BJJ World Champion Brenda Larissa Says It Started When She Was 12 — And Her Sister Was Next

She said he told her she would have a great future.

Brenda Larissa was 12. Melqui Galvão was one of Brazil's most prominent BJJ coaches. He came with equipment, sponsorships, competition fees, and a school scholarship for her and her single mother. He told her that if she dedicated herself, she would be able to help her mother someday. The pitch landed because it was real. He delivered on all of it.

Then he told her the support wasn't free.

On May 5, Larissa released a video statement detailing what followed: 14 years of abuse, starting when she was 12. She said Galvão forced her to date a boy from the academy as cover, so his wife wouldn't suspect anything. The relationship was a prop. The sport was the stage.

Then her sister came through the same door.

"He abused my sister too," Larissa said publicly. Both sisters have filed formal complaints. Her sister has returned to jiu-jitsu as an adult, purple belt in BJJ and green belt in judo. That she came back to the art that was used against her is something. What it took to get there is her story to tell.

After Larissa moved away, Galvão sent her a text with a childhood photo of her attached. The message: "I'm sorry I wasn't the father you should have had."

He never stopped seeing himself as her protector. He just never stopped hiding what the protection cost.

Who Galvão Was

Galvão wasn't some fringe coach operating outside the sport's infrastructure. He was one of Brazil's most prominent, with access to federations, competitions, sponsorship pipelines, and the networks that move talented young athletes into careers. Larissa's path to a world championship ran through him. Her family's economic security ran through him. For a 12-year-old in that position, "no" isn't a neutral answer. It has a price.

He was arrested on April 28, 2026. Charges include statutory rape of a person under 14, sexual misconduct without consent, and unauthorized access to electronic devices. Police identified at least three alleged victims. One was 12 years old when the abuse began.

The IBJJF and CBJJ permanently banned him from all sanctioned events within days. Right call, made quickly. What a lifetime ban can't answer is what changes structurally, so the next person with this kind of resource control over young athletes can't do the same thing.

The prominence of Galvão's position in Brazilian jiu-jitsu made the case particularly significant and damaging. He wasn't an obscure instructor at a small academy—he operated at the highest levels of the sport, with access to elite competitions, talent development networks, and the trust of families who saw him as a gatekeeper to their children's athletic futures. This level of institutional access meant that his abuse wasn't confined to a single academy or region. It cut across multiple competitive circles and reached into the lives of families who believed they were trusting their children with someone vetted by the sport's most respected hierarchies.

The structural reality that made Galvão dangerous is what persists long after his arrest. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, particularly in Brazil where the sport originated and where most elite athletes develop, young competitors are often economically dependent on their coaches in ways that don't exist in many Western sports. The cost of gi uniforms, competition registration, travel to tournaments, and private instruction can be prohibitive for families without resources. A coach who covers these costs doesn't just provide opportunity—they become the only pathway available. When that same coach is also the authority figure, the sponsor, the connection to further opportunities, and often the only adult in a young athlete's life offering consistent attention, the power dynamic isn't just imbalanced. It's totalizing.

The Volume

After the arrest, Nicholas Meregali became an informal intake point for victims who reached out. He listened. He talked to them. The volume broke him.

"Talking with women who were assaulted, abused, at 12, 13, 14, 10 years old," Meregali said. "It is frightening, it drains you. I feel like my heart is on the floor."

He had to step back. "I cannot handle this situation anymore."

When a prominent athlete walking away from victim intake is itself a news story, that's a volume problem. Meregali's breakdown wasn't a character flaw or lack of commitment. It was a measure of scale. He discovered, in real time, that the scope of alleged abuse connected to one coach extended far beyond what had been initially disclosed. The number of people reaching out, the ages at which they experienced trauma, and the repeated patterns across accounts created a psychological burden that a single person, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot sustain alone.

This matters because it reveals something the initial arrest couldn't: Galvão wasn't an isolated predator. He was a systemic one. Isolated predators harm individuals. Systemic ones establish patterns that become normalized within environments. The fact that multiple victims existed, that multiple people knew or suspected, and that the sport's structure continued to enable his access to vulnerable athletes—these aren't coincidences. They're features of an ecosystem that prioritizes competitive success and coach authority over athlete safety.

Lívia Barasine, a two-time World Cup champion at brown belt, also came forward. "I was the victim of a sexual crime committed by someone I admired," she said. "I saw this person as a leader, as an example to follow." She described psychological harm, physical violation, and active intimidation to prevent her from reporting.

Barasine's statement added another layer to the picture. She wasn't a young, economically desperate athlete at the beginning of her career. She was already accomplished, already successful. If a world champion could be silenced through intimidation, the power dynamics cutting across the sport weren't incidental. They were foundational. The threat of losing access to competitions, sponsorships, training opportunities, or social standing within the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community could silence even people who had already achieved elite status.

Every account follows the same shape. Trust first. Then control. Then silence, enforced from the inside. The abuse didn't need force. It needed authority over what the victim couldn't afford to lose. The methodology was consistent across cases because the structure that enabled it was consistent. A coach doesn't abuse an athlete he can't control. He can't control an athlete who has alternative sources of opportunity, financial support, or social validation. Strip those alternatives away—make yourself the only person who can provide what an athlete needs—and control becomes automatic. Resistance carries a tangible, calculable cost.

What the Sport Needs to Sit With

Mica Galvão, Melqui's son and the 2024 Super Grand Slam winner, dissolved BJJ College and rebranded as Mika Jiu-Jitsu. He said in a statement that he is still processing what happened and denounces harassment and violence against women and children. That's his to account for. His response raises questions about institutional knowledge, family dynamics within coaching families, and whether proximity to a predator carries responsibility. These aren't simple questions, and his personal reckoning is ongoing. What matters for the sport is that he chose to acknowledge rather than defend.

The harder question belongs to the sport itself.

BJJ's youth pipeline runs on a specific economy. Coaches control equipment. They control competition access. They control whether a kid who can't afford entry fees and travel gets to compete at all. For athletes from modest backgrounds, which describes most of the sport in Brazil, that's not a preference system. It's a survival system. There's no alternative. You either get a sponsor-coach or you don't compete. You either get fed into the pipeline or you stay local and limited.

A coach who controls all of it has total power over a young athlete who needs it. That didn't create Galvão. But it handed him the mechanism. The same mechanism exists anywhere a coach runs a youth program with resource-dependent athletes and no independent oversight. Every major academy in Brazil has a version of this dynamic. Most coaches use that power responsibly. Some don't. The system doesn't distinguish between them until something explodes into public view.

This is the structural problem no ban address. You can remove one predator and the architecture that enabled him stays intact. The next coach with talent, resources, and access to economically vulnerable kids walks into the exact same environment. The incentives haven't changed. The oversight mechanisms haven't been installed. The pathways for reporting have remained frozen. The athlete still needs sponsorship more than the coach needs oversight.

The IBJJF banned one man. What gave him that power is still there. International federation rules can't fix local economic dependencies. Policy papers won't change the fact that a single coach in a favela or suburban academy can still control a child's entire athletic future. Bans are necessary but insufficient. They're reactive rather than preventive. They address symptoms while the disease remains structural.

What would prevention look like? Independent financial pathways for young athletes, not controlled by individual coaches. Third-party oversight in academies, particularly for youth training. Mandatory reporting structures with protections for victims who might otherwise face retaliation. Athlete advocacy systems that can investigate complaints without the coach being involved in the investigation. Transparent sponsorship and equipment distribution so no single person controls all resources. None of this is radical. Most serious sports organizations in developed countries have versions of these systems. Brazilian jiu-jitsu has largely opted out.

The economic reality of Brazilian jiu-jitsu makes this harder, not impossible. The sport is built on modest margins and coach autonomy. A academy isn't a billion-dollar franchise with compliance departments. Most coaches aren't even full-time professionals—they're semi-professional or part-time, supplementing other income. Asking them to implement multi-layered oversight systems isn't realistic. But refusing to acknowledge the structural vulnerability and instead pretending that lifetime bans solve the problem is worse than realistic. It's false.

Larissa's Choice

Brenda Larissa is a world champion. She was winning titles through all of it. She built that career on top of everything she described, publicly, in detail, on camera, so other victims might feel less alone in what they've been carrying. That choice to go public had real costs. It meant opening herself to questions about whether she was truthful, whether she misunderstood situations, whether she was motivated by something other than disclosure. It meant having her entire athletic career recontextualized around abuse rather than skill. It meant becoming a symbol of victimhood when she wanted to be known for her jiu-jitsu.

But she did it anyway, because the alternative was silence, and silence is what allows patterns to continue. Her sister came back to jiu-jitsu, which might be the most defiant thing a person who survived what she survived could do. Not to quit the sport that harmed her, but to return to it as someone who couldn't be harmed by the same person anymore. That's not healing in any easy sense. That's claiming space back.

The sport can at least try to answer her. Not with statements. Not with bans. With structural changes that make it harder for the next Galvão to accumulate so much power over so many vulnerable people. With systems that allow victims to report without losing everything. With pathways for young athletes that don't require trusting a single authority figure with their entire future. With transparency about who coaches have access to and how they're using it.

None of this will undo what happened to Larissa or her sister or anyone else Galvão harmed. But it might prevent someone else from experiencing the same choice: staying silent to protect your career, your family's financial security, your access to the sport you love, or speaking and losing all of it. Structural change won't guarantee justice. But it removes one excuse that predators rely on—that the system has no choice but to enable them because that's how the sport works.

The sport always has choices. It just has to decide whether preventing abuse is worth the cost of making them.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• BJJ World Champion Brenda Larissa Details 14 Years of Alleged Abuse by Melqui Galvão
• Brenda Larissa Comes Forward Publicly With Abuse Allegations Against Melqui Galvao
• Top BJJ coach Melqui Galvao arrested for alleged sexual assault of minors, banned from IBJJF
• Nicholas Meregali Overwhelmed By The Response To Melqui Galvão Case: 'Frightening'
• 'I Was a Victim of Sexual Crime Committed by Someone I Admired': BJJ World Champ Releases Statement Amid Galvão Case