BY KEVIN G. HALL
 Herald World Staff

 RIO DE JANEIRO -- Pop star Gloria Trevi lived the high life as a Mexican singer, TV hostess and calendar girl. She combined the raunchiness of Madonna with the pep of Britney Spears, and from New York to Los Angeles and on both sides of the Rio Grande River the scantily clad starlet was a goddess to her Hispanic fans.

 Now seven months pregnant, the product she says of repeated rape by Brazilian prison guards, Trevi, 29, has fallen from grace and fallen hard. She has been jailed since Jan. 13, 2000, facing extradition to Mexico, where she and her manager Sergio Andrade, 45, say they face trumped up charges of corrupting minors.

 Trevi's case is far stranger than the fiction of her roles in ``novellas,'' or Mexican soaps shown throughout Latin America. She says political heavyweights in Mexico are out to kill her. She has sent the Brazilian media into a frenzy by refusing to name the father of her unborn child.

 Her rags-to-riches-to-rags melodrama shines a harsh light on the judicial systems of Mexico and Brazil.

 ``This is a real circus. Nobody in the world has worked on something as bizarre as this,'' said Otavio Bezerra Neves, a constitutional lawyer who representing Trevi during her nearly two-year extradition battle.

 On the margins of her prosecution in Mexico are rumors of sexual favors for politicians, money laundering and her allegations that her former employer TV Azteca, one of Mexico's two main television conglomerates, engaged in massive tax evasion.

 In Brazil, the sudden acceleration of her asylum hearing one day after congressmen interviewed her about her alleged prison rape has drawn accusations of a political
 cover-up.

 ``The Brazilian government needs to get rid of her as quickly as possible to avoid finding out about the sexual violence she suffered in jail. I think it is immoral,'' said Luis Eduardo Greenhalg, a congressman on the human-rights committee who visited Trevi and is trying to launch a full-scale congressional probe. ``We congressmen are trying to block her extradition, at least until at least the occurrences have been totally clarified.''

 In a handwritten response from her jail cell to questions, Trevi said she fears she will be killed if she returns to Mexico.

 Her greatest fears are being killed while carrying her unborn child, or having the state take custody of him soon after birth. She refused to discuss who raped her.

 ``I don't want to talk about this and would never use a child, much less my son, to stay in Brazil, and I consider silence to be my best guarantee of safety and calm in
 Brazil,'' Trevi wrote.

 According to a report in the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, prosecutors have offered Trevi benefits of a witness protection program if she would name and testify against her alleged rapist.

 In both Mexico and Brazil, Trevi's plight has become a media circus, dominating gossip shows and newscasts alike. Lost in all the chatter are the serious accusations of rape of a prisoner and the harsh reality of a pregnant woman in miserable prison conditions.

 The vaunted Brazilian newsmagazine Istoe, in its Nov. 21 issue, ran a nude photo of Trevi with devil's horns and a trident on its cover with the banner ``Sex in Prison.''

 ``In Mexico they are conducting a soap opera without actors, without spending money on production, it is just her life,'' said Bezerra Neves, noting that Brazilian and
 Mexican television see ratings in Trevi's troubles.

 Meanwhile, although facing no charges in Brazil, the very pregnant Trevi must use a tiny hole in the floor as a squat toilet. A pipe spitting out cold water from a dank
 Brazilian prison wall serves as her shower. She gets no special diet despite reportedly suffering from hypoglycemia. There is no doctor at the prison should her water
 break during the steamy hot Brazilian night.

 ``These are sad conditions, products of a great injustice. The obstetric and gynecological care is precarious, right now I have an infection that I cannot get treated,'' Trevi wrote. ``Hygienic conditions practically don't exist, the water in our cell is dirty and cold, the toilet is a hole, causing me great difficulty when I have to go. There are lots of bugs, flies, roaches, bees, spiders. It really is anguishing.''

 Her plight seems especially unfair because had she committed the crime she is accused of, corruption of minors, in Brazil, she could be placed under house arrest with medical care. If she were being held in Mexico, the same would be true. But she is being held in Brazil on extradition charges and Brazilian law does not give discretion for house arrest, Bezerra said.

 On Monday, Brazil's National Conference of Bishops came to Trevi's defense. The conference was readying a letter to Brazil's supreme tribunal asking that the judiciary order obstetric care for Trevi and begin attending to the special needs of a pregnant woman.

 ``We are going to ask that she be allowed to leave the prison for tests and get better food. It is urgent that she get a special diet,'' said The Rev. Ubaldo Steri, a member of the special quasi-government panel that decides asylum requests.

                                    © 2001