“Hi, I’m looking for Don Neily. If that’s you, you might remember me. I’m Ruben Castaneda, I covered the Hilda Rosa Dos Santos case for The Washington Post.”
It was a Sunday morning in April 2024 and I had traveled more than 1,000 miles from Washington, D.C., to a home in a Midwestern subdivision with one goal – find Don Neily, a retired FBI agent who investigated the mistreatment of Dos Santos, an undocumented Brazilian woman who was the victim of domestic slavery in Montgomery Village. The mistreatment was revealed in federal court testimony in 2000.
I was freelancing as a fixer for Katia Lund, an American Brazilian filmmaker who was working on a docuseries about the case. In recent years, a Brazilian podcast had drawn attention to the bizarre life of Margarida Bonetti, one of Dos Santos’s alleged abusers, inside a decaying mansion, creating a sensation in Brazil. Lund said she wanted to focus on Dos Santos, on the mistreatment she suffered and how she persevered and survived…