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Free Speech

Attempt to Vanish Newspaper Articles About Elected School District Trustee Lynette Boggs-Perez

Boggs-Perez is the recently elected trustee of the San-Antonio-area Judson Independent School District, and the requests aimed to deindex columns about her in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the San Antonio Express-News.

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


From San Antonio Express-News (Liz Teitz) (paywalled); you can see the deindexing requests in the invaluable Lumen Database:

Google has received six requests to remove links to newspaper columns about Lynette Boggs-Perez, a recently elected Judson ISD trustee [and legal counsel to the Bexar County Republican Party] whose political career in Nevada was dogged by scandal before she moved to Texas.

The opinion columns in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the San Antonio Express-News describe, among other things, her [now-expunged] 2006 criminal history over flawed election paperwork and a 2017 allegation that she took a neighbor's puppy and claimed it as her own— a dispute that led her to sue the Converse Police Department….

Boggs-Perez denied sending any of the requests or being aware of them. Why anyone would do so is "beyond my understanding," she said this week.

Google has not taken action on any of the requests, and the links remain available on the search engine….

In 2007, Boggs was charged with perjury and filing a false statement about her residency when she ran for the Clark County Commission. The perjury charge was dropped when she pleaded to a misdemeanor, which was expunged in 2015, according to the Review-Journal….

One of the alleged Boggs-Perez requests cited a court order, which can be used to compel companies to remove links, typically when a judge finds that there is defamation or copyright infringement. But that request, submitted in December, "does not have anything to do with a court order," [Adam Holland of the Lumen Database] said. The sender attached instead a copy of the lawsuit Boggs-Perez and her husband filed against the city….