Texas

Texas Man Arrested After Ranting About Age Verification Laws Blocking His Anime

Did he make a true threat? Or was this just hyperbolic ranting about bad policy?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 8.10.2026 12:15 PM

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(Photo: Ingram Travis County. Nandovidal81/Dreamstime)

"Unlock my fucking anime," a Texas man told authorities in an expletive-laden rant last month. He now faces criminal charges.

The man called the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on July 25, apparently upset that he was being blocked from viewing anime of some sort.

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"I don't know which one of you sons of bitches passed this motherfucking bill to get this damn shit blocking my motherfucking anime, but you whole ass motherfuckers need to unpass this shit," he allegedly said in a voicemail, the transcript of which was provided to KXAN by the Texas Department of Public Safety. "Y'all are fucking ridiculous with your bitch asses. My Google account says I'm fucking over the age of 18, and your dumbass is passing these dumbass laws"

So far: hero. Because the caller—identified by the state as Joseph Roy Ozment—is spot on about these laws, even if it's not quite clear precisely which law he's talking about.

Texas law now requires age verification by app stores and age verification by adult websites. Either might be responsible for preventing an adult from viewing anime of certain varieties.

Some porn platforms have blocked Texas viewers entirely, which could explain why the caller was blocked. Or it's possible he wasn't literally blocked but still couldn't access the content he wanted to because he wasn't able or willing to show an ID. (Of course, he may have just had an internet connection issue, or been delusional, or otherwise been blocked from intended content somehow. But for the sake of discussion, I'll take him at his word that this had something to do with proving his age.)

These laws are huge invasions of privacy and undoubtedly deeply frustrating to many. They mean that adults trying to access legal content—including literally any app, not just ones intended for mature audiences—have to go through an age verification process of some sort. (In a recent Carnegie Mellon University study, most people asked to participate in a survey for the chance to win prizes would not go ahead with it when asked to verify their age by submitting an ID).

Here's where Ozment went wrong: He allegedly ended his anti-age-verification rant with "I'm a fucking stab every goddamn one of you bitches. Unlock my fucking anime."

While kind of hilarious if not taken literally, of course authorities took it literally.

Ozment was arrested on suspicion of making a terroristic threat against a public servant. According to Travis County, Texas, court records, Ozment has not yet been formally indicted on the charge, a third-degree felony that could come with a penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.

Should he be? That depends on whether he was making what's known as a "true threat." True threats are not protected by the First Amendment. But what counts as a true threat isn't always so simple to determine.

"A true threat is a statement that frightens or intimidates one or more specified persons into believing that they will be seriously harmed by the speaker or by someone acting at the speaker's behest," writes law professor Kevin Francis O'Neill. "The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat, but the prosecution must prove that he or she intended to communicate a threat."

One can't definitively tell from the call transcript alone here whether Ozment was........

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