Joan Meyer in body camera footage photos attached to a federal complaint from an August 11, 2023, raid conducted on the home she shared with her son, right, her co-owner of the Kansas newspaper, the Marion Record. Meyer died from a heart attack one day after the raid. Right: AUGUST 17, 2023 Eric Meyer publisher of the Marion County Record Newspaper stands outside the newspaper office (Credit: Mark Reinstein/MediaPunch /IPX)
Crying and clutching a walker, Joan Meyer, 98, told the armed police chief standing in her living room last summer that if they kept ransacking the house she shared with her son Eric Meyer, 70 — her co-publisher of the Marion County Record in Kansas, a newspaper serving under 2,000 people — they were going to kill her from the stress.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen … This is the first time I’ve ever had police in my house threatening me … I’m not dumb. I may be ninety-some years old, but I know what’s going on. And what’s going on is illegal as hell,” Joan Meyer said after she tried to call her son whose phone, “in a cruel twist,” a new lawsuit against the county’s mayor, police chief and sheriff alleges, was already “tucked inside an evidence bag” by police who obtained it with a warrant based on false statements.
Joan Meyer died the next day. She suffered cardiac arrest.
“Marion County Record editor Eric Meyer is not only severely anguished over what happened to (and at) his family’s newspaper, but is heartbroken over the loss of his mother, who was literally hounded to death by Chief Cody and his army of law enforcement officers,” an exhaustive 137-page federal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of for the District of Kansas states.
Alleging First and Fourth Amendment violations, as well as retaliation, invasion of privacy, police failure to train or supervise, and more, Eric Meyer sued the City of Marion and a number of police officials on both his own behalf and on behalf of his mother’s estate on April 1. The lawsuit triggers a new chapter in a saga that Meyer says has rocked his family and his small town since reporters at the Marion County Record began digging into allegations of misconduct by the county’s then-police chief Gideon Cody.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Cody had ordered the raid on the paper and resigned just days after his suspension for it had left questions swirling around his conduct. Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey determined prior to Cody’s resignation that there had been “insufficient evidence” to justify the raid and seizure of records from the newspaper’s office and from the Meyers’ home.
Cody, Marion County former Mayor David Mayfield, current police chief Zach Hudlin, the county’s Board of Commissioners, Marion County Sheriff Jeff Soyez and Marion County detective Aaron Christner are all named in Eric Meyer’s lawsuit.
At no time during the “illegal raids” last August was the seizure of any materials taken by police related to something to prevent death or seriously bodily injury, according to Meyer. Instead, it was a petty but complex revenge scheme sparked weeks before involving a local businessperson who claimed the paper had illegally accessed her driving records.
The story involved a local restaurateur that cited a confidential source. The source said a “local caterer” had previously been convicted of drunk driving but was still driving around town without a valid driver’s license. The tip emerged while the caterer in question was applying for liquor license. The “caterer” was restaurateur Kari Newell. That was, at least, what the Marion Record was attempting to verify when it had received its tip before publishing. The tip, according to Eric Meyer, may have come from Newell’s ex-husband. The couple had only recently divorced.
Before deciding whether to publish on that basis alone, one of Meyer’s reporters, Phyllis Zorn, looked into the tip by searching public records online and she confirmed that Newell had in fact lost her driver’s license due to a DUI.
Background: In still photo from body camera footage provided in a federal complaint depicting the raid on Eric Meyer and Joan Meyer’s home in August 2023, Joan Meyer can be seen sitting in her chair clutching her walker./Inset: In the federal complaint from Eric Meyer, he provides a copy of a Facebook post made by a former Marion County mayor a couple of weeks before the raid.
What followed was a rapid descent into constitutional rights violations, Meyer has maintained.
Newell learned about the charges, grew outraged and went to a city council meeting and accused the paper of accessing her records illegally. Meyer has said that a source for the tip about Newell was tied to a person named Pam Maag. Maag, he claims, provided the caterer’s driver’s license number and her date of birth and that this is what reporter Phyillis Zorn used in her research. Eric Meyer says the raid that rained down on himself, his mother and the paper was done in large part because then-Marion County police chief Gideon Cody had wrongfully accused Zorn of lying about her access to Newell’s records.
This was how the search warrants were approved by a magistrate judge, according to Meyer. That same judge — who was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing in the matter — approved the warrant that swept up cellphones, computers and other equipment, and allegedly contributed to the effective shuttering of the newspaper’s operations and chilling of its free speech.
The retaliation was complete, Meyer says.
The newspaper owner also points to a history of commentary Mayfield, the town’s former mayor and a former Kansas Highway Patrol officer. Meyer says the former mayor was out to punish the newspaper for running stories that he didn’t like or found too critical of officials. The federal lawsuit notes specifically that two weeks before the raid, Mayfield took to his personal Facebook page to lash out at the “real villains in America.”
A photograph purportedly shows Marion (Kans.) Police Chief Gideon Cody “directing and participating in the raid” of the Marion County Record newspaper (via federal court filing). Inset: FILE – A stack of the latest weekly edition of the Marion County Record sits in the back of the newspaper’s building, awaiting unbundling, sorting and distribution, Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023, in Marion, Kan. The newspaper’s front page was dedicated to two stories about a raid by local police on its offices and the publisher’s home on Aug. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/John Hanna)
Gideon Cody appears in footage from inside Marion County Record newspaper office during raid in August (YouTube screengrab KSHB).
They “real villains aren’t Black people. They aren’t white people. They aren’t Asians. They aren’t Latinos. They aren’t women. They aren’t gays,” Mayfield wrote on July 25, 2023. “They are the radical ‘journalists,’ ‘teachers,’ & ‘professors’ who do nothing but sow division between the American people.”
The federal complaint’s allegations are enumerated in great detail and the First and Fourth Amendment violations are spread out over a half dozen counts. And this won’t be the end of it, according to Meyer. The lawsuit notes that he is reserving the right to bring additional claims later, including wrongful death, abuse of process, neglect and more.
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