“They figured that this might shut me down,” says Priscilla Villarreal. “However what they did was create a monster.”
Villarreal is a journalist within the Texas border city of Laredo. She is at the middle of a authorized battle with vital First Modification implications. Villarreal does not work for a newspaper or journal, nor does she have a perch at a TV station. Fairly, she livestreams her reporting on-line, infused together with her signature profanity-laced commentary.
Identified in Laredo as “Lagordiloca” (which interprets to “the fats, loopy girl”), she’s a star there, well-known for her irreverent, muckraking strategy, which regularly sees her broadcasting immediately from crime scenes and site visitors accidents. In 2024, she introduced a write-in marketing campaign for Laredo Metropolis Council.
Not everybody finds her endearing. In 2017, legislation enforcement—who had usually been the goal of Villarreal’s crucial reporting—arrested her after she broke two comparatively benign tales: one regarding a Border Patrol agent who had dedicated suicide, the opposite regarding a household concerned in a deadly site visitors accident.
“They had been simply in search of one thing to arrest me,” Villarreal says. “As a result of I used to be exposing the corruption, I used to be exposing them being merciless to detainees.…They had been doing issues they weren’t purported to.”
Villarreal had confirmed her info with a confidential supply inside the Laredo Police Division. That very same company then arrested her for doing so, leveraging an obscure Texas legislation that criminalizes the soliciting of nonpublic particulars if the particular person requesting stands to “profit” from it.
“In Laredo no one had ever been arrested for that,” says Joey Tellez, Villarreal’s prison protection lawyer. She was each the primary and the final.
The statute seems to have been written to fend off authorities corruption, akin to bribery. However legislation enforcement contorted the legislation to pursue a case in opposition to Villarreal for doing what journalists do daily: request info not but printed (a.okay.a. a scoop) and profit from it, often within the type of a wage.
Villarreal does not gather a wage. So her “profit,” the federal government alleged, was recognition on Fb.
The case was ultimately dismissed. However when Villarreal sued, arguing that legislation enforcement ought to know higher than to arrest a journalist for her reporting, she discovered the federal judges evaluating the declare to be sharply divided. Her lawsuit has kicked off a nationwide debate—not solely about her arrest and whether or not or not it violated the First Modification, but additionally over the character of “citizen journalism,” and if reporters who adhere to a nontraditional strategy are entitled to a much less strong set of rights.
“Villarreal and others painting her as a martyr for the sake of journalism. That’s inappropriate,” wrote Decide Edith Jones of the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the fifth Circuit, which dominated 9–7 in opposition to Villarreal. “Mainstream, reputable media shops routinely withhold the id of accident victims or those that dedicated suicide till public officers or relations launch that info publicly.” The officers she sued acquired certified immunity, which prohibits victims of presidency abuse from pursuing federal civil rights fits if the misconduct alleged has not but been “clearly established” as unconstitutional.
Although her strategy could also be polarizing, Villarreal has attracted help from an ideologically various set of teams, together with the Christian conservative legislation agency Alliance Defending Freedom, the libertarian Cato Institute, and the left-leaning Constitutional Accountability Heart. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press referred to as the fifth Circuit’s choice “a disastrous ruling for journalists’ rights,” and together with 21 media organizations, together with The New York Occasions and The Washington Submit, filed an amicus transient urging the Supreme Courtroom to listen to the case. A number of present and former journalists, together with Purpose‘s Jacob Sullum, additionally submitted a short in help of Villarreal. In October, the Supreme Courtroom threw out that call and ordered the fifth Circuit to rethink.
“I bristle at the concept that judges can throw out distinctions which have any vital authorized which means between citizen journalists and journalists who work for greater firms,” says Greg Lukianoff of the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression, which is representing Villarreal in her attraction. We must always all agree, he says, “that primarily simply because a person decide does not contemplate you a ‘reputable journalist’…you continue to have the identical free speech and First Modification rights as a New York Occasions journalist.”
This text initially appeared in print beneath the headline “Citizen Journalism Below Risk.”
