Three women with press credentials issued by New York City gathered outside a Manhattan courthouse last week to voice their opinions on Luigi Mangione and the UnitedHealthcare executive he is accused of killing. Their comments, which went viral, sparked an immediate crisis over who deserves the right to cover court proceedings and what legitimacy a government-issued press pass actually conveys.
The three women, Abril Rios, Ashley Rojas, and Lena Weissbrot, had obtained city-issued credentials that grant certain privileges traditionally reserved for journalists: passage across police lines, reserved courtroom seating, and permission to use laptops during proceedings. They posed for photos displaying the credentials while making inflammatory remarks about the victim.
City Council member David Carr responded swiftly. "This is America, people have the freedom to say or write whatever awful, batshit crazy things they want," he said. "But these deranged homicide-fan girls should never be allowed access to courtrooms or official press events with the imprimatur of the City of New York."
The controversy has exposed a fundamental tension in press credentialing: what separates legitimate journalism from activism, and who gets to decide? The mayor's office for media and entertainment announced it would reassess the city's credentialing process and standards. Officials acknowledged the issue while insisting that three individuals in question fell outside any reasonable debate about the boundaries of press access.
Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, framed the problem in broader terms. "Whenever a government agency gets to decide who is a journalist, it can be concerning," he said. "The blurring of lines between activism and journalism is a concerning trend." He noted that if legitimate reporters are being denied access while activists gain it, the consequences become troubling.
New York City has a history of making questionable credentialing decisions. In 2008, the NYPD denied press credentials to three bloggers from online news organizations, leading to a lawsuit. The department eventually agreed to grant them credentials after being confronted with constitutional violations. Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, who negotiated that settlement, acknowledged the difficulty of defining a journalist.
"The best we could do at that point was to have some objective standards," Siegel said. "Back then, we settled on six articles that you were able to write about where you passed a police or fire line." But even that standard raised questions about whether such credentials should require proof of emergency reporting in the first place.
The NYPD's credentialing practices became especially contentious during the de Blasio administration. Veterans of civil rights law describe a pattern of denying or revoking credentials for journalists the department disliked. Veteran defense attorney Ron Kuby documented cases where journalists were arrested while covering 2020 George Floyd protests, their false arrests used as justification to revoke credentials that were never reinstated after charges were dismissed.
In 2021, the city moved credentialing authority away from the NYPD to the mayor's office for media and entertainment. That office has issued 32 event-specific credentials to self-described independent journalists for Mangione court proceedings since February 2025.
Event-specific credentials present a particular danger. Non-journalist content creators issued these passes gain access to reserved seating and computer use without the professional incentives that traditional journalists have to maintain standards. If engagement metrics drive their work, the motivation to follow courthouse decorum diminishes accordingly.
Constitutional concerns complicate the fix. Kuby pointed out that unpopular commentary is not the same as inappropriate conduct. "We don't regulate journalism because it's the job of journalists to publish things the government frequently does not like," he said. "This is true on the left and the right, and in between."
Siegel suggested practical solutions. If the current system creates logistical problems for actual journalists trying to access court proceedings, officials should convene representatives from the press, city attorneys, and government to establish clear, objective standards. An overflow courtroom with closed-circuit video was mentioned as one way to ensure adequate access for both press and public.
Rios, one of the three women whose credentials triggered the review, has defended her status. "I'm not a reporter I work in social media which is also press thank you," she posted on social media. Mangione faces a state trial scheduled for September 8 and a separate federal trial related to the December 4, 2024 killing in Midtown Manhattan. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Author James Rodriguez: "Government agencies choosing which voices get press credentials is a legitimate constitutional worry, but so is flooding courtrooms with activists masquerading as journalists and squeezing out real reporters."
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