Mayor praised chief for putting editor ‘in his place’
A week after falsely claiming in court that it had provided them to the Record, the City of Marion has produced copies of emails in which Marion’s then-mayor called the Record’s editor “such an ass” and complimented Marion’s then-police chief for putting the editor “in his place.”
The emails were written five weeks before the chief started an investigation that ultimately led to a now disavowed raid of the Record newsroom.
An attorney representing Marion’s insurance company told Judge Ben Sexton on March 6 that she had provided the emails to the Record under the Kansas Open Records Act.
Rather than having sent them to the Record, however, she sent them to a Kansas City Star reporter on Oct. 16, 2023, in response to a KORA request made two months earlier, on Aug. 17, 2023, six days after the raid.
The emails, written July 4, 2023, were reactions to an exchange between Record editor Eric Meyer and Gideon Cody, then Marion’s police chief.
Meyer had asked Cody to resume providing a weekly summary of police activities as the department had done for nearly 60 years. Hillsboro’s police department provides a similar summary.
Cody discontinued Marion’s summaries after taking office in June, 2023. Police resumed supplying them in October, 2023, after Cody was suspended and resigned in the wake of his raid.
In a letter Friday to Sexton, attorney Jennifer Hill, representing the city’s insurance carrier, admitted her error. Late the night before, she had provided the documents to the Record.
The documents reveal that Cody forwarded July 3 and 4, 2023, exchanges with Meyer to then-Mayor David Mayfield.
At the top of the forwarded messages, Cody wrote to Mayfield: “I would prefer not to send out our activity logs and give the paper any unnecessary ammo against the Department.”
Mayfield responded:
“Your answer to Eric is hilarious. I laughed the whole time reading your response. He is such an ass[;] he always talks down to people as he did in his email to you. Great job of putting him in his place. I’m sure he’ll spend the rest of his holiday researching the cases you quoted.”
Hill, who after the raid assumed the role of city custodian of records under KORA, had claimed in court March 6 that she had been “trying to be transparent” in providing the messages to Meyer.
“Mayor Mayfield said some not-very-nice things about Mr. Meyer in those messages,” she told Sexton, “and Mr. Meyer got those open records from us.”
Record attorney Bernie Rhodes informed her after she made her claim that Meyer had never received them.
“Because you made this explicit representation to the court,” he told Hill, “please provide me with Mr. Mayfield’s email, along with corroboration of the fact you produced it to Mr. Meyer in response to the KORA request.”
Rhodes and Hill had been in court March 6 for a pretrial conference in a state lawsuit brought by the Record nearly a year after the raid.
The Record’s suit contends that the city demonstrated bad faith by failing to promptly provide under the Open Records Act various requested messages indicating Mayfield had encouraged a pre-existing bias against the newspaper.
Among the evidence cited at the hearing March 6 was a text message the city released six months after the Record filed suit and 15 months after it originally had been requested under KORA by Record reporter Phyllis Zorn.
Mayfield has repeatedly denied any involvement in the investigation that led to the raid on the Record newsroom.
In the text, however, he tells then-Administrator Brogan Jones three days before the raid:
“I went and visited with Cody and the sheriff, and I told Cody I was behind him and his investigation 100 percent. Can’t wait to see how this plays out.”
Upon learning of the message 15 months after the city had denied it existed, Rhodes told the court: “If that’s not hiding the ball, I don’t know what is. We knew [Mayfield] was behind this all along.”
The Record also has cited a social media posting 17 days before the raid in which Mayfield said: “The real villains in America aren’t black people, they aren’t white people, they aren’t Asians, they aren’t Latinos, they aren’t women, they aren’t gays. They are the radical journalists, teachers, and professors who do nothing but sow division between the American people.”
Meyer is a retired journalism professor.
The weekly police activity summaries he had requested be reinstated were resumed immediately after Cody resigned as chief.
The police department’s sole remaining licensed officer, Zach Hudlin, became interim chief. That very day, he approached Meyer and said that he had attempted to persuade Cody in July there was nothing wrong with providing the weekly summary.
In their exchange about the summaries, both Meyer and Cody expressed willingness to discuss the issue in person.
Meyer specifically suggested that they meet later that week, after the July 4 holiday.
Cody did not communicate further with Meyer. His next interaction with Meyer was to eject him and Zorn from a public meet-and-greet Aug. 1 for Congressman Jake LaTurner.
The ejection prompted a Record reader to provide a document that the restaurant owner who reportedly asked for the ejection had been driving illegally for nearly two decades.
After legally verifying the document, the Record decided not to publish a story about the driving matter. However, the Record’s attempts to verify the document led Cody to seek a search warrant and charges of identity theft against the Record and the city’s vice mayor, a political rival of the mayor.