This story is part of a series by Kansas Reflector and The Handbasket to examine the one-year anniversary of the raid on the Marion County Record.
MARION — Since the raid on the Marion County Record newspaper a year ago, Phyllis Zorn spends more time alone at home, etching glass to calm her nerves.
She suffers life-threatening seizures that were at one point under control but have grown more painful and frequent since. As a local journalist in town covering legal affairs for about a decade, she says the fallout from the raid has thrown “monkey wrenches” into her ability to cover the community. When the sheriff sees her, he turns away.
All these setbacks have only heightened the feeling that she’d “love the satisfaction” of seeing criminal charges filed against the people responsible for villainizing journalists — and vilifying her in particular. But she doesn’t think it’s likely.
“I would really like for them to come right out and say that I am in the clear,” Zorn said in her first interview since the raid. “They have not officially cleared me.”
In the absence of information, she’s left to wonder why special prosecutors have kept an investigative report into the raid a secret. For her, closure remains elusive.
On Aug. 11, 2023, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, with the encouragement of then-Mayor David Mayfield and support from Sheriff Jeff Soyez, trampled constitutionally protected freedoms by ransacking the newspaper office, the publisher’s home, and the home of Mayfield’s political rival. Police seized computers and personal cellphones, and caused fatal stress for the newspaper owner’s 98-year-old mother. And the chilling abuse of power — which upended the lives of Zorn and others, and spawned five federal lawsuits — has cast a shadow over the city that residents fear will linger for years.
Cody, Mayfield, Soyez and other defendants have responded to lawsuits by denying they violated civil rights.
The way Zorn sees it, she was a pawn. Local officials who resented the newspaper’s hard-hitting stories plotted their attack when they learned Zorn had obtained a copy of documentation showing restaurateur Kari Newell’s driver’s license was suspended after a DUI. Zorn’s supposed crime was identity theft, even though she retrieved the record from a public online database. Her reporting threatened Newell’s attempt to get a liquor license — and the credibility of law enforcement who let her drive without a license.
A year after the raid, Newell has left town. Cody resigned in disgrace. Mayfield, who called journalists the “real villains” in America, chose not to seek reelection. Councilwoman Ruth Herbel, a friend of the newspaper whose home also was raided, lost her reelection. Several police officers and sheriff’s deputies quit their jobs.
Eric Meyer, the editor and publisher whose mother, Joan, died a day after police raided their shared home, remains defiant as he sometimes works around the clock to preserve the understaffed newspaper’s reporting prowess in a divided community. Local police still try to intimidate staff, he said, and restrict the newspaper’s access to public records.
“Is it going to prevent us from doing our job? No, because we’re not gonna let it,” Meyer said in a recent interview at the Record office.
He wore a short-sleeved button down monogrammed with his initials, and leaned back in his chair behind a large, mostly spotless dark wood desk, trumpeting his story of triumph. Though it was a year forward from the raids, the wood-paneled space with red vertical blinds suggested a trip back in time. Back when newspapers were king.
Meyer, Zorn, Herbel, former reporter Deb Gruver, and office manager Cheri Bentz have filed federal lawsuits against local leaders and law enforcement that accuse them of breaking federal and state laws that shield journalists from having to reveal sources and other reporting to police, as well as violations of constitutional protections for free speech and against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, whose agents helped investigate Zorn and Meyer before the raid, enlisted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to review the actions of police and local leaders. Riley County Attorney Barry Wilkerson and Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett, who were appointed special prosecutors, haven’t disclosed the CBI findings.
