@cicerone imposter,
You know, Zimmerman's girlfriend was wise to begin texting a reporter about the kind of behavior he was displaying three weeks before the incident that led to his arrest. She hoped, if she did eventually give this reporter an actual interview, it would spur Zimmerman to get psychiatric help, which he had been refusing to do, and he had been blowing up at her when she suggested it.
The girlfriend must have been at her wits end when she contacted that reporter. She had Zimmerman, in her house, she couldn't get him to leave, he was volatile and voicing suicidal ideation, and he wouldn't go to see a psychiatrist, and the way he was acting had her afraid of him. And she received no payment for anything she texted to that reporter.
But, by texting that reporter, she established some record of what her life was like with him, and how he was acting, weeks before the incident that led to his arrest.
Nicole Simpson had often told friends she knew O.J. would kill her one day, and that he'd get away with it. For that reason, she placed photos of her battered face, after one of his assaults, in a safety deposit box, to be found in the event he did kill her. She was trying to provide her own documentation of what he was like.
I think Zimmerman's girlfriend might have been trying to do something similar when she began texting that reporter. She was telling her own story, not just to try to get him some help, and herself some help, but to establish her own documentation about what he was like, just as Nicole Simpson tried to do with those photos.
