A prominent Mexican journalist and her publisher, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, are being sued in an attempt to force them to remove a bombshell political investigation from the country’s bookstores.

The book La Casa Blanca de Peña Nieto is based on an exposé by a team led by journalist Carmen Aristegui which revealed in 2014 that the country’s first lady had purchased a $7m mansion from a prominent contractor with close links to her husband, President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The scandal over the property – known as the White House, or Casa Blanca – sent Peña Nieto’s popularity plunging to historically low levels and wrecked his reputation internationally as a reform-minded president.

Soon after breaking the story, however, Aristegui was abruptly fired from her popular morning radio show. At the time, she accused her former employers, MVS radio, of bowing to pressure from Peña Nieto – an allegation repeated in the prologue of the book, which was published last October. MVS Radio has denied it gave way to pressure.

The Mexican government has also denied any involvement, describing Aristegui’s departure from MVS as a conflict between private parties.

The lawsuit against Penguin and Arestegui, filed by the owners of MVS Radio on 29 May, demands the withdrawal of all copies of the book, a public apology and the removal of the book’s current prologue from any future editions.

News of the lawsuit emerged just days after Peña Nieto issued a partial apology for any “offence and outrage” over the White House affair.

“This is a clear case of judicial harassment,” Aristegui told reporters on Thursday. “On one hand, [the president] is asking for forgiveness. On the other, we’re being sued.”

The legal treatment of the Aristegui team again demonstrated the difficulties faced by independent media in Mexico, where many outlets depend on government advertising to survive, and in return rarely challenge national or local officials.

In the book’s prologue, Aristegui expresses disappointment with the owners of MVS Radio – the Vargas family – and says they suffered a “moral collapse” in agreeing to fire her.

Aristegui said that she is being sued for “moral damage”, though the reporters working with her on the investigation – the book’s authors – are not named in the suit. One of the reporters, Daniel Lizarraga, says the authors sought comment from MVS, but the company “rejected” all request for interviews and instead issued a statement, “which did not answer any of the questions”.



A spokesman for MVS Radio told the Guardian the prologue contained falsehoods about Joaquín Vargas, chairman of the MVS board of directors.

“His interest is not money,” said Felipe Chao, vice-president for institutional relations and communications, adding that Aristegui and team should offer proof of her allegations against Vargas.

Chao denied any undue government influence, saying the company received approximately 6% of its revenues in government advertising.

Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Random House’s Spanish-language division, said it stood by the book and planned to fight the lawsuit.

“The investigation itself has never been questioned,” said Ricardo Cayuela Gally, the publisher’s editorial director in Mexico City. “In any other country, this wins the national journalism award.”

Aristegui’s morning radio show ran on MVS for six years until 2015 and was one of the most popular in Mexico City. Unlike most print and radio in Mexico, it carried out in-depth investigations – though it drew criticism that it didn’t go after leftwing targets with equal vigor.



Aristegui’s departure from the station came after two members of her team were fired for allegedly associating the company’s brand with a new website to encourage whistleblowers, known as Mexicoleaks.

Aristegui called the reasoning a pretext, since MVS had granted her complete editorial control over program and its contents.



Her investigation of the Casa Blanca scandal hit Mexico like a bombshell, revealing that first lady Angelica Rivera had purchased a $7m whitewashed mansion from a contractor, Grupo Higa, which had done billions of pesos of business with the government of the state of Mexico while Peña Nieto was governor there from 2005 to 2011.

Subsequent reports in the Wall Street Journal showed Peña Nieto and finance minister Luis Videgaray had also homes from contractors.



Peña Nieto’s popularity subsequently plunged, while the federal government was forced to cancel a contract to build high-speed rail line with a Chinese company as Grupo Higa was one of its partners.

“[Aristegui] went for the jugular and she got it,” says Federico Estévez, political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.



In early 2015, Peña Nieto appointed a friend of his finance minister to investigate the incident. The 60,000-page report – which didn’t include interviews with the contractor or implicated individuals – found no wrongdoing since none of the accused were federal public officials at the time of the purchase.

It was widely criticised as a whitewash, and the president’s apology this week was rejected by most Mexicans.

“His apologies came too late,” said Viridiana Ríos, an analyst at the Wilson Centre, a thinktank in Washington. “We needed to have his apologies at the beginning.”

