In a nearly-unprecedented move, police and prosecutors insist on taking two Blade reporters to trial for doing their jobs
Above: Asheville city hall by night. File photo by Max Cooper
UPDATE: On June 16, after a judge told the jury they couldn’t consider the First Amendment or constitutional issues in their verdict, our journalists were convicted of trespassing and given a $100 fine. They will appeal. This ruling sets a chilling precedent for journalists around the country. We have a longer statement about the convictions here. The Blade, as ever, remains determined to fight on.
The trial of Asheville Blade reporters Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss for recording the Christmas 2021 APD raid on Aston Park will start tomorrow, June 12.
It is worth reviewing how we got here. On Dec. 25, 2021 Asheville police officers raided an Aston Park encampment with protesters, mutual aid workers and unhoused locals. Coit and Bliss were there monitoring the situation and repeatedly identified themselves as press. APD officers didn’t tell them to take a step back; they ordered them to leave the park entirely, which would have required them to move so far away that it would leave them unable to record or monitor the police’s actions. When they asserted their rights to cover the actions of the police on public property they were both arrested.
Body cam footage later revealed the police explicitly decided to arrest them first “since they’re videotaping.”
They were charged with second-degree trespassing. Some of the officers were blatantly transphobic towards Bliss, a trans woman, including keeping her in the mens’ side of the police van and misgendering her even after seeing the “F” on her license, retrieved from her pants pocket. She was still wearing her press i.d. when released.
This marked the second time a Blade reporter has been arrested for doing their job, after cops dragged Coit out of their car and arrested them for covering a 2020 anti-racist demonstration. Their press identification was hanging from their rearview mirror. Those charges were, over a year later, dismissed.
Documents later obtained by the ACLU also revealed that Coit and Bliss were secretly banned from all public parks for a year, due to “camping in Aston Park refusing to leave” something neither was ever even accused of. Neither reporter was ever informed. These bans meant they could have been arrested simply for trying to cover a city council meeting in-person. City hall’s currently being sued by the ACLU for their park ban policy, which is blatantly unconstitutional.
A shot from body cam footage showing Asheville police hauling Blade reporter Matilda Bliss into the detention van on Dec. 25, 2021. They would later get an illegal search warrant for her phone
After her arrest police refused to return Bliss’ phone and belongings to her, even after these were specifically requested by defense attorney Ben Scales. On Jan. 19, 2022 Asheville police executed a search warrant on Bliss’ phone in trying to prosecute another case against mutual aid workers and protesters.
The warrant specifically cites Bliss’ political views as reason to target her, claiming she was linked to “anarchist extremist groups.” The only example mentioned was a public schedule of social justice events she’d maintained for years.
No, we are not making this up.
The police did not mention she was a journalist, and the warrant clearly violates the 1980 federal Privacy Protection Act, which protects journalists’ notes and materials from being searched or seized in such circumstances.
On Jan. 25, 2022 city manager Debra Campbell explicitly said that she believes that the police decide who does and doesn’t qualify as a journalist.
As the year wound on it became clear that the Buncombe County District Attorney’s office was hell-bent on prosecuting Bliss and Coit for doing their jobs. This is incredibly unusual, as according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker it marks only the fourth time since 2018 that journalists anywhere in the country have been taken to court for something they did in the course of reporting.
On April 19 Judge Calvin Hill ignored First Amendment violations, publicly doubted if Bliss and Coit were journalists — something the prosecutor hadn’t even tried to assert — and said that the press needed to ask the parks director’s permission in advance to monitor the police on public land after 10 p.m. He then declared them guilty of trespassing. He even broke North Carolina sentencing rules, which mandate both reporters receive nothing more than a fine, to try to hit Coit with a suspended jail sentence and a year of probation for recording the police. The case was immediately appealed to a jury trial.
By this time condemnation of the actions of the APD, city hall and the prosecutor’s office had grown. More than 45 press, civil liberties and media organizations have condemned the persecution of our journalists. These include the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the North Carolina chapter of the ACLU, Reporters Without Borders and many, many more.
The same organizations who help journalists survive openly authoritarian regimes around the world have sounded the alarm about the danger to the press in “progressive” Asheville.
The Asheville Police Department’s hostility to journalists — or anyone monitoring them — is well-documented. In an official September 2020 city survey APD officers listed “no scrutiny from media” and “knowing your decisions will not be scrutinized” as top priorities. After Blade reporters documented a similar April 2021 raid on an Aston Park houseless camp and criticized the police in our coverage, APD commanders and high-level city officials forwarded around an email declaring our organization something to “fight back” against. In a March 22, 2023 interview on the Overlook podcast chief David Zack declared “maybe it was the journalists who were the problem.”
Slide from a 2020 official city hall survey of APD officers’ priorities
Other publications generally less critical of the police do not receive the same treatment. In 2016 Mountain Xpress reporter Dan Hess was arrested while covering a protest occupying the police station lobby. Along with the release of a public statement criticizing this breach of press rights, District Attorney Todd Williams dropped his charges only days later.
This stands in stark contrast to Williams’ comparison of Blade journalists to a covid-denying business (no, we’re not making that up either). He made that analogy in an interview with “The Overlook” podcast Williams personally requested, as if covering a camp eviction at nighttime is the same as flaunting local health protections for profit during a global pandemic.
As the Freedom of the Press Foundation summed up handily, “blatant unconstitutionality appears to be the order of the day in Asheville.”
This is all part of a wider attack on dissent and organizing in this town. After the December 2021 Aston Park raid 16 mutual aid workers were hit with bogus “felony littering” charges for having supplies in a public park. Documents recently uncovered by the Blade reveal that even the city’s own solid waste manager saw this as blatant retaliation, asserting in an email to the city manager that “clearly, these folks weren’t littering” and that the police chief and p.r. officials weren’t telling the truth.
As Asheville has become one of the least affordable cities in the country local governments here have increasingly been defined by petty cruelty, an aversion to the most basic transparency and the open use of force against the homeless and all others who don’t fit neatly into the tourism industry’s marketing brochures.
While we are beholden to no outside group and ground our reporting in research and investigation, we are honest about our views. Our sympathy will always lie with communities under fire, not those holding the guns. An independent press should be no friend to the powerful.
Last week Judge Alan Thornburg suddenly switched in for the judge previously hearing pretrial motions, who had expressed some interests in both hearing more about First Amendment concerns and in local governments’ respecting the defense’s access to evidence. Instead Thornburg refused to consider press freedom issues, denied any questioning of the higher-level officials who ordered the raid and ordered the trial to proceed less than a week later. He also demanded Scales immediately respond to a motion to quash that he’d received less than 24 hours before. Thornburg’s orders didn’t cite any reasons or justification.
Asheville police during the Christmas night 2021 Aston Park raid. Photo by Veronica Coit
Our co-op has zero illusions about the “justice” system and how it operates. There’s a reason we remain, proudly, abolitionists. Nonetheless there is still so much blatantly wrong with the persecution of our journalists to emphasize in court.
The people of this city deserve a press that stands up to retaliation and refuses to go along with those in power simply because it’s the easy thing to do. The next few weeks are going to be hard but we remain committed to fight on no matter what happens.
— The Asheville Blade co-op
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