Citizen Journalism Is Under Attack. This Texas Woman Is Fighting to Save It.
After being arrested for doing journalism, Priscilla Villarreal has taken her fight to the courts.
"They figured that this would shut me down," says Priscilla Villarreal. "But what they did was create a monster."
Villarreal is a journalist in the Texas border town of Laredo. She is at the center of a legal battle with significant First Amendment implications. Villarreal doesn't work for a newspaper or magazine, nor does she have a perch at a TV station. Rather, she livestreams her reporting online, infused with her signature profanity-laced commentary.
Known in Laredo as "Lagordiloca" (which translates to "the fat, crazy lady"), she's a celebrity there, famous for her irreverent, muckraking approach, which often sees her broadcasting directly from crime scenes and traffic accidents. In 2024, she announced a write-in campaign for Laredo City Council.
Not everyone finds her endearing. In 2017, law enforcement—who had often been the target of Villarreal's critical reporting—arrested her after she broke two relatively benign stories: one concerning a Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide, the other relating to a family involved in a fatal traffic accident.
"They were just looking for something to arrest me," Villarreal says. "Because I was exposing the corruption, I was exposing them being cruel to detainees.…They were doing things they weren't supposed to."
Villarreal had confirmed her information with a confidential source within the Laredo Police Department. That same agency then arrested her for doing so, leveraging an obscure Texas law that criminalizes the soliciting of nonpublic details if the person requesting stands to "benefit" from it.
"In Laredo nobody had ever been arrested for that," says Joey Tellez, Villarreal's criminal defense lawyer. She was both the first and the last.
The statute appears to have been written to fend off government corruption, such as bribery. But law enforcement contorted the law to pursue a case against Villarreal for doing what journalists do every day: request information not yet published (a.k.a. a scoop) and benefit from it, usually in the form of a salary.
Villarreal doesn't collect a salary. So her "benefit," the government alleged, was popularity on Facebook.
The case was eventually dismissed. But when Villarreal sued, arguing that law enforcement should know better than to arrest a journalist for her reporting, she found the federal judges evaluating the claim to be sharply divided. Her lawsuit has kicked off a national debate—not only about her arrest and whether or not it violated the First Amendment, but also over the nature of "citizen journalism," and if reporters who adhere to a nontraditional approach are entitled to a less robust set of rights.
"Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism. That is inappropriate," wrote Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which ruled 9–7 against Villarreal. "Mainstream, legitimate media outlets routinely withhold the identity of accident victims or those who committed suicide until public officials or family members release that information publicly." The officials she sued received qualified immunity, which prohibits victims of government abuse from pursuing federal civil rights suits if the misconduct alleged has not yet been "clearly established" as unconstitutional.
Though her approach may be polarizing, Villarreal has attracted support from an ideologically diverse set of groups, including the Christian conservative law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, the libertarian Cato Institute, and the left-leaning Constitutional Accountability Center. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the 5th Circuit's decision "a disastrous ruling for journalists' rights," and along with 21 media organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. Several current and former journalists, including Reason's Jacob Sullum, also submitted a brief in support of Villarreal. In October, the Supreme Court threw out that decision and ordered the 5th Circuit to reconsider.
"I bristle at the idea that judges can throw out distinctions that have any significant legal meaning between citizen journalists and journalists who work for bigger companies," says Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is representing Villarreal in her appeal. We should all agree, he says, "that essentially just because an individual judge doesn't consider you a 'legitimate journalist'…you still have the same free speech and First Amendment rights as a New York Times journalist."
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Citizen Journalism Under Threat."
