A Brazilian court has ordered that three-time Formula One world champion Nelson Piquet is required to pay $953,050 in moral damages to Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton for making racist and homophobic statements against Hamilton. Piquet used a racist term to allude to Hamilton when commenting on Hamilton’s crash with Max Verstappen at the British Grand Prix in an interview that took place in November 2021. The conversation was about Hamilton’s collision with Verstappen. After the video of the interview was shared on social media in June of last year, Hamilton issued a call to action to alter “antiquated ways of thinking.”
“It’s not just a matter of language. This antiquated way of thinking needs to evolve, and it has no place in our sport,” Hamilton, who is the only Black driver in the sport, wrote on Twitter at the time. Hamilton was recently given honorary citizenship in Brazil, and he is the only Black driver in the sport. “For my whole life, I’ve been subjected to these views and attacked for them. There has been more than enough time to acquire knowledge. The time is here for us to take action.” Piquet, who is 70 years old, extended an apology to Hamilton and stated that his remarks had been mistranslated. Piquet’s daughter Kelly is Verstappen’s partner. Piquet used racial slurs and homophobic slang towards Hamilton on a podcast, which was eventually made public. Piquet was discussing Hamilton’s loss of the 2016 title to Nico Rosberg, and he made the comments against Hamilton.
Four different human rights organizations, one of which being the National LGBT+ Alliance of Brazil, filed the complaints against Piquet and demanded that he pay 10 million Brazilian reals in compensation for supposed moral harm. In his decision, the judge Pedro Matos de Arruda explained that the amount of compensation was determined “in the sense that one should not only appreciate the reparative function of civil liability but also (and perhaps mainly) the punitive function so that, as a society, we can someday be free from the pernicious acts that are racism and homophobia.”
