The same thing happened to me when I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Blade about a school in Oklahoma where teachers and administrators were using or tolerating homophobic and racist slurs against children.

I found photos of three of the school staff on social media, and I included them in my story. The Blade got a letter from a lawyer representing two of the men, demanding that the story be taken down, claiming the photos violate copyright.

Well. The story is still up, including in a version here on Medium, because that lawyer was as legally incorrect as Grace Christian is.

Journalists do have a right to include most publicly available photos of public figures in our stories. There are exceptions to that, from what the Blade's lawyer explained to me, but the exceptions are quite limited.