'Gestapo Tactics' Used To Raid Newspaper Publisher's Home

A small-town Kansas newspaper said its 98-year-old co-owner died Saturday after local police raided her home, seized her computer and other equipment, and separately grabbed phones, computers and other material from the paper’s staff.

The NY Daily News reports national press organizations have condemned the raids on the offices, staff and owners of the Marion County Record, a 154-year-old weekly paper serving Marion, Kan. and its namesake county, home to 12,000 people.

“We are shocked and outraged by this brazen violation of press freedom,” said a statement by Eileen O’Reilly, president of the National Press Club, and Gil Klein, president of the club’s Journalism Institute.

“A law enforcement raid of a newspaper office is deeply upsetting anywhere in the world,” the statement said. “It is especially concerning in the United States, where we have strong and well-established legal protections guaranteeing the freedom of the press.”

Joan Meyer, 98, who co-owned the newspaper with her son Eric, “collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home,” after becoming “stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal raids,” the newspaper reported.

The Record added that Meyer was “otherwise in good health for her age.”

During their raid on Meyer’s home Friday, police seized her computer and a router used by her Amazon Alexa personal assistant device, the newspaper said. Additionally, the paper reported, cops copied bank statements belonging to her son.

At the same time they raided Meyer’s home, officers raided the newspaper’s office in Marion, the paper reported. Police seized journalists’ personal phones and computers and other equipment and material from the newspaper office, the Record said.

The search warrant used by authorities was signed by a local judge, Laura Viar, who ordered the seizure of equipment and information used in “the identity theft of Kari Newell,” a local restaurant owner.

Last week, the newspaper reported that Newell had forced their journalists out of a public forum at her restaurant with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner. LaTurner’s staff was apologetic, said a story in the Kansas Reflector, a news website.

Editor Eric Meyer

But Newell was angry with the newspaper’s report on the situation, and said so on her Facebook page. “Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied half-truths,” Newell said. “We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading insinuations.”

The NY Times reports a spokesperson for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which aids criminal justice agencies statewide, said on Saturday that the Marion police approached the bureau to help with an investigation into “illegal access and dissemination of confidential criminal justice information.” In a statement on Sunday, the bureau noted the importance of a free press, but added, “No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media.”

Although news organizations are sometimes the targets of legal actions by government officials, including subpoenas seeking interview notes and other records, the search and seizure of the tools to produce journalism are rare.