Three years after Kansas police stormed into a small-town newsroom and the homes of publisher Eric Meyer and former city council member Ruth Herbel, reporter Phyllis Zorn is set to receive $850,000 from the city of Marion to settle her federal lawsuit over the raid. Zorn, a reporter for the Marion County Record, said the settlement ended what she called her long national nightmare.
The payout, reported by KCUR, comes on top of the $600,000 Zorn previously received from Marion County, and adds to a growing pile of settlements tied to the August 11, 2023 raid on the Marion County Record office, publisher Eric Meyer's home, and the home of former city council member Ruth Herbel. Marion County has already settled a collection of related lawsuits for a combined $3 million, and former reporter Deb Gruver separately settled with the city for $235,000, according to the same report.
The raid began after local restaurant owner Kari Newell accused the newspaper of illegally accessing her driving record. Zorn had verified through a public online database that Newell had been driving with a suspended license tied to a drunken driving case, and Meyer emailed local law enforcement to say the paper had the information but did not plan to publish a story on it. Police pursued a theory that Zorn had committed identity theft, seized journalists' cellphones, and reviewed material for unpublished stories, per the KCUR account.
A Judge Finds No Basis for the Raid
U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree ruled in March 2025 that there was no reasonable basis to believe Zorn or anyone at the newspaper had committed a crime. That finding echoed a broader pattern documented elsewhere: a 124-page investigation released by special prosecutors in August 2024 found the raid stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding among law enforcement about whether the Kansas Department of Revenue's online driver's license portal was open to the public, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Zorn and others have said the raid amounted to retaliation for the newspaper's aggressive coverage, which included misconduct accusations against then-Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody. The human toll extended beyond Zorn: Meyer's 98-year-old mother died one day after a confrontation with officers at her home on the day of the raid, according to the same reporting.
Lingering Health Effects
Zorn has said she suffered increasingly painful and frequent tonic-clonic seizures after the raid, now takes 2.5 times the medication she took beforehand, and has since retired from the Marion County Record and relocated elsewhere in Kansas. Jennifer Hill, an attorney involved in the case, declined to comment on the Zorn settlement specifically but said the attorneys were progressing through discovery and taking witness depositions in the broader litigation.
Meyer, the newspaper's publisher, said the settlements amounted to a costly lesson for local leaders who tried to weaponize law enforcement against the newspaper, according to the KCUR report. Marion County and the City of Marion together have now paid out well over $4 million to journalists and others affected by the raid.
Cody Faces a Felony, and a Postponed Trial
Special prosecutors Marc Bennett and Barry Wilkerson charged Cody with felony obstruction of justice, alleging he told Newell to delete their text messages after the raid, even as the same prosecutors cleared Cody and other officers of wrongdoing in carrying out the search itself. Under Kansas sentencing guidelines, the obstruction charge carries a potential sentence of seven to 23 months in prison if Cody is convicted, according to Voice of America. Cody's trial has been postponed after his attorneys quit the case, and he has since moved to Hawaii, per the KCUR report. He stepped down as Marion police chief a couple of months after the raid.
The raid also drew scrutiny at the federal level. The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 generally bars police from executing search warrants on newsrooms, requiring a subpoena instead except under narrow exceptions, according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. Congress passed that law in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1978 ruling in Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, which had allowed a similar search warrant on a student newspaper, according to the Freedom Forum. In the days after the Marion raid, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the police action raised significant concerns about core democratic press freedoms, as reported by The Guardian.
The Marion County Sheriff's Office searched seized digital files, and an agreement was reached to destroy the flash drive and backup copies. Marion County has agreed to issue a public apology, according to the Gateway Journalism Review. The Marion County Attorney had already withdrawn the search warrants and submitted a proposed order for the return of seized computers, cellphones, and files just days after the raid, citing insufficient evidence of any legal connection between the alleged crime and the places searched.
According to Medill's State of Local News 2025 report, the number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, up from 206 in last year's report. The report, published by Northwestern University's Local News Initiative, says more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone.
The story of the raid on a newspaper serving a prairie town of roughly 1,900 residents has since reached far beyond Marion, Kansas. A documentary titled Seized premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January and is expected to stream later this year on HBO Max, bringing the small-town case to a national audience once again as Cody's criminal case remains unresolved.
