The tidy version of the André Galvão story was supposed to end on May 1, when San Diego authorities closed the case for insufficient evidence and no charges were filed. A named athlete inside Atos did not get the memo.

On May 21, Andressa Simas — a purple belt and longtime Atos competitor — posted her own account on Instagram, tagging Alexa Herse, the athlete whose February allegations opened the case. Simas is not an anonymous screenshot or a whisper in a group chat. She is an active, medal-winning competitor who has represented the team for years, and she put her name and her face on this.

By her account — translated from Portuguese, and presented here as her allegation — roughly three months ago, during the investigation into Herse's case, she was called in to give a statement because she says she had also experienced harassment from the same man. She says she tried to file her own separate complaint and was told at the station that it would be better to just attach it to Herse's case. "Justice differs from one country to another," she wrote, "but the truth is only one."

What she alleges is specific. She says that at his home, in the presence of his own family, she was touched inappropriately without her consent; that when she tried to pull away, the behavior continued; and that she was given a nickname with a sexual connotation that embarrassed her on the spot. In her statement and in BJJEE's reporting, she also says he steered her away from her chosen training partners so that she would have to roll with him, and that after she went to the police she faced retaliation and visa-related threats.

Here is the part that has to share the same paragraph, because this is real news and not a verdict: Galvão denies all of it, and has since his February 1 statement calling the allegations false rumors. The San Diego case is closed. No charges were filed. There is no criminal case in Brazil. These are allegations, untested in any court, and "she says" is doing load-bearing work in every sentence above. Anyone who tells you this is settled — in either direction — is selling something.

But "insufficient evidence" reads differently once a second named person describes being waved toward the same case file. The most convenient defense in this entire saga has always been the lone-accuser frame: one disgruntled student, one personal grudge, one misunderstanding of "cultural differences." That frame depends on there being exactly one person. It gets a lot harder when the next person in line is purple belt #2, on the record, under her own name, describing a police station that — by her account — treated her complaint as an addendum rather than its own case.

And it isn't just the two of them anymore. Josh Hinger, a black belt who came up inside Atos, has publicly said both women are telling the truth. You can dismiss one accuser as a grudge. You can maybe stretch and dismiss two. It becomes a much harder sell when one of Galvão's own black belts is standing next to them. That doesn't prove the allegations — an insider's belief is not evidence — but it does quietly retire the "lone smear campaign" story that Atos leaned on for months.

The detail that should bother people most isn't even the most lurid one. It's the bureaucratic one: a woman says she walked into a police station wanting to file her own complaint and was told to just append it to someone else's. Whether that was a procedural call about a single suspect or something closer to a soft discouragement, it's exactly the kind of friction that quietly shrinks the official record — and then "insufficient evidence" gets cited as though the record had ever been allowed to fill up.

None of this is a conviction, and it shouldn't be written like one. Simas could be wrong; Galvão is entitled to the denial he has given and to the closure he received. But the job here isn't to play judge. It's to refuse to pretend the story ended on May 1, when the people closest to it — a second named athlete, and a black belt from inside the room — keep declining to let it. The case is legally closed. The questions Atos has spent four months not answering are not.

For a sport that loves the words "family" and "loyalty," this is the uncomfortable test of what they actually mean. Right now, the most loyal thing happening anywhere in the Atos story is two women and one black belt refusing to go quiet — which tells you who the older, more convenient version of "loyalty" was really built to protect.

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

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