From the Texas Tribune: Appeals court to decide if First Amendment should have protected Laredo’s “big crazy lady” from arrest

A great look at federalism

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It is unusual for all 16 judges of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to convene and hear a case. This month, they will do so to consider a lawsuit involving a foul-mouthed Latina firebrand known as La Gordiloca, an unlikely citizen journalist who has upended politics as usual in her border town of Laredo.

Her case pits the First Amendment against qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields public officials from being sued individually unless they’ve violated a “clearly established” constitutional right. Although it involves a freelance, untrained citizen journalist, the case has widespread implications for journalism in Texas and beyond. A similar case is already working its way up through the courts in Fort Bend County.

Priscilla Villarreal didn’t set out to piss off powerful people around Laredo. It started one day in 2015 when she heard sirens blaring outside her house. She went outside and saw a hostage situation unfolding; she began recording video on her phone as shots were fired and continued as the victims, two dead girls, were carried out of the house. She uploaded clips to Facebook; almost one million people saw them.

Villarreal’s day job was supervising wrecking crews as they cleaned up tractor-trailer crash scenes, but unedited videos chronicling the dark corners of her city became her calling. Her reach exploded with the release of Facebook Live, and along the way she picked up a moniker: La Gordiloca, or “the big crazy lady.” She now has 200,000 followers watching her livestreamed crime scene videos and listening to her stream-of-consciousness soliloquies, mostly in Spanish, about everything from cooking and local restaurants to well-sourced gossip about corrupt cops and politicians.

It’s the latter that began turning heads around Laredo, a South Texas town of a quarter-million people. In 2017, when a local U.S. Border Patrol agent died by suicide, Villarreal learned his name from a police officer and reported it publicly before the police issued a statement. A month later, she posted the name of a family involved in a deadly car crash, again after verifying it with a Laredo police officer.

Police started harassing her, she says, including in a filmed incident in which a police officer prevented her from being near a crash site where she was working her day job with the cleanup crew. Six months after her initial reports naming the people involved in the two incidents, Laredo police arrested Villarreal for twice breaking a little-known state law — one under which the Webb County district attorney had never before prosecuted anyone — involving soliciting or receiving information from a public servant that “has not been made public” with an intent to obtain a benefit.

“When I would report on whatever it was that was going on that had to do with the cops, they had to stop what they were doing,” Villarreal said. “I’m not saying all of them, but, you know, not being able to beat somebody up or to do something that was gonna get caught on camera — I think that that’s what they didn’t like about what I was doing.”