Free Speech

Billy Binion | 9.3.2024 12:00 PM

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........

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