This Texas Woman Was Jailed for Her Journalism. Is She the Future of Media?

LAREDO, Texas—”They figured that this would shut me down,” says Priscilla Villarreal. “But what they did was create a monster.”

Villarreal is a journalist here in the Texas border town of Laredo. She is at the center of a major First Amendment battle that her attorneys hope to take to the Supreme Court. She has become an unlikely face in the fight for a free press.

Or is she not that unlikely at all?

Villarreal doesn’t work for a newspaper or magazine. She doesn’t have a perch at a TV station. Rather, she livestreams her reporting, infused with her signature profanity-laced commentary, on her Facebook page, “Lagordiloca,” which translates to: “the fat, crazy lady.”

Her page currently boasts 217,000 followers—almost the population of Laredo itself, where it seems almost everyone knows Lagordiloca’s name, whether you’re in a coffee shop, an Uber, a bar, a restaurant, the grocery store. She is a celebrity here, famous for her irreverent, muckraking approach, which often sees her broadcasting directly from crime scenes and traffic accidents.

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 soliciting 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.

Put more simply, they arrested her for asking questions. The statute appears to have been written to fend off government corruption, like bribery. But law enforcement contorted it in such a way that allowed them 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, however, 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 more sharply divided on the issue than one might assume. 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 filing 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 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.

“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, CEO and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is representing Villarreal in her appeal. He hopes the Court takes the case, he says, “to tell…the world that essentially just because an individual judge doesn’t consider you a ‘legitimate journalist’ that you still have the same free speech and First Amendment rights as a New York Times journalist.”

Lukianoff adds that “the rights of the many really do hang on the rights of the one.”

Villarreal indeed considers herself a citizen journalist, and she says her competitors in traditional media are handicapped. “I don’t have anyone to tell me, ‘You can’t put that out there,’” she says. 

But traditional news organizations also sometimes protect reporters from their worst instincts. I went to New York City to sit down with James O’Keefe, another so-called citizen journalist, who founded the conservative advocacy group Project Veritas. (He was fired in 2023.) Though he and Villarreal arguably have very different politics, he filed a brief in support of her in 2022, calling her arrest an “outrageous abuse of power” that could threaten his own work.

Villarreal and O’Keefe are by no means the same person; in many ways they are night and day. But the two share some important things in common when it comes to this debate: an approach outside of the mainstream and a penchant for making enemies who would like them to stop talking. 

O’Keefe’s stock and trade is trying to expose people and organizations with hidden cameras. He first gained notoriety by secretly recording interactions with the left-wing advocacy group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which caused a national scandal and drove the organization into bankruptcy. 

He has also drawn sharp criticism for his performance antics. Perhaps most emblematic of his approach was his alleged attempt to seduce CNN journalist Abbie Boudreau by luring her onto a boat deemed a “palace of pleasure,” where porn, condoms, and fuzzy handcuffs would await her. O’Keefe would film the interaction. Boudreau was tipped off and the plan was thwarted.

“Is citizen journalism more about getting clicks and attention to monetize,” I ask him, “or is it about pursuing the truth?”

“I think it’s about pursuing the truth,” he responds. “I think my track record speaks for itself.”

“How do you respond to people who say [that] this departure from journalistic norms is not an improvement and not something we should be defending?” I ask Lukianoff.

“Legacy journalism has done a tremendous amount to shoot itself in the foot, and it’s blaming everyone else for it not being taken very seriously anymore,” he says. “We actually have just a ton more people innovating in the space of journalism, sure. There are going to be people who aren’t very reliable. But I do think the entire public is waiting for people to raise their hands to say, ‘No, I’m actually one of the people who’s never going to lie to you. I’m going to be straight about it, even if you don’t like what I’m saying.’”

Tellez says that general sentiment is an apt description of Villarreal. “We’re 150 miles away from any other major town,” he notes. “The traditional news media, print or television, don’t really do investigative journalism on the goings-on of local politicians, and she does a good job of it.”

It’s pitch black outside, early in the morning, as I sit in the backseat of Villarreal’s car while she searches for crime scenes. We eventually see police sirens. She drives toward them, and we arrive at a gas station, where she jumps out to stream an arrest. The man in handcuffs: her ex–brother in law. Then it’s off to a convenience store. This time, a robbery, and another livestream. That’s what the world sees.

But there’s also a lot the world does not see. She lost three kids, all born prematurely. “When I lost my first child, she lived for five hours,” she says. “The traumatizing part of it was watching her take her last breath.” Nothing, she adds, can hurt her like that did.

Not police or prosecutors or sneering federal judges or haters online. If anything, it fuels her. “I want to go to the Supreme Court,” she says. “But my story is already in the history books. My story’s out there. You know, and I want people to know that we all have rights.”

Photo Credits: Adani Samat; Midjourney

Music Credits: Artlist

• Video Editor: Qinling Li
• Motion Graphics: Adani Samat
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

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Source: https://reason.com/video/2024/09/03/this-texas-woman-was-jailed-for-her-journalism-is-she-the-future-of-media/