Indigenous Amazon tribe says New York Times story led to its members being smeared as porn addicts

This June 22, 2019, file photo shows the exterior of the New York Times building in New York. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

LOS ANGELES — An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography.

The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles.

It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process.

The suit says the Times’ June 2024 story by reporter Jack Nicas on how the group was handling the introduction of satellite service through Elon Musk’s Starlink “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography.”

“These statements were not only inflammatory but conveyed to the average reader that the Marubo people had descended into moral and social decline as a direct result of internet access,” an amended version of the lawsuit filed Thursday says. “Such portrayals go far beyond cultural commentary; they directly attack the character, morality, and social standing of an entire people, suggesting they lack the discipline or values to function in the modern world.”

In a statement to The Associated Press, a Times spokesperson said: “Any fair reading of this piece shows a sensitive and nuanced exploration of the benefits and complications of new technology in a remote Indigenous village with a proud history and preserved culture. We intend to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”

The theme of Nicas’ story was that after less than a year of service, the community was now facing the same kinds of struggles with the pervasive effects of the internet and the proliferation of smartphones that much of the world has dealt with for years.

Nicas listed a broad range of those challenges: “teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.”

He later wrote that a tribal leader “is most unsettled by the pornography. He said young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a stunning development for a culture that frowns on kissing in public.”

The piece makes no other mention of porn, but that aspect of the story was amplified and aggregated by other outlets including TMZ, which ran a story and accompanying video headlined, “Elon Musk’s Starlink Hookup Leaves A Remote Tribe Addicted To Porn.”

The suit says the video segment “falsely framed the Marubo Tribe as having descended into moral collapse.”

Messages seeking comment from TMZ and Yahoo were not immediately answered.

The misperceptions brought on by the aggregation and repackaging of the story led the Times to publish a follow-up.

“The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography,” Nicas wrote in the the second story. “There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article.”

That did not satisfy the tribe, which says in the lawsuit that it “failed to acknowledge the role the NYT itself played in fueling the defamatory narrative. Rather than issuing a retraction or apology, the follow-up downplayed the original article’s emphasis on pornography by shifting blame to third-party aggregators.”

Nicas wrote that he spent a week with the Marubo tribe. The lawsuit says that while he was invited for a week, he spent less than 48 hours in the village, “barely enough time to observe, understand, or respectfully engage with the community.

The lawsuit was first reported by Courthouse News.

The plaintiffs also include community leader Enoque Marubo and Brazilian journalist and sociologist Flora Dutra, both of whom appeared in the story.

Both were instrumental in bringing the tribe the internet connection, which they said has had many positive effects including facilitating emergency medicine and the education of children.

They cited the TMZ video, which shows them setting up antennas for the connection, as creating the “unmistakable impression” that the two “had introduced harmful, sexually explicit material into the community and facilitated the alleged moral and social decay.”

The lawsuit seeks at least $180 million, including both general and punitive damages, from each of the defendants.

“The fallout from the publication was not limited to public perception,” the suit says, “it destroyed lives, institutions, and culturally significant projects.”

Andrew Dalton, The Associated Press