New York City Council moves to strip press passes from Mangione fan club

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin introduced a bill Thursday that would make it easier to revoke city-issued press credentials, targeting a group of Luigi Mangione supporters who obtained official passes and used them to access courthouse proceedings despite having no legitimate journalistic purpose.

The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Chris Banks and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Carmen De La Rosa and Inna Vernikov, would lower the evidentiary standard for revoking a press pass from “clear and convincing evidence” to the less demanding “preponderance of the evidence.” It would also grant the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment direct authority to suspend or revoke credentials.

The legislation arrives months after a trio of self-described “Mangionistas”, Ashley Rojas, Abril Rios, and Lena Weissbrot, drew national attention by flashing city-issued press passes outside the courthouse during Mangione’s hearings. None of them are working journalists in any recognizable sense. What they are, by their own conduct, is a fan club for a man who shot and killed a 50-year-old father of two on a Manhattan sidewalk.

What the ‘Mangionistas’ actually said

The statements these credentialed individuals have made on the record tell the story better than any legislative summary could. Rojas, speaking to the New York Post outside the courthouse in May, offered this contribution to public discourse:

“F— Brian Thompson. That’s all I want to say. F— Brian Thompson. F— his mom.”

That quote, with the profanity masked here for obvious reasons, came from someone carrying an official New York City press credential. Weissbrot, for her part, claimed that Thompson “was responsible for more deaths than Usama bin Laden.” Thompson was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Bin Laden masterminded the September 11 attacks.

These are not journalists covering a trial. These are activists celebrating a killing, and New York City handed them the credentials to do it.

How the credentialing system broke down

The New York Post reported that the credentialing debacle traces back to a 2021 reform under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, which transferred press pass authority from the NYPD to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. That transfer followed journalist arrests during the 2020 George Floyd protests. The new system’s requirements were vague, applicants needed six or more published pieces including in-person event coverage. Fan-blog-style court attendance posts apparently cleared that bar.

The problem compounded under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. National Review reported that Mamdani scrapped proposed stricter rules drafted under former Mayor Eric Adams. Those rules would have required applicants to be affiliated with a legitimate news-gathering organization and would have allowed credentials to be denied or revoked for applicants who make verbal or physical threats, criteria that Rojas’s and Weissbrot’s public statements would seem to violate on their face.

Instead, Mamdani’s administration loosened the gates. The three women received their passes in 2025.

Menin, who formerly served as MOME commissioner, appeared on FOX 5 New York’s “Good Day New York” Thursday to announce the bill. Fox News reported her framing of the problem:

“These fangirls, who are not journalists, are showing up at the trial with press credentials that the City of New York is giving to them.”

She added that the city needs to “reform their practices so it’s really journalists, legitimate journalists, who should be getting the press credentials.”

A mayor who saw the problem, and did nothing first

Mayor Mamdani himself acknowledged the failure. He told reporters that “those three individuals should not have received press passes.” But that admission raises the obvious question: his own administration issued those passes after rolling back the stricter rules that might have prevented it.

Mangione, who pleaded guilty to federal charges earlier this year, shot Brian Thompson on December 5, 2024, approaching from behind and firing with a silenced handgun before fleeing on a bicycle. He was arrested days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after customers and workers recognized him from a wanted poster.

His legal team is now fighting to have New York state-level charges dismissed on double jeopardy grounds. The state trial, the same proceedings these credentialed fans have been attending, continues in Manhattan. His defense team has pursued an extreme emotional disturbance argument in the state case, a strategy that has itself drawn scrutiny.

City Council Minority Leader David Carr, a Republican from Staten Island, captured the bipartisan disgust in comments to the Post, calling the credentialed women “homicide-fan girls” who “should never be allowed access to courtrooms or official press events with the imprimatur of the City of New York.” He added bluntly: “they aren’t reporters, they’re ghouls.”

The bill’s mechanics, and its limits

The core change in the proposed legislation is procedural but significant. Under current rules, the city must meet a “clear and convincing evidence” standard to justify revoking a press pass, a threshold typically associated with civil-liberties-sensitive proceedings. The bill would lower that to “preponderance of the evidence,” the standard used in most civil disputes. It means the city would need to show only that it is more likely than not that a credential holder is misusing the pass.

The Washington Examiner reported that the legislation specifically targets the use of credentials to gain access behind police lines, at City Hall, and inside courthouses, the very access points these Mangione supporters exploited.

Whether the bill will face First Amendment challenges remains to be seen. Press credentialing has always sat at the intersection of government access and free expression, and any system that gives a political office the power to decide who qualifies as a “legitimate journalist” invites abuse.

But the current system has already been abused, just from the other direction. When a city credential becomes a backstage pass for people whose stated contribution to the discourse is profane tirades against a murder victim and his family, the process has failed.

Former Mayor Adams apparently saw this coming. His proposed rules, which Mamdani discarded, included the common-sense requirement that applicants be affiliated with an actual news organization. Adams warned, as National Review noted, that “individuals carrying press credentials” had been “using them during demonstrations and events to harass police officers, intimidate members of the public, interfere with law enforcement operations, and shield activist behavior behind the label of journalism.”

That warning went unheeded. Now the City Council is trying to clean up the mess.

The deeper failure

The Mangione case has drawn intense public attention from the start, and with it a disturbing online subculture that treats a confessed killer as a folk hero. That subculture was always going to try to get close to the proceedings. The city’s job was to keep the courthouse serious and secure.

Instead, New York City handed official credentials to people who openly celebrate the murder of a man who left behind a wife and two children. It did so under rules that were loosened for ideological reasons, to make credentialing more “accessible”, and then failed to exercise the most basic judgment about who was applying and why.

Menin’s bill is a reasonable corrective. But it shouldn’t have been necessary. The problem wasn’t that the city lacked the legal tools to say no. The problem was that the people running the system didn’t bother to use the judgment the job required.

When your credentialing process can’t distinguish between a reporter and a fan club, the credential means nothing, and neither does the institution that issues it.