Brazilian Reality TV Star Alleges Invasive Search by Moroccan Police After Robbery

It all started with a robbery. Liziane Gutierrez, a former contestant on the Brazilian reality TV show "A Fazenda", had her luxury bag, her phone and her husband Toni’s work phone stolen on October 30 outside the hotel where they were staying in Marrakech, reports The SUN. Her partner still had his personal phone and tried to track down the stolen devices. The next day, a signal was emitted for one of the stolen phones. They rushed to the nearest police officer to urge them to act. "We saw these guys with the police car near the hotel and we went to contact them. And we don’t speak Arabic, we don’t speak French, so I was trying to communicate in English and with Google Translate. They just ignored us," Liziane recounted on her Instagram account.

In the aftermath, the reality TV star starts filming the Moroccan police to show people that they were not being taken seriously. The couple will be handcuffed and taken to the police station. "I know I’m not an easy person to deal with. But at that moment, I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just trying to get help. I was in a country where they didn’t speak English well, I didn’t know anyone there except my husband, so I was just trying to seek help," she continues. The police arrest the couple. While Toni was released a day later, after handing over the password of the phone that filmed the police officers, Liziane spent a month in prison where she lived an experience she describes as a nightmare.

"The prison was a nightmare when I got there. They thought I was transgender, so I had to open my legs in front of two women and two men. I’ve never felt so humiliated in my life. And they were looking inside me like a doctor or something, and I was crying," she recounts. And she continues: "After that, they think: ’Oh, okay, it’s actually a woman.’ So they put me in this prison. If I was trans, I would probably have been in the men’s prison." She deplores the prison conditions. "In the small room, it was supposed to be a maximum of 10 girls, and there were 20. There were insects everywhere, flies everywhere. There was no ventilation, but people were smoking inside this room. Some people stayed there for a week. How? I have no idea. We had to sleep on the floor," Liziane relates.

She adds: "The bathroom was like a hole in the ground. There’s food like once a day, and they serve bread. And the temperature goes from very hot to very cold." The model bitterly regrets her stay in Morocco: "I’d rather go back to North Korea 10 times than come back to Morocco. I was more respected in North Korea than in Morocco."