By Sherman Smith
TOPEKA — Phyllis Zorn, the reporter whose acts of journalism served as an excuse for the August 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion to settle her federal lawsuit over the raid.
Attorneys for Zorn and the city filed a motion Tuesday, exactly three years after the raid, to dismiss the case. Kansas Reflector reviewed a copy of the settlement agreement, which has not been entered into the court record.
Zorn said her long national nightmare is over.
“I’ve always been a fairly private person,” Zorn said. “It’s been an uncomfortable situation for me to be in, where pieces of my life are out there. That took some serious getting used to.”
“They picked on the wrong people,” she added. “I think they thought they would get away with it because they’re some nothing little town in rural Kansas. But we were a newspaper. We have access to immediately draw the attention of the whole nation.”
Kansas Reflector broke the news of the August 2023 raid, which attracted international attention for its obvious violation of press freedom. Federal and state laws prohibit such raids on journalists because of the chilling effect of allowing authorities to review source materials and prevent news outlets from publishing unflattering stories.
Zorn previously received $600,000 from the county, which settled various lawsuits over the raid for a collective $3 million last fall. The city has not yet settled lawsuits filed by newspaper publisher Eric Meyer and former city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Former reporter Deb Gruver settled with the city in 2024 for $235,000.
Meyer said the settlements are a costly lesson for local leaders who tried to weaponize law enforcement against the newspaper.
“They proceeded at the encouragement of elected officials to trump up bogus charges they knew to be false, lied on warrant applications, tried to persuade others who normally review such things to look the other way, ignored advice from the KBI, and proudly set out to do the biggest raid ever in the history of Marion,” he said.
‘Small town bitchiness’
In Zorn’s case, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree issued a preliminary ruling in March 2025 that said there was no reasonable basis for police to believe that Zorn or anyone at the newspaper had committed a crime.
The lawsuits by Zorn and others accused police and city leaders of retaliating for the newspaper’s aggressive coverage, including newspaper staff digging into accusations of Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody’s misconduct at his previous job with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department.
Zorn said a documentary about the raid — “Seized,” named for part of the headline the newspaper published after the raid — shows that many people in town were unhappy with the way Meyer wrote in the newspaper. The movie premiered in January at Sundance Film Festival and is expected to stream later this year on HBO Max.
Zorn said there were times she went into Meyer’s office after proofreading an article and said: “Don’t do this.”
“Sometimes he told me, ‘I wrote it that way because I wanted it that way,’ ” she said. “Other times, we changed it.”
Meyer said it was “a very open workplace,” and he also faulted her writing at times. People in town complained about everyone at the newspaper, he said, including Zorn.
“That’s life in a small town,” Meyer said. “As one of the reviewers of the documentary ‘Seized’ put it, ‘typically small-town bitchiness.’ ”
A week before the raid, Meyer and Zorn attempted to cover a public meeting with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner at a cafe owned by Kari Newell. Cody ejected the journalists at Newell’s request.
Coverage of the incident inspired resident Pam Maag, who was friends with Newell’s estranged husband, to send Zorn and Herbel a copy of Newell’s driving record. The record showed Newell, who was asking the city for a liquor license for her restaurant, had been driving with a suspended license for drunken driving.
Zorn verified the driving record through a public online database. Meyer then sent an email to local law enforcement saying they had obtained the information but were not planning to publish a story.
When Meyer showed Zorn the email, she asked if he had already sent it. He had.
“I thought, now we’re in for it,” she said. “We’re gonna get backwash, and we sure enough did.”
The raids
Cody, with the help of the sheriff’s office, responded to Meyer’s email by pursuing the bogus theory that Zorn had committed identity theft.
On Aug. 11, 2023, police raided the newspaper office, Meyer’s home and Herbel’s home. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother died a day after her profane squabble with officers who invaded the home where she lived with her son. Police seized journalists’ cellphones and reviewed material for unpublished stories, exceeding the scope of the warrants.
“The only thing any of us can do is stand up and just say no, even if it tosses us into expensive turmoil for years to come,” Meyer said. “That’s the price of living in a democracy when there are others who try to abuse their power.”
After the raids, Zorn suffered increasingly painful and frequent tonic-clonic seizures. She would lose consciousness and suffer muscle convulsions and lose bodily control. They are under control now, she said, but she is taking 2.5 times the medication she took before the raid.
“It was a farce,” Zorn said. “It was a farce that had unintended consequences. There were serious consequences for me. It has affected my health for, no doubt, the rest of my life.”
Jennifer Hill, an attorney for the city, declined to comment on the Zorn settlement or answer questions about ongoing litigation.
“We are progressing through discovery at this time,” Hill said. “The attorneys have taken depositions of some witnesses and continue to work through depositions of fact witnesses.”
Zorn retired from the newspaper and relocated elsewhere in Kansas after receiving her settlement from the county last fall. She said she bought a house, paid off some debts and invested the rest of the first settlement in stocks and bonds.
“This go-around,” she said, “I’m definitely going to do some of those things that I always wanted to do but had neither time nor money.”
She said she has no desire to travel overseas but would like to take a cruise on the Mississippi River.
Cody on trial
Randy Rathbun, a Wichita attorney, represented Zorn in her civil lawsuit against the city and county. He said he worked closely with law enforcement when he was the U.S. attorney for Kansas from 1993 to 1996.
“People now sometimes ask me, ‘Why are you suing law enforcement?’ And you know, it’s just cases like this where some people just lost their moral compass,” Rathbun said.
He said police knew Zorn hadn’t committed a crime.
Special prosecutors Marc Bennett, of Sedgwick County, and Barry Wilkerson, of Riley County, cleared Cody and other law enforcement officers of wrongdoing in carrying out the raids. But they charged Cody with misdemeanor obstruction for telling Newell after the raid to delete their text messages so people didn’t get the wrong idea about their relationship.
Cody, who stepped down as police chief a couple of months after the raids and moved to Hawaii, was scheduled to go on trial later this month, but the trial was postponed after his attorneys quit the case because of a broken relationship with their client.
Zorn said she was raised by a highway patrolman who became a small town police chief. She hopes the lawsuits send a clear message to law enforcement that you can’t raid a newspaper.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the inside of my father’s casket lid is shredded because what they did was so wrong, and he would want to get to them and address what they did to his little girl,” Zorn said.
The veteran reporter paused to offer her advice for writing this story.
“That might make a good quote,” she offered.
The post Three years after police raid on Kansas newspaper, reporter settles lawsuit for $850K appeared first on News Radio KMAN.
