Former Aldermanic President Lewis Reed may be in prison, but his actions still haunt the city he once presided over: A new ruling says the City of St. Louis is liable for his actions on Twitter (now X, but who actually calls it that, anyway?).
The ruling came yesterday from the
, which heard the city’s appeal of a U.S. District Court ruling.
The suit was brought by the ACLU of Missouri and Washington University’s First Amendment Clinic on behalf of Sarah Felts, who responded critically to one of Reed’s 2019 tweets about the city’s Workhouse — and was swiftly blocked. She sued, saying the block was an unconstitutional violation of her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
U.S. District Judge John A. Ross agreed, saying that Reed’s block amounted to unacceptable “viewpoint discrimination.” Since Reed primarily used the account for official business and not his campaign, the court found it amounted to a public forum and awarded Felts the $1 she had sought in damages.