Nicholas Meregali Steps Back From Galvao Plea — 'Many Of Those People Are Also Part Of It'

Nicholas Meregali — three-time IBJJF World Champion and the loudest name in professional BJJ pressing on the Melqui Galvão case — made a very public plea. On April 28, he posted an Instagram video asking victims to come forward with a specific ask: contact him directly and he'd route them to the detective and attorney handling the criminal case. Galvão had surrendered to Manaus police that same day on charges that include rape of a vulnerable person under 14, sexual harassment, threats, and electronic hacking. The plea got 75,000 likes within hours. It looked like the moment someone in the sport's upper tier would actually step up.

Then it lasted exactly 48 hours.

Two days later, on April 30, Meregali posted a follow-up video. "I am stepping back now. I cannot handle this situation anymore. I do not have the experience, the heart, the spirit. I do not know how to deal with this," he said. On the surface, that would have been a clean story — good instincts, genuine overwhelm, honest exit. The kind of moment where someone realizes they're in over their head and admits it. Except for the line he dropped on the way out, the one that actually matters.

"We also found people connected to others who are also part of this whole situation," Meregali said. "Many of those people are also part of it, and it is sad."

The retreat is the news. That sentence is the story.

What Meregali was describing — and this is where the conversation gets substantially heavier — is a second layer. Not Melqui Galvão, the man who surrendered with an audio recording now in police evidence where a voice attributed to him offers a victim's mother a BJJ school in Orlando and US relocation in exchange for silence. Not the cops Galvão allegedly cultivated during his tenure as an Amazonas Civil Police investigator to shut down earlier complaints. Beyond that: people who publicly condemned Galvão in the weeks after his arrest, who are themselves named by victims in Meregali's DMs. People with names and faces in the BJJ community. People who had issued statements of support for victims. People who had publicly voiced their disgust at Melqui Galvão.

In his follow-up video, Meregali laid out what he'd actually encountered during those 48 hours. "Frightening, the number of people who were filtered in the last 48 hours through my Instagram," he said. "Talking with women who were assaulted, abused, at 12, 13, 14, 10 years old… It is frightening, it drains you."

This wasn't idle overwhelm talking. Meregali already had serious external pressure before he even opened that intake channel. Mica Galvão — Melqui's son, multi-time IBJJF World Champion and ONE Championship flyweight sub-grappling champ — had filed four civil and criminal lawsuits against Meregali over PED accusations. One of Meregali's witnesses was directly threatened by Melqui Galvão and withdrew from the process entirely. Meregali had laid all of it out in his original plea video on April 28. He had receipts and had been carrying them while the family pursued him in court. That was the baseline. That was what he was already dealing with.

Then the DMs started coming in. Accounts of abuse at ages 10, 12, 13, 14. Multiple women. Consistent patterns. Detailed descriptions. It broke him. That part, honestly, is understandable from a human standpoint. What doesn't get to quietly exit with him is who sent those accounts alongside the victim disclosures: people — named people, faces people in the BJJ community would recognize — who had posted clarification notes, who had issued statements of support for victims, who had publicly voiced their disgust at Melqui Galvão. People who, per Meregali's account, are themselves implicated by other women in those same DMs.

A condemnation statement is free to post. It costs even less when you need cover.

To understand the actual scope of what Meregali was encountering, you need the full timeline and context of the Galvão case as it stood on April 30, 2026. The case had already gone substantially further than most people were tracking. Three named complainants, the youngest 12 at the time of the alleged abuse. A 16-minute audio recording in São Paulo police evidence where a voice attributed to Galvão offers travel, a gym partnership in Orlando, and US relocation in exchange for silence. Career-long law enforcement access in Amazonas, with documented allegations that earlier complaints were buried through those connections. The 17-year-old whose report opened the case was allegedly assaulted during a competition trip to Rome in February 2026 — just months before everything broke publicly. IBJJF and CBJJ had permanently banned Galvão the day he surrendered.

On May 4 — less than a week after Meregali's exit — brown belt and two-time World Cup champion Lívia Barasine became the first named competitor from within Galvão's team to go public with her own account. "I was the victim of a sexual crime committed by someone I admired," she wrote on Instagram. She named the 8th Women's Police Station of São Paulo as the reporting body and February as when she filed. Her account names psychological torture, coercion, and threats to her career. Barasine's willingness to go public with her name attached — something most victims don't do — suggested that the internal dynamics at Galvão's gym were substantially more fractured than initial reporting indicated.

Meanwhile, the people closest to Galvão were making moves. Mica shut down BJJ College on May 3 and launched MJJ — Mika Jiu-Jitsu — under his own name. He called the split definitive. He still hasn't named his father publicly. Diogo Reis — 94-9, two-time ADCC World Champion, lifelong Galvão product — formally cut ties on May 1, saying the facts made it impossible to continue. He competed at ONE Fight Night 43 on May 15 in Bangkok, his first appearance since leaving the gym. Amit Elor, US Olympic gold medalist, issued a distancing statement on April 29 and did not name the gym or any prior relationship. All of these moves — the gym closures, the new brand launches, the distancing statements — appeared in the news cycle while Meregali was receiving DMs from women describing what happened to them at ages 10, 12, 13, 14.

Meregali made the handoff explicit when he stepped back: "I think we need to seek more qualified people." On the surface, that reads as humility. It's actually a referral. It's also an acknowledgment that the infrastructure doesn't exist in BJJ to handle what's actually being reported. No gym has a protocol for this. No federation has trained staff for intake. No organization has the institutional capacity to sit with what women are saying and direct it anywhere except "the authorities." Meregali opened a door for 48 hours. What came through suggests it had been locked from the inside for a long time.

The arrest itself has a charge sheet. It has a court. It has a process. What Meregali described — that some of the loudest voices condemning Galvão are themselves accused in those DMs — has none of that. No courtroom. No procedure. No mechanism for verification or due process. Just the gap between what someone posts and what victims say happened to them. Just the difference between a public statement and a private account. Just the question of who in the room was actually saying what they meant.

He spent 48 hours as a makeshift intake system for something the sport has been quietly hosting for years. He opened a door. What came through broke him. He made the handoff explicit and stepped away. Someone else's turn, he said. The problem is, that's not how accountability actually works in professional sports. There is no "someone else." There's just the void where institutional responsibility should be and people like Meregali standing in it for 48 hours before realizing they're drowning.

By May 5 — 27 days before this retrospective — the door had closed again. Meregali was gone. The victims' accounts remained. The names of the people implicated in those DMs remained. The question of who knew what, and when, and what they did about it, remained. The only thing that changed was that one person stopped trying to be the system. He couldn't be. The system doesn't exist.

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

Sources

• Meregali Overwhelmed By Culture Of Abuse And The Number Of Responses To His Public Plea
• Nicholas Meregali Overwhelmed By The Response To Melqui Galvão Case: 'Frightening'
• Nicholas Meregali Makes A Public Plea Following Melqui Galvao Arrest