Three years ago, a police chief in Marion, Kansas, population 1,900, decided the appropriate response to a newspaper doing its job was to storm the building, seize reporters’ phones, and rifle through unpublished stories. The pretext? Reporter Phyllis Zorn had looked up a driving record in a public online database. For this, police accused her of identity theft.
A public record. Identity theft. Let that sit.
This week, Zorn settled her federal lawsuit against the city of Marion for $850,000. She already received $600,000 from the county last fall, part of a collective $3 million in settlements. Former reporter Deb Gruver settled part of her case for $235,000 in 2024. The money is real. The accountability is incomplete.
Because here is what that bogus raid actually cost. Eric Meyer’s 98-year-old mother died the day after officers invaded the home she shared with her son, following what witnesses described as a profane confrontation with police. Zorn, who had no prior history of severe seizures, began suffering tonic-clonic episodes so violent she lost consciousness and bodily control. She is now on two and a half times her previous medication. “It has affected my health for, no doubt, the rest of my life,” she said. No charges were ever filed against Zorn or anyone at the newspaper. Federal Judge Daniel Crabtree ruled in March 2025 that there was no reasonable basis to believe any crime had been committed. There never was.
Chris Jennings (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsFormer Police Chief Gideon Cody, who led the raid, was not charged for the raid itself. Special prosecutors cleared him of wrongdoing on that. He was charged with felony obstruction for telling a local business owner to delete their text messages so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea about their relationship. Cody resigned, moved to Hawaii, and his trial was postponed after his own attorneys quit over a “broken relationship” with their client. You could not write a more damning paragraph about how the system protects its own.
Meyer has been clear from the start: this was not one rogue cop. “There were people within law enforcement who helped him, people in elected positions, people in judicial court positions, who could have and should have stopped him, and they didn’t,” he said. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation advised against the raid. Cody ignored it. Judges signed warrants based on false claims. Elected officials encouraged the whole thing. Five federal lawsuits are still working through the courts, and Meyer refuses to settle quietly. He wants admissions. He wants reports to licensing authorities. He wants it to hurt beyond the insurance cap.
Good. It should hurt. A police force that weaponizes a fabricated crime to punish a newspaper for investigating the chief’s misconduct at his previous department is not a few bad apples. It is a system that treated the First Amendment as an inconvenience and a 98-year-old woman as collateral damage.
Zorn called it right: “They picked on the wrong people.” She was raised by a highway patrolman who became a small-town police chief. She knows what honorable law enforcement looks like. What happened in Marion is its opposite.
The settlements are a down payment on justice, not the full bill. Cody faces his obstruction charge. Meyer’s lawsuit continues. The Marion County sheriff and prosecutor remain defendants in Gruver’s case. Every official who signed off, looked away, or cheered this on should be named in court and answerable to the public they failed. Press freedom is not an abstraction. It is a reporter looking up a public record and not having her life destroyed for it. That standard was violated in Marion, and the only thing that prevents the next town from doing the same is consequences that actually reach the people who gave the orders.