This 'crazy fat lady' was arrested for her journalism

Priscilla Villarreal, known as "Lagordiloca," is suing law enforcement for violating her First Amendment rights. She is appealing to the Supreme Court.

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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.

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.

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."

Producer: Billy Binion; Video Editors: Qinling Li, Arthur Nazaryan, and Phoebe McFarb

Cinematography: Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan

Photo Credits: Adani Samat; Midjourney

Music Credits: Artlist