Karina Yapor even
ran away from home and told a Mexican paper that she was still
in love with Andrade. Soon, though, other girls began coming
forward. A former Guerrero state beauty queen told the police
that Andrade had raped her in front of the other girls. A girl
who had joined Andrade's circle after participating in a Trevi
look-alike contest in Santiago, Chile, said that when she
refused to have sex with Andrade, he whipped her with a utility
cord and tore off her clothes. She and her sister, who had also
joined the group, eventually escaped, she said, and made their
way back to Chile.
Finally, Karina Yapor had a change of heart. She filed
charges of her own and in 2001 released ''Revelaciones,'' a book
that portrays Andrade as a violent cult overlord. ''Sex and
punishment took place daily,'' Yapor writes. ''That was our way
of life.'' For three years she often had group sex with Andrade
and two other girls, she claims, and when she became pregnant,
Andrade demanded she abandon her baby ''for the good of the
group.''
Trevi also had a baby by Andrade, Yapor writes, but the
infant girl choked to death on vomit when she was a 1-month-old
in Brazil. (Trevi admitted that a child of hers died in Brazil,
but she would not identify the father. Her lawyers, however,
have said that it was Andrade.) The loss devastated Trevi,
according to Yapor's account, but that's not the face the star
showed the public when her run finally ended. In news photos,
she can be seen smiling and blowing kisses from the back of a
squad car.
From her seat by the hospital window, Trevi scornfully dismissed
the protegees who have turned against her. The girls were
coerced by imprisonment, she argued, or contradicted themselves,
or were cashing in: ''I'm sorry, but I know that a person who
has been abused doesn't go and tell her story in front of the
cameras like that, with a lack of shame.''
But if she tried to prove that in a Mexican court, Trevi
claimed, her life would be in danger. She didn't leave Mexico as
a fugitive, she explained, but as an insider with dangerous
information about the entertainment industry. Network executives
and their political cronies knew she would expose their
corruption, she said, so they had initiated this smear campaign.
''Do you know what would happen to me if I went back to
Mexico?'' she asked. ''Activists are killed in Mexico. That's
why I hang on here with my fingernails. If I go back and speak
up, I could be found dead in my cell, and what would they say?
'She committed suicide.' Who would investigate it? Who would
report on it? Nobody, because those are the same people who fear
what I have to say.'' Because she has been a victim of power in
both Mexico and Brazil, Trevi's lawyers have insisted, she
should be released on human rights grounds and granted political
asylum.
Trevi, however, never said anything about corruption or
conspiracies until after her arrest. And if she were truly in
danger, why did she take five teenagers on the run with her?
Possible corruption in the entertainment world also does not
explain Andrade's repeated problems with adolescent girls. As
for that, Trevi said, it's really a matter of context. ''In the
United States, a minor is a minor, and that's a crime,'' she
explained. ''In Mexico, if the minor is over 12 or 14, it's not
a violation, and you can't say anything.''
It was getting dark, and Trevi had grown tired. She asked if I
would like to hear a song she wrote in prison. I was surprised
to find that she has a beautiful, delicate voice.
I want to take the mountains from your shoulders,
And give you rest.
Because there's no one like you,
There's no one, like you.
A patter of applause came from the door where pregnant
mothers from other rooms were gathering and the two police
officers were softly clapping. Her eyes glistening, Trevi
dedicated the next song to all their future babies.
One week later, on Feb. 18, Ángel Gabriel Trevi was born.
The Brazilian police seized the placenta, and 75 prison guards
and police officers offered their DNA for paternity testing. But
one volunteered sample cleared them all, including Borelli: the
father, investigators say, is Sergio Andrade.
The police now believe that Trevi bribed guards for time
alone with Andrade in an attorney-client conference room.
Trevi's lawyers have demanded independent DNA tests, claiming
that the government doctored the results to hide its complicity
in Trevi's rape. But perhaps Trevi already hinted at the truth
herself, in her song about lifting the mountains from a dear
friend's shoulders. Because Ángel Gabriel was born on Brazilian
soil, Sergio Andrade may also be the parent of a Brazilian
child. If so, he now has as strong a claim to freedom as Trevi.
Christopher McDougall is a writer at large for Philadelphia
magazine.
