28/04/2026
You can hear the whole story in episode 110 of A Trial by Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts (link in bio).
Born into poverty in one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous favelas, Flordelis dos Santos de Souza clawed her way out not through luck or privilege, but through her faith in God — and she made it her mission to bring as many people with her as she could. By 2019, she was a celebrated gospel singer, a renowned evangelical pastor, a sitting member of Brazil’s Congress, and the mother of fifty-five adopted children she had pulled off the streets and called her own. She was proof that God was real and that He showed up for the forgotten. She was, by every measure that mattered in evangelical Brazil, a living saint. But on the morning of June 16, 2019, her husband was found sh*t 18 times in their garage — and the story Flordelis told about what happened that night would begin to unravel almost immediately. Because the miracle, it turned out, had a very dark foundation. And the saint? She was anything but.
