The New York Times filed a lawsuit last week against Rita Villadiego, a Filipina woman accused of pretending to be a reporter for the American newspaper giant.
The suit was filed against Villadiego, who writes under the pseudonym “Contessa Bourbon,” for pretending to be a reporter for the paper and showing up to community events and press conferences, complete with a self-printed business card with the Times‘ logo.
According to the lawsuit, she managed to get int a press conference with US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos after presenting herself as a reporter for the paper.
The Times is asking the court to stop Villadiego from presenting herself as a reporter, and to award the paper costs, attorney fees, and other relief deemed by the court.
The lawsuit asserts that Villadiego has represented herself as a reporter for the paper several times since 2015.
As of today, Villadiego’s Twitter account is active. In some tweets made today, she claims to be “popular” and a “celebrity” in the Philippines, and how she has an upcoming movie and Broadway musical based on her life allegedly starring Broadway star Lea Salonga.
According to her Twitter credentials, she also reports for the Wall Street Journal, London Times, Guardian, and the Washington Post. Oh, and apparently calls herself the… “Queen of BARCELONA”
We don’t know if she’s kidding, but the tweets are pretty bizarre.
Cristina DC Pastor, a former reporter of the now defunct Manila Chronicle, and founder of New York-based Filipino American community news website The FilAm, wrote in a piece published on Nov. 11 that she knew Villadiego. She encountered Villadiego previously while editing the weekly Filipino-American newspaper Philippine News where Villadiego would contribute occasionally.
“In the US, she is a freelance journalist who wrote mainly for the Filipino Express in Jersey City, first under her real name. After a couple of years, she began to use the byline Contessa Bourbon,” Pastor said.
“Contessa Bourbon became her nom de plume around the time she and Hope moved to Washington D.C. When I asked why she was leaving New York, she said she was being hounded by “terrorists,” so she had to change address and change her name,” she said. Yikes.
While Pastor wasn’t certain if Villadiego was mentally unwell, she said, “there was something odd about her. Some people thought she was unwell. I overheard one community leader admonish her, ‘Rita, I think you should go home… for the sake of your daughter.”
In the Philippines, she was a reporter for the Philippine Daily Inquirer in the mid-1990s.
The lawsuit also stated that Ms. Bourbon’s “use of the The New York Times in connection with her physical impersonation of a New York Times reporter and in representing herself online (via her social media accounts including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) as a New York Times journalist is likely to cause confusion, or injury to the business reputation of The Times, or dilution of the distinctive quality of The Times’s marks.”
They said she had received a written letter in May 2015 from the Times asking her to stop presenting herself as a reporter for the paper, but she continued to do so.
Coconuts Manila has attempted to reach Villadiego for a reaction about the lawsuit via Facebook messenger but has not yet received a reply as of posting time.
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