In August, after 50 uninterrupted years as a thrice-weekly publication, the Bolinas Hearsay News paused the presses. A notice to readers said its editors needed a vacation—and to reassess the way they operated.
The Hearsay, long the unvarnished voice of Bolinas, had devolved in recent months into a battleground for a bitter feud between residents divided over the Israel-Hamas war. For the publishers, the acrimony had turned fundamental publishing tenets topsy-turvy.
When the paper reemerged from its hiatus in September, it did so with 13 retractions and a new plan: a once-weekly publication schedule and editors reimagined as assemblers. It was a significant departure for a paper that had scarcely changed its format in five decades, sticking to its creed that “Everyone is a Reporter” and everything should be printed.
Since its inaugural issue on March 13, 1974, the Hearsay has been a forum for locals to air grievances, celebrate victories and weigh in on the debates of the day. “Bolinas waits more eagerly and gives more credence to the Hearsay News than they would to The New York Times,” said Steve Heilig, one of the Hearsay’s editors.
That’s because the voice of the Hearsay—with its letters, poems, meeting agendas, artwork, birthday announcements, obituaries and tide log—is distinctly the voice of Bolinas. As the writer Kevin Opstedal put it, the Hearsay serves as “an ongoing biography of a town.”
By offering everyone a soapbox, the paper was doing what the internet does now long before there was an internet. It was the blogosphere and social media decades before their time. But what is the Hearsay, exactly? A newspaper? A bulletin? A manifesto? An anarchic publishing experiment? The lines have always been blurred.
The Hearsay has never had paid staff, and these days it’s run by an amorphous collective of around 12 locals. “We try to think of it as a bulletin board, so it’s really up to the people of the town what ends up in there,” said Kathleen O’Neill, a longtime editor.
The editors never sought to be moderators who govern, regulate or maintain decorum. They are just conduits, printing what’s sent to them without interreference.
Founded by Michael Rafferty, a town butcher at the time, the Hearsay has always been a labor of love, cobbled together on a shoestring budget. For decades, the team split their work across Monday, Wednesday and Friday editions, dividing into roles of adman, editor and printer from a modest office in the Bolinas Community Public Utility District building.
But the Covid-19 pandemic exacted a toll, hollowing out staff and leaving editors juggling.
“We’re largely pasteup people,” Mr. Heilig said. On print days, whoever is on duty gathers, cuts and pastes submissions, loads the Risograph and then prints, collates and folds the copies.
The paper’s distribution is modest. One hundred copies are printed and distributed to the two local markets, the liquor store and the hardware store. They sell for 75 cents each, barely covering the cost of paper and ink. The small print run assumes that copies will be shared among Bolinas’s 1,200 residents. A digital link is sent out to a few hundred subscribers.
In September, the paper issued retractions concerning a pair of polemics written by José Leyva, a community organizer originally from Sonora, Mexico. Mr. Leyva, who lived in Bolinas for six years before returning to Mexico in March, sporadically contributed to the Hearsay, mostly sharing poems and short musings. He worked as a stonemason and, later, as a community organizer for the Bolinas Community Land Trust, helping secure housing for 60 workers who then lived on the Tacherra ranch.
Despite his affection for Bolinas, Mr. Leyva told the Light about the profound sense of alienation he experienced while living there. “I experienced different degrees of the colonized relationship between Latinos and white people in Bolinas,” he reflected. “Walking down the street, I couldn’t return the gaze of a white man or woman. I would look down, and I saw my Latino friends doing the same.”
Two letters he wrote, published on Aug. 5 and 9, took aim at Cheryl Ruggiero, an animal rights lawyer who leads a group called Bolinas for Compassionate Land Use, which has opposed efforts to house the former Tacherra ranch residents at an emergency R.V. park. Over the past year, Ms. Ruggiero also became the most vocal pro-Israel voice in town—a position she readily admits puts her in the minority.
In two lengthy letters, Mr. Leyva not only assailed Ms. Ruggerio’s character but accused her of being a threat to the community, a racist and a supporter of genocide. Ms. Ruggiero, who was camping near Mono Lake when the first article appeared, received a text from her neighbor, Wiley Laufman, who was the paper’s editor that day.
“Hey, Cheryl,” he wrote, “I just want to give you a heads up that José comes after you pretty hard today. I feel caught in between all this as your friend and neighbor and editor. Sorry this is so ugly.”
“I’m camping,” she replied, followed by a shocked OMG and heart emojis.
Ms. Ruggiero read the articles after she returned to Bolinas. In tears, she drafted a letter demanding corrections to what she described as libelous statements. The Hearsay printed a retraction shortly after, but she argued that it did not meet the legal standard for visibility set by California law. She contacted the paper again, demanding a retraction that complied with the state’s libel laws. Ultimately, the Hearsay printed a front-page retraction on Sept. 13 written by the paper’s attorney, Bolinas resident Jack Siedman, who did not return requests for comment.
The doctrine set by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision revolutionized the law of libel, securing strong First Amendment protections for the press and making it much harder for public figures to win defamation suits. In its unanimous ruling, the court held that public figures must show not just that an article was inaccurate and hurt their reputation, but also that the publisher acted with “actual malice”—either knowingly publishing falsehoods or showing reckless disregard for the truth.
Over the years, the definition of a public figure grew expansive. In 1974, Gertz v. Robert Welch held that a private individual could become a public figure if they “voluntarily inject” themselves into a public controversy or are involuntarily “drawn into” one.
Though libel laws differ from state to state, in California, a prominently displayed retraction can demonstrate a lack of actual malice. On the other hand, a publisher’s failure to retract can aid a public figure in establishing the malice required to win a defamation case.
For his part, Mr. Leyva expressed dismay at the retractions. “She’s using the law, a colonial, white supremacist structure, to silence others,” he said.
When asked about the conflict unfolding in Bolinas, Floyd Abrams—the titan of free speech who defended The New York Times against the Nixon administration’s attempts to suppress it from printing the Pentagon Papers—reflected on the protections afforded to even the most angry, offensive, unpatriotic, hateful, hurtful and harmful speech.
“The First Amendment exists precisely to protect people who say controversial things in controversial ways,” he said. “Its spirit lies in accepting the notion that people will hold a range of views on many subjects, many of which will be difficult or even impossible to live with. But we, at our best, have always protected that freedom.”
In the public square, you can say or publish ignorant things, hateful things, in many cases false things, and the government cannot intervene.
For Ms. Ruggiero, the story began well before Mr. Leyva’s missives, in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. Though more than 7,000 miles from Israel, the war felt close to many in Bolinas, and the Hearsay found itself grappling with its role as the town’s sounding board amid increasingly polarized discourse.
“After Oct. 7, it was clear that the loudest voices were taking control of the town’s narrative,” Ms. Ruggiero said. “They were framing it as this battle between good and evil.”
As posts about the war filled the pages of the Hearsay and spray-painted slogans appeared around town—messages like “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” and “From the River to the Sea”—she and her husband responded by hanging posters of their own.
Their signs read, “Free the Hostages” and featured a Star of David and a broken heart. “We never defiled their posters,” she said, “but ours were always torn down, defaced or disappeared.” She began submitting her own pieces to the Hearsay, defending Israel in the conflict.
Ms. Ruggiero has since grown concerned for her safety. She installed security cameras at her home and fears walking around town, where she says people refuse to meet her gaze or whisper as she passes. “I feel like an outcast,” she admitted.
Her friend and neighbor Alicia Gamaz, a lawyer who splits her time between San Francisco and Bolinas, worries about Ms. Ruggiero’s wellbeing. “She has been dragged through fire for her beliefs, and I think that’s unfair,” Ms. Gamez said.
Ms. Ruggiero said the dynamics amount to a kind of litmus test: If you support Palestine, you’re in. If you support the existence of Israel, you’re out.
But Mr. Leyva says the same of Ms. Ruggiero. “She wants to punish anyone that disagrees with the way that she thinks or what she believes,” he said. He said that Ms. Ruggiero has threatened legal action against various entities in town and even contacted the land trust to inquire about his immigration status.
In his writings, Mr. Leyva paints a portrait of whiteness in Bolinas, where “ideals like democracy and equality are often celebrated but when we examine the material conditions of people living here, those values become hollow,” he said.
He hoped readers would reckon with the town’s often-unquestioned racial hierarchies, along with their stance on the war. “My goal wasn’t just to challenge those who are outspoken; I wanted to bring attention to the silence, to those who avoid the conversation altogether,” he said.
When asked about his tact and delivery, Mr. Leyva described his decision to call out Ms. Ruggiero as a necessary intervention.
“If I approached this differently, part of me wonders if she would reconsider her position and just be more thoughtful about what she says and how she acts,” he said. “But honestly, I don’t think she would. What I’m really doing is shedding light on the accumulated experiences that I and other brown people have endured in this community. I’m not here to change minds.”
On Aug. 9, Will Bartlett, the Hearsay’s editor of the day, penned an unusual preamble, grappling with the uneasy balance between personal conscience and the Hearsay’s norms.
“Putting everything to print that comes in the inbox or through the door slot can sometimes be really difficult,” he wrote. “About a year ago, I stopped even reading the contributions, because I did not want to have my thoughts interfere with the thoughts of others.”
Mr. Bartlett said he saw himself as “not an editor, but a put-er-together-er.” He has since left the paper.
The conflict is the second time the Hearsay has faced allegations of defamation. The first instance came in 1982, when landlord Gregg Welsh threatened to sue the paper after someone called him a slumlord in its pages. That case was dropped before it went to court.
Lacking any pretense of journalistic objectivity, the Hearsay’s submissions are deeply personal and forcefully opinionated accounts of events that matter to the denizens of Bolinas. But Ms. O’Neill, the veteran editor, sees an uptick in submissions that reflect deepening divisions and animosity. The challenge then lies in how the Hearsay can continue to channel the town’s whirling discontent and creativity without crossing a line.
“The world is going through something right now,” she said. “Everyone just seems full of rage for the other side. I keep reminding people how passionate we were when we were young, demonstrating against the war, but I think as we get older, we start seeing the larger picture—things are never as straightforward as we would like them to be. We want to reflect the feelings of the people in our community, but we also don’t want to make others feel afraid. Right now, that’s a difficult line to walk.”