Greenwald has faced backlash from far right after series of articles damaging to Jair Bolsonaro’s government

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Brazil’s bitterly divided politics reached a new low on Thursday, when a rightwing columnist smacked the US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the face on a live radio program.

Greenwald and Augusto Nunes are prominent figures on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Thursday’s physical violence – which was being livestreamed – left Brazilians stunned.

Greenwald has become a central figure in Brazilian politics after publishing a string of articles challenging the legitimacy of the country’s largest-ever corruption investigation.

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His reporting – based on a trove of leaked mobile phone messages – has been particularly damaging for the government of Jair Bolsonaro, making Greenwald a hate figure for those on Brazil’s far right, who have accused him of illegal hacking.

The altercation came when the two men appeared on a program for the Jovem Pan radio station on Thursday.

Nunes, a well-known columnist for Veja magazine, had previously suggested that a family judge should look into taking away Greenwald’s adopted children.

Referring to Nunes’s comments, Greenwald said: “What he did was the ugliest, dirtiest thing I have seen in my career as a journalist.”

Nunes responded that he was merely asking who took care of Greenwald’s children while his husband – the congressman David Miranda – was in the capital and the journalist was “spending all his time dealing with stolen material”.

The Brazilian Report (@BrazilianReport) BREAKING NEWS: @theintercept journalist @ggreenwald was punched by VEJA columnist Augusto Nunes after calling him "coward". The scuffle happened during a program on radio station Jovem Pan #BrazilianReport #AugustoNunes #GlennGreenwald pic.twitter.com/0GI0nMUHbP

Greenwald accused Nunes of being a coward, prompting Nunes to take a swing at Greenwald. The two started lashing out at each other before they were pulled apart by station staff.

In Brazil’s current hyper-partisan atmosphere, reaction was divided predictably along political lines.

Ciro Gomes, a leftwing politician who ran for president in 2018, called Nunes “vermin” and a “lowlife”.

Nunes was “destroying values, committing slander, aggression, throwing insults and defending the worst values of the corrupt right wing”, he said in a video posted to social media.

Two of Bolsonaro’s son’s expressed support for Nunes. Eduardo Bolsonaro, a congressman, tweeted that Nunes had acted “in legitimate defense of his honor”.

“No one is required to be violated constantly with distortions of their words, be insulted to their face and accept it. Augusto Nunes didn’t have another option. He reacted the way any normal person with blood in their veins would have done,” Bolsonaro tweeted.

Greenwald later posted a video to social media saying that Nunes’s attack was homophobic and dangerous.

“Millions of Brazilians, and people all over the world … also have children and both parents work because of financial necessity or because they want to, but … he only says this about us,” he said.

“This use of physical force and violence in the political debate is very serious. Now we are seeing … that Bolsonaro’s movement … is applauding, supporting his use of physical violence in the political debate.”

Greenwald won a Pulitzer prize for leading the Guardian’s reporting on National Security Agency (NSA) spying revealed by Edward Snowden before co-founding the Intercept website in 2014.