The latest on the Kansas newspaper police raid

The Handbasket follows up on its earlier scoop.

Image from ABC News video of the raid

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It’s been unbelievable to watch how a newspaper with a circulation of just 4,000 readers has captured the attention of the nation after being raided by police. 

Perhaps you hadn’t heard of Marion, Kansas, before this weekend, but chances are you have now: The Marion County Record and the home of its owners were raided Friday morning after a local judge granted a search warrant. One of the owners—98-year-old Joan Meyer—has since died. And now media outlets all over the country are rallying to support the paper and, perhaps more importantly, the First Amendment.

In a story posted to the Marion County Record’s site Saturday evening, Eric Meyer announced his mother had passed away from being, “stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home.” When I spoke with Meyer mere hours prior, he’d described the toll it was taking on his mother, who was waiting for a Meals on Wheels delivery when the cops showed up.

“My mother got very, very, very, very upset about this and about that time her lunch did arrive, and she never did eat it yesterday,” Meyer told me via phone Saturday morning. “She refused to eat it. In fact, she refused to eat anything. She refused to go to bed last night. She sat up all night. She was very upset about this. They came into her home. She did nothing wrong.”

The family connections to journalism—and to this small town paper in particular—run deep, with Eric’s late father beginning work there as a reporter in 1948. When the paper’s editor died in the sixties, Bill Meyer took over and ran it until it was put up for sale in the ‘90s. Nearing retirement and fearing what would happen if a big newspaper chain took over, Bill and Eric decided to take a leap. 

“We looked at other papers that they [the chain] bought and said, ‘God, that would be a shame.’ And he [Bill] said, ‘well, what can we do about it?’ And I said, ‘well, why don't the two of us go in together and jointly buy the paper?’”

And so in 1998, they did. When Bill passed in 2006, Eric and his mother Joan continued as co-owners. Now with Joan gone, it’s just Eric.

But Eric Meyer has an army of journalists and democracy-minded citizens ready and willing to fight for him. 

On Sunday, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with the endorsement of 30+ news organizations including the New York Times and Washington Post, sent a letter to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody writing that, “Newsroom searches and seizures are among the most intrusive actions law enforcement can take with respect to the free press, and the most potentially suppressive of free speech by the press and the public.”

The letter demands Cody, “immediately return the seized material to the Record, to purge any records that may already have been accessed, and to initiate a full independent and transparent review of your department’s actions.”

Cody, for his part, continues to insist he and his department are not in the wrong. He hasn’t directly addressed the allegations that the raids were, at least in part, motivated by an ongoing investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Cody at his prior job. That story was broken here at The Handbasket on Saturday. And the Kansas Bureau of Investigation said in a statement Monday, “No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media.”

And Kari Newell, the local restaurant owner who was originally believed to be the sole cause of the raid on the Record, wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post, “I am not the one that incited the investigation.” She was sure to yet again convey her animus towards the press: “Media is not exempt from the laws they blast others for not following. Unethical journalism 1010.”

Now Eric Meyer is planning to file a federal lawsuit, "to establish a clear precedent that this sort of behavior cannot be tolerated,” he told Axios Monday morning. As he told me Saturday, “the people who did this are going to learn a very expensive lesson.” Video obtained by ABC News shows actual camera footage of the raid at the office as it happened.

A few people have asked how I got the scoop about the sexual misconduct allegations against the police chief, and I thought I’d share here: It was really very straightforward! After reading the Kansas Reflector’s reporting Friday night, I emailed the general email address at the Marion County Record asking to speak with Meyer. He replied around 3:30am Saturday letting me know that because the cops seized his cellphone, he could only be reached by landline. So I called him up at 9am, and we chatted for an hour or so. 

There’s certainly a lot more where this story came from. Watch this space for further developments.

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