Late last month, State Attorney Suzy Lopez dropped out of the 3rd Annual Tampa Bay Criminal Justice Summit, where she was scheduled to speak on a panel alongside Hillsborough County Public Defender Lisa McLean about topics including death penalty prosecutions, election crimes and drug courts.
Emails obtained by Creative Loafing Tampa Bay showed that Lopez withdrew from the panel after she was not given a list of questions before the event.
The state attorney is an elected position responsible for prosecuting all crimes within a judicial circuit. Lopez was elected to represent Florida’s 13th Circuit covering all of Hillsborough county.
She was appointed in 2022 when former State Attorney Andrew Warren was removed from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis after he signed a pledge not to prosecute people under the state’s abortion laws.
Lopez won election to the seat in 2024, earning nearly 53% of the vote over Warren.
The emails, obtained by CL through a public records request, showed a week-long conversation Lopez and her communications director, Erin Maloney, had with an organizer for the criminal justice summit. Lopez asked the organizer if he could provide her with a list of questions in advance, and he initially said yes. The organizer later told Lopez that the panel moderator was not planning on providing questions in advance. The organizer instead sent a list of topics to be discussed to give her time to prepare.
“We need the questions, not just the topics,” Maloney responded. “In order to have a real conversation, we need to prepare the State Attorney.”
Maloney also said that some of the topics didn’t apply to the state attorney’s office, such as “election crimes,” which she said are not handled by Lopez’s department.
“If the moderator you chose does not want to be forthcoming about what he’s asking, then we will bow out because the State Attorney already has a very full schedule that day,” Maloney continued.
In a separate email to Lopez, Maloney said: “It is my suggestion that you do not attend this event unless we receive the questions or even simply topics he will ask about. This is not a political debate- we agreed to their terms ahead of time, and now they are trying to change the rules.”
Lopez agreed, and Maloney informed the organizer that Lopez would be withdrawing from the event.
“We discussed having questions beforehand as we do for every panel that we take part in, and we agreed to that ahead of time,” Maloney’s email to the organizer reads. “This is not a political debate, and as always, we like to be fully prepared with statistics and the most up to date answers for the audience. Even just seeing the topics, it is clear that some of them would not even apply to our office.”
When asked about the emails, Maloney told CL that this was a miscommunication, not an attempt to dodge public accountability. Panel audiences, Maloney said, would rather hear polished answers: “These panels get into the weeds legally so we want to be prepared.”
She also said that questions are typically provided in advance for panels that aren’t supposed to be political debates.
Maloney told CL that it’s not a policy for the state attorney to receive panel questions in advance, despite the email to the event organizer where she said they discussed having questions ahead of time “as we do for every panel that we take part in.”
Maloney pointed to audience Q&A sessions often held after panels as an example of Lopez taking questions without preparation.
When asked if there was a situation in which Lopez would speak on an unscripted panel, she told CL, “It’s just hard to answer a hypothetical.”
Elizabeth Martinez Strauss, an attorney who ran for Lopez’s state attorney seat in 2024, told CL that Lopez may have backed out to avoid confronting challenging questions on the fly. Strauss said that she has enjoyed personal conversations with Lopez in the past, but when the topic turned to policy, Lopez lost her footing.
“[Lopez] doesn’t like to be thinking on her feet,” Strauss told CL. Audiences want to hear from officials directly, even when they don’t have all the answers, Strauss—who earned just under 30% of the vote in the primary for the state attorney’s office—said.
She didn’t blame the state attorney for wanting the questions in advance, and said that since Lopez was appointed rather than elected, it’s possible that she didn’t initially want a position that put her in the electoral spotlight.
“But, I mean, if you’re competent and you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be afraid of answering questions,” Strauss continued. “If you don’t know it, you should just have the insight to say, ‘I’m not going to guess about a number or a specific fact.’”
Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky
This article appears in Nov. 13 – 19, 2025.