Very few stories these days take my breath away, but this one did the trick: Cops in Kansas raided the office of local newspaper the Marion County Record Friday morning because of a complaint by a local restaurant owner named Kari Newell. She was unhappy with the outlet’s reporting on how she kicked out reporters from a recent event at her establishment with US Congressman Jake LaTurner (R-KS) and subsequent research they were conducting. The cops responded in kind, seizing cell phones, computers, and other devices necessary for publishing the paper after receving a signed search warrant from a judge.
What has remained unreported until now is that, prior to the raids, the newspaper had been actively investigating Gideon Cody, Chief of Police for the city of Marion. They’d received multiple tips alleging he’d retired from his previous job to avoid demotion and punishment over alleged sexual misconduct charges.
The news of the multiple raids was reported Friday by both the paper itself and by nonprofit news service Kansas Reflector. After receiving an alert from the Kansas Press Association, Reflector Editor-in-Chief Sherman Smith said he quickly understood the gravity of the situation. “My immediate reaction: This is an attack on all journalists, and we have to respond,” Sherman told The Handbasket in an email Friday night. “My staff and I stopped what we were doing and directed our attention to reporting this story.”
I reached out to Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the Marion County Record, late Friday evening to get his reaction to the unprecedented raids and to learn about any new updates in the case. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Marisa Kabas: I wanted to check in and see if there had been any updates since the raids yesterday.
Eric Meyer: We’ve pieced together enough equipment so that we’ll probably be able to put out our paper. Our big question is how to get the material for it, which we don’t have any of. I mean, I’m gonna have to go hunting to find the name plate for the front page.
But other than that, we’re doing ok. Been in lots of talks with lots of lawyers. That’s pretty much the long and short of it, I guess for now. Just getting started on rebuilding everything. So, we’ve got a bit of work to do with that.
MK: And what are the lawyers telling you right now?
EM: That the people who did this are going to learn a very expensive lesson. Their real question was, from a legal standpoint, was it more important that we get it [the newspaper’s equipment] back right now, or is it more important that we—for lack of a better word—stick it to them? We’re able to survive now, and I don’t really want to stick it to anybody, but we need to have something that’s big enough to convince somebody that you really don’t do this. Not in America. This is not something that you do here. So, we’ll be working in that direction.
MK: When the raids happened, were you at the office or were you at your home?
EM: I was at my home. I stay here with my 98-year-old mother and she was actually waiting for her meal to arrive from Meals on Wheels. And I thought when I heard the knocking, that was a meal person. I know they normally just leave it outside and no, it was a couple of police officers.
I immediately tried to call the newspaper and I couldn’t get through to the newspaper because they had raided them at the same time and forced them to go outside. So, although I did have a landline here—the advantage of living with a 98 year old woman is you’ve got a landline!—they couldn’t answer at the Record.
At the newspaper office, they’d been forced to leave the office. We weren’t forced to leave the house here. But my mother is very upset about having police in her house for several hours. They stood here for a long time.
I got in the car and left to go down to the newspaper office. And actually along the way had to stop because I couldn’t find phone numbers [since all his devices had been seized]. I wanted to call the attorney we normally use from the open government coalition that usually provides initial consulting for us, and I didn’t have his phone number. So
