On what felt like an early New York City summer day, a gaggle of women in the bloom of youth gathered outside Manhattan’s criminal courthouse last week, waxing philosophical about Luigi Mangione and the man he is accused of murdering.
“Fuck Brian Thompson, that’s all I’m going to say,” one of the three women, who sported a button adorned with Mangione’s face, said of the late UnitedHealthcare executive. After directing the same invective towards Thompson’s mother, the woman continued: “I said what I said.”
“His children are better off without him,” said her pigtailed associate, who stood out in a hip-hugging pastel-and-black stripe ensemble. She then told Thompson’s children to “enjoy the blood money”.
The third woman, whose sandy hair maintained a near-perfect blowout despite the heat, remarked: “I’m not saying we should all take up arms, but when your democracy has eroded and there’s no other option, what are we meant to do? What are we left with?”
This sort of commentary has become common among some of the Mangione supporters who attend his every court appearance. However, some Mangione backers – including the rhapsodic superfans quoted above – have secured New York City-issued press credentials.
The three women – Abril Rios, Ashley Rojas and Lena Weissbrot – showed off their credentials outside court, even posing for a cheeky photo.
City-issued credentials are not golden tickets to unfettered access, but they convey some privileges that journalists need to serve as the public’s eyes and ears. These credentials are supposed to allow journalists passage across police and fire lines; at court, city-issued credentials could give access to reserved seating and permission for laptop use.
The Guardian reported several months ago that several dogged Mangione supporters had somehow landed press credentials. City officials took notice of their curious credentialing this week when the trio’s comments went viral.
“This is America – people have the freedom to say or write whatever awful, batshit crazy things they want. 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,” city council member David Carr said, according to the New York Post.
The mayor’s office for media and entertainment (Mome) insisted that requirements had not changed since Zohran Mamdani took office. Dora Pekec, a senior spokesperson for Mamdani, said in an email: “The Mamdani administration is reassessing the city’s process and standards for press credentialing.”
“We will initiate our own process to review these, and what I will say is there is a good-natured debate to be had about where a press pass should extend and where it shouldn’t,” Mamdani, who has been criticized for favoring influencers over traditional media, reportedly said at a press conference on Tuesday. “However, the three people that we are talking about don’t fall within that debate.”
The prospect of a so-called debate has also renewed discussion about what constitutes legitimate press for credentialing purposes: is social media a form of media that merits a credential? Who makes that call – and how?
“Whenever a government agency gets to decide who is a journalist, it can be concerning,” said Roy Gutterman, director of the Newhouse School’s Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University. “The blurring of lines between activism and journalism is a concerning trend. We’ve seen questionable credentialing at the upper levels of the federal government, too.”
That said, “activism and independent journalism are not the same. If legitimate reporters and news outlets are being denied access because activists are getting access, it is troubling.”
New York City officials have repeatedly made unconstitutional credentialing decisions long before social media muddied the waters. In 2008, three bloggers sued the NYPD after their press credential applications were denied.
These bloggers alleged that the NYPD rejected their application because they were from online or alternative news organizations, violating the constitution. The NYPD agreed to grant them credentials several months later.
Their lawyer, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, continued negotiating with city officials to determine fair, constitutional criteria for credentialing.
“It’s very hard to define what a journalist is,” Siegel said. “The best we could do at that point was to have some objective standards.
“Back then, we settled on six articles that you were able to write about where you passed a police or fire line, but then I also wondered: well, wait a minute, why do you have to pass a police line in order to get press credentials?” Siegel also said they worried about the police department continuing credentialing “because they were pretty hostile, especially to people who were critical of the status quo”.
This hostility came to a head during former mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as the NYPD was “routinely denying or provoking press credentials for journalists they did not like”, said Ron Kuby, a veteran defense attorney who focuses on civil rights. The NYPD repeatedly collared journalists covering 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder.
“Sometimes, they would even arrest journalists while they were doing news gathering, use that false arrest to revoke their press credentials, and then refuse to reinstate them after these false charges were dismissed,” Kuby continued. In 2021, city hall voted to move credentialing outside the NYPD’s authority to the mayor’s office.
MOME also issues event-specific credentials. Thirty-two event-specific credentials for Mangione court proceedings have been issued to self-described independent journalists between February 2025 and April 2026, the Guardian learned.
Event-specific credentials potentially give non-journalist content creators, who don’t have professional incentives to abide by basic journalism standards, seating and computer access that working journalists need. If clout is king, and content is catnip for followers, there’s even less incentive to abide by rules of courthouse decorum – potentially worsening access issues journalists already face.
Kuby pointed out that unpopular commentary is by no means the same as inappropriate conduct, saying: “As a general rule in American life and the first amendment, we don’t regulate journalism because it’s the job of journalists to publish things the government frequently does not like, and this is true on the left and the right, and in between.”
Siegel said if it turned out that the current press credentialing system winds up creating “systemic logistical problems with access to the court proceedings”, then Mamdani should convene with press representatives and city attorneys and revisit objective standards for credentials.
Kuby and Siegel said that an overflow courtroom – where closed-circuit video of proceedings would be displayed – was among the ways to ensure that press and public have adequate access.
Mangione will face a state-level trial on 8 September for allegedly gunning down Thompson in Midtown Manhattan on 4 December 2024.
Mangione also faces a federal trial related to Thompson’s killing. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Rios, for her part, has maintained that she is a member of the media amid this controversy. “I‘m not a reporter I work in social media which is also press thank you,” she posted on Monday, with a flaming heart emoji.
