Kansas Cops Raid Newspaper Office To Avenge Drunk Lady, Alleged Sex Pest Police Chief

They also maybe killed an old lady.

On Friday of last week, all five members of the Marion, Kansas, police force raided the office of The Marion County Record, a local newspaper with a readership of about 4,000, along with the private home of its publisher, seizing computers, records, reporters’ cellphones and pretty much everything else they could get their hands on.

Why? Well, not for any reason that would make enough sense to remotely justify raiding a newspaper and seizing the means of publication.

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The story they are going with is this — reporters from The Marion County Record attempted to attend a meet-and-greet with the local Republican congressman at Kari’s Kitchen, a restaurant owned by one Kari Newell. Newell was not a fan of the publication, which is locally known for holding local officials accountable for their actions, and asked the reporters to leave.

After the newspaper published an article about the incident, they got an anonymous tip from someone offering proof that Newell got a DUI back in 2008, along with several other driving infractions, which would make her ineligible to get a liquor license, as per Kansas law. Did they publish this? No, they did not.

Rather, they contacted a lawyer and, without naming Newell specifically, contacted the police to let them know they “had received the material from someone who had bragged about retaining ‘connections’ despite no longer working in law enforcement,” and that the source had also told them that several people working in law enforcement in the town were aware that Newell did not have a valid driver’s license and let her drive around town anyway.

Newell was notified by police (assume she was identified through context clues?) about this and responded by showing up to a town council meeting and accusing the paper of illegally obtaining this information about her and then conspiring with councilmember Ruth Herbel, who she says spread the information in order to deprive her of a liquor license that she almost definitely would have been denied anyway because probably the board that issues liquor licenses does background checks.

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Newell also suggested that the “tip” could have come from her ex, as she is currently in the midst of contentious divorce proceedings.

On Friday morning, armed with a warrant signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, which mentioned Newell and vaguely accused the newspaper of “identity theft” and “unlawful acts concerning computers,” police and deputies from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office raided the paper’s offices and the home where editor and publisher Eric Meyer lived with his 98-year-old mother, with whom he co-owned the Record.

It is not clear how the newspaper attempted to steal Newell’s identity or defraud anybody by receiving a tip.

Sadly, not long after the raid, Meyer’s mother, Joan Meyer, passed away. An article in the Record attributed her death to stress related to the raid, stating that she was unable to eat or sleep after the raid and was “[s]tressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief.”

This is all certainly very shocking, as we tend to think of raids on newspaper offices as something that isn’t supposed to happen here. Meyer, who worked as a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal for 20 years and as a journalism professor at the University of Illinois for 26 years prior to buying the hometown paper where his father had worked all his life to prevent it from being bought up by a big corporation, told The Kansas Reflector that he’d never heard of police raiding a newspaper office before this.

If all of this sounds bizarre to you, Marion’s newly minted chief of police, Gideon Cody, insists that everything is definitely on the level. “I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated,” he said in a statement published to Facebook.

That might be a tad more reassuring if Cody were not also the current subject of an investigation by the Record.

Eric Meyer told journalist Marisa Kabas, in an interview posted to her Substack The Handbacket, that ever since Cody was hired by the town, the Record had been inundated with calls from his former coworkers saying that the reason he “retired” from his previous job was due to an investigation into sexual misconduct.

“We had half a dozen or more different anonymous sources calling in about that. Well, we never ran that because we never could get any of them to go on the record, and we never could get his personnel file,” Meyer told Kabas. “But the allegations—including the identities of who made the allegations—were on one of the computers that got seized.”

How fabulously convenient for Police Chief Cody!

This isn’t something that should be happening, here or anywhere. That even the police chief of a small town in the middle of Kansas thought he was going to be able to do this without it blowing up in his face on a national level is a bad sign — but the fact that this clearly hasn’t worked out for him or for Kari Newell, now that the entire nation knows he might be a sex pest and she is not legally allowed to operate a vehicle or get a liquor license might actually be a good one, for once.