Eric Meyer
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Eric Meyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I informed them that I thought this was a set-up deal, that the police chief was aware we had information on him, and he had animus toward us.
She actually was in her bedroom when they arrived. She came out of her bedroom. She was very upset that they were there and became increasingly upset.
They were just standing there guarding her so that she couldn't touch anything. They were there for two and a half hours.
She started comparing what they were doing to Nazi tactics. And she's not one who would use the word Nazi casually, but she wanted to know why they were allowed to do this, why there were police in her house. Eventually, by the end of the day, there were seven officers in her house. Two weeks earlier, they had had a case where they were searching for evidence in a rape case, a child rape case.
They went into a guy's house who was the suspect of this, known to have firearms in his house. They took two people. Why they needed seven to go after a 98-year-old woman to try to get her computer, I do not understand. Other than the fact it was designed to embarrass and harass and put us in our place.
When they were searching the newsroom, they got to her desk, and an officer was going through her desk, Deb Groover's desk, and found the investigative files we had on Gideon Cody and calls out to Gideon Cody, you should come look at this, and shows Gideon Cody the file we had, the first page of which was the LinkedIn profile of our main source, so he knew who it was.
He looked at it and put it back in the desk drawer.
She just sat in a chair and kept talking over and over again. Where were all the good people? I've lived in this town for 98 years. I've spent 60 years working on the newspaper. What was it all for?
Yeah. There was absolutely no way we were not going to publish a newspaper that week. That would have been defeat.
Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.
It took two all-nighters. We didn't even have our nameplate, you know, the thing on the front of the paper that says Marion County Record. We didn't even have that. We had to recreate everything. We pulled computers out of an old storage closet. That's a fancy name for a junk room. And we had old Windows XP computers that we set up in a temporary network.
The one thing we still had was that we'd posted a PDF, as we always do on the website of our paper, but it was a low-res PDF. So we pulled it down and tried to grab some material from it and Our normal deadline is midnight on Tuesday night. We were there until 6.30 before we got the paper sent out to our printer at 6.30 a.m., but we made it.
Seized but not silenced.
Oh, no, they laughed at it. And later on in body cams, they're joking about, oh, yeah, sure, he thinks it's going to make national news. Well, it made international news.
And the judge basically wrote back, said, you didn't listen to my ruling. My ruling said, return it now. Now means now. And so they wouldn't give it to us, but they destroyed it. So we had a ceremony in which the sheriff wanted no part of it. So the undersheriff took a hammer and a chisel and broke the hard drive into little bitty pieces, put them in a plastic bag and gave them to us.
The report that came out in August basically said, first of all, we'd never committed a crime.
As often as a case in scandals, it's not the thing that happened that was important. It was the cover-up afterward.
Well, the reporter who had her cell phone ripped away from her. resigned. She couldn't take working in Marion anymore. She couldn't deal with being around the same people because the magistrate's still there, the county attorney's still there, the sheriff's still there, the sheriff's investigator's still there. There were some nice things that happened. People supported the newspaper.
I mean, we got tens of thousands of messages of support. We are the 122nd largest town in Kansas, not very big. As of today, we have the eighth largest paid circulation in the state of Kansas because of thousands of people who subscribe to the paper in support of it.
The issue here is not just the raid. It's the idea that Law enforcement can be weaponized politically, personally, to attack journalists who report things that people don't want to have reported.
Showing 21–40 of 41 · page 2 of 3
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