We all knew there was more to the story concerning the raid of the Marion County Record, a small Kansas newspaper.
We all thought it was about Kari Newell, the woman named in the search warrant. The paper received a tip about her drunk driving conviction and driving without a license. The reporters never ran the story because they didn’t know how the source obtained the information. They handed the tip over to the police, Newell threw a fit in front of the city council, and the paper wrote an article detailing their side of the story.
Next thing the Marion County Record knew, the police raided the office and home of owner and publisher Eric Meyer over allegations of “identity theft and ‘unlawful acts concerning computers.'” His mother died less than 24 hours after the raid.
It turns out the Marian County Record was investigating Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody over sexual misconduct allegation.
Cody came to the Marion Police Department in April. He retired as a captain in Kansas City, MO.
Cody’s former colleagues reached out to the Marion County Record about the sexual misconduct allegations.
Marion County Record owner and publisher Eric Meyer spoke to the Handbasket substack:
EM: So the backstory that we haven’t told, because we don’t wanna get in trouble, is that we’ve been investigating the police chief [Gideon Cody]. When he was named Chief just two months ago, we got an outpouring of calls from his former co-workers making a wide array of allegations against him saying that he was about to be demoted at his previous job and that he retired to avoid demotion and punishment over sexual misconduct charges and other things.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. But the allegations—including the identities of who made the allegations—were on one of the computers that got seized. I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.
Like Newell driving without a license, the paper never reported the allegations against Cody:
We’ve gathered a lot of information. Deb, one of our reporters, has worked for weeks on this story. And we kind of didn’t get anywhere with it. We tried to alert the city through backdoor channels that they needed to really look at his employment record. They said, “oh, we have,” and we talked to the Kansas City, Missouri Police where he was from, and the Human Resources Department said, “no, nobody’s ever looked at his record.” Then two days later, somebody did look at it after they’d already told us they’d done so.But the Kansas City Missouri Police HR Department told us, they [the city of Marion] asked specifically for only those things in which he [Cody] had been convicted and disciplinary action had been taken. And so that’s all they gave him. This action wasn’t completed. So that was where we kind of had to leave the story. They went ahead and hired him.
Attorney Bernard Rhodes, the lawyer representing the Marion County Record, wrote in a letter to Cody that he “personally authorized” the raids.
“I represent the Marion County Record and am writing to offer you an opportunity to mitigate my client’s damages from the illegal searches you personally authorized, directed and conducted on Friday,” wrote Rhodes.
Rhodes demanded authorities “not review any information” on any devices or material they confiscated during their “illegal search.”
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