She’s called ‘killer,’ ‘Hitler.’ At center of Kansas newspaper raid, she remains defiant

Kari Newell — whose role at the center of a Kansas newspaper raid has cast her as a villain — sat on the front porch of her cafe, Kari’s Kitchen, holding a cellphone full of strangers’ hate texts from across the country.

“YOU FASCIST,” reads one.

“Kari IS the DEVIL,” reads another.

“F*** Kari,” says a third, but without asterisks.

They call her a “killer.” They call her “Hitler.” The messages since the Aug. 11 raid have been so vile, she’s shut off the comments and online reservations for her other restaurant across the street, Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886, inside the Historic Elgin Hotel.

Newell, 46, sat in silence for a moment last week, staring into the middle distance. Chin rigid, her eyes welling with tears. She looked tired, beleaguered, angry.

“A little beaten up?” she asked, rhetorically, wiping a teardrop with the back of her hand.

Because as hurt and attacked as Newell feels — lifted by her defenders, but also vilified by fresh critics — she also remains defiant, unapologetic and righteous in her belief that whatever villains exist in the controversy that has engulfed Marion, she is not one of them. In her view, she is being unfairly demonized.

From perhaps an unexpected quarter, another player in the controversy said he thinks the same: Eric Meyer, the editor and publisher of the raided Marion County Record.

“She is a pawn,” Meyer said, seated in his newsroom office last week. “I think she was a convenient excuse used by other people to get at us. I think she’s a patsy in that regard.”

‘Blood on my hands’

Newell took a breath. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said of all that has happened.

The Marion City Council meeting on Aug. 7 may be the place. That’s when Newell, as many in the nation now know, spoke up in her town of a decade, on the edge of the Flint Hills, population less than 2,000.

Opinionated, accused sometimes of being abrasive — “A lot of people take straightforward honesty as abrasive,” she’d say. “People aren’t familiar with hearing the truth” — Newell rose to complain.

She believed, she said, that a reporter for the weekly Marion County Record had “illegally obtained” private information about her from a Kansas Department of Revenue website. The information showed that Newell had a record for driving under the influence of alcohol from 2008 and had been driving without a valid driver’s license for 15 years. (She previously faced misdemeanor violations for driving with a canceled license, driving with no proof of insurance and driving while suspended, according to court records.) Newell has said the mounting cost of settling her DUI diversion fines kept her from getting a new driver’s license.

A decision whether to give Newell a two-year liquor license for her Parlour restaurant was on the council agenda.

The paper denied it did anything illegal, because the state website is public record. Meyer’s paper had already decided not to pursue a story about her DUI. Under Kansas statutes, a past misdemeanor DUI has no bearing on getting a liquor license.

At the meeting, Newell nonetheless castigated the paper. She castigated a council member, Ruth Herbel, who she claimed got the information and “negligently and maliciously” shared it with others. Newell said she would notify the Marion County attorney, the brother-in-law of the owner of the Elgin Hotel where she has her restaurant.

She told the council, “This is going to become a case.”

It did. Four days later, Marion’s new police chief, Gideon Cody — a former Kansas City police captain who left the force in April facing discipline and possible demotion — raided the Marion County Record newsroom, taking computers and cellphones, and igniting a national firestorm on press freedoms. With a warrant signed by a magistrate judge with her own history of drunken driving, police raided the home of Herbel.

They also descended on the home of Meyer, where he lived with his 98-year-old mother, the paper’s co-owner. In a powerful home-security video, Joan (pronounced Joanne) Meyer can be seen and heard stomping her walker, demanding that a brood of officers and sheriff’s deputies leave her house.

“Don’t you touch any of that stuff!” she shouts. “This is my house. … Get out of my way! What are you doing? Those are personal papers!” To one officer, she would ask, “Does your mother love you? Do you love your mother?”

Joan Meyer died the next day.

Blame pooled at Newell’s doorstep.

“I’ve probably got 600 or 700 messages saying I have blood on my hands, that I should go to jail for manslaughter, sued for wrongful death, that I killed that poor woman,” Newell said. “I’m probably approaching 5,000 pieces of hate mail.”

Newell didn’t attend Joan Meyer’s funeral Aug. 19. The service was held at the church across the intersection from her restaurants. She closed for the day out of respect.

Now, some residents said, it might have been best had Newell never reopened. They question whether her businesses will, or should, survive.

“After what she has done, I’m not going to go to her place any more. And there’s about 100 people telling me the same thing,” said Jack Webb, 88, a resident for 52 years. He knew Joan Meyer well. He used to cut her grass.

Lloyd Meir, 77, walked into the local pharmacy, red Make America Great Again hat atop his head, cowboy boots on his feet. He minced no words in expressing his disdain for Police Chief Cody, the mayor, choice city leaders — and Newell.

“They need to pack their bags and hit the road,” he said. “What they did to that newspaper is pathetic. And to him (Eric Meyer) and his mother: Hell, they killed her. They need to go to the penitentiary. She needs to go with them.”

Blame game in Marion, Kansas

Newell has no intention of going anywhere, or bending to critics.

“You can knock me down, but you can’t kick me out,” she said.

When she stood at the City Council lectern to complain about what she believed to be identify theft, she felt, and still feels that it is the Marion newspaper that committed the real wrong. Kansas Department of Revenue officials have since said that the information was, indeed, a public record.

“I still question the validity and the legality of that,” Newell said. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is investigating.

Even so, Newell said, on the evening she confronted the City Council she had no idea that police would swoop into the newspaper four days later.

“Absolutely not,” Newell said.

Or into Joan Meyer’s house.

“No,” she said.

Certainly she is angry over being blamed.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I didn’t go in and raid the newspaper. I didn’t incite the raid.”

Nor does she think Chief Cody should be blamed.

“For doing his job?” she asked. “I mean he had to get permission for what he did. Had to be signed off by an attorney and a judge. He didn’t make the call on his own. He didn’t manipulate anyone into doing that. They read what he typed up and they signed off on it. Once it’s signed off on, you’ve got to do it.

“He’s done a beautiful job. I really think Cody wanted some kind of success here. And I think, unfortunately, instead, this has killed his career.”

Rarely lacking strong opinions, Newell at first refused to answer, but then touched on the question of whether Cody’s police raid might have led to Joan Meyer’s death.

“She was 98 years old,” Newell said. “It’s very sad. It’s very, very tragically sad. … It doesn’t matter what we think. God called her home. Is it going to unring this bell? It’s not. It’s not.”

Over the last few weeks, she said, she has been casting about, “scouring as to where to place my hurt and my anger and my blame.”

First on her mind is her estranged second husband, Ryan Newell, the father of two children. Newell herself has four children from previous relationships. A wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he lost both his legs above his knees. The couple met through friends and, records show, married in 2018.

Now they’re in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. Newell is aware that it was her husband who passed along to a friend the personal information needed to access her driving record. The friend passed it to the newspaper.

“Do I blame my estranged husband?” she considered. “Do I cast the blame to his female friend?”

Also on her list: Eric Meyer for being guided by what she thinks is personal animus, a vendetta.

“Hellbent,” she said, “to try to destroy my name.” (Even though the paper decided against publishing the DUI story.)

To Newell’s way of thinking, part of the reason goes to a slight in early August, when she was holding a meet-and-greet at her cafe for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Republican from Kansas’ 2nd District. She asked for Meyer and one of his reporters to be ejected because she said it was a private affair. Journalists contend it was an open meeting.

The person she does not blame: herself.

“No,” she said. “No, not really. I don’t think I can be angry at myself for standing up for myself.”

‘In the crosshairs’

She does have defenders.

The vile texts: Newell is convinced they are not coming from Marion residents, but instead are trolls, hate-mongers from the outside.

“Do you think I care what random Joe Schmo from Florida has to say?” she said. “What are the odds that he’s ever going to step in my restaurant and say it to my face?”

Like Newell, her supporters tend to be residents critical of what they view as an overly aggressive local newspaper, but one that others say is just doing its job.

“She’s being treated unfairly, yes,” said one lifelong resident, who asked The Star not to use her name. A number of Newell’s supporters made similar requests for fear of alienating neighbors with strong opposite views.

“I do support her,” said Summer Johnson, 38, new to Marion from Denver a year ago. “Sometimes reporters have nothing to report, so they’re digging into people’s private, past lives. We all have pasts. Now these jerks want to ruin their lives just to make a story?”

Melody Bryson, a friend of Newell’s in Sedgwick County, called The Star to vouch for her friend of four years.

She lauded her character and commitment to helping others, such as disabled veterans. She recalled when Newell, while being a caregiver to her husband, took care of three other people, all of whom had been injured in motorcycle accidents.

“She has a huge heart,” Bryson said. “She will do anything for anybody who is in need. People who are vilifying her don’t understand the details. Do you think Kari ordered this raid? You think she filed the complaint? No, she didn’t. She wanted to be left alone.”

That’s the opposite of what happened.

“I think I put myself right in the crosshairs inadvertently,” Newell said. “I think that tensions have been boiling up in this town between the newspaper and the city, and the newspaper and the citizens, and the citizens and the city for years. And my spark of a finger shake and tongue-wagging started the whole fire.”

Meyer agreed that the mess that has enveloped Marion, he said, is not about Kari Newell. It’s the stuff of small town politics, including tension with the watchdog paper, that stretches back years.

He described a complicated stew of city leader actions — past and present, competent and not — of Gideon Cody, whom his reporters were investigating, along with the bad blood among City Council members with animosities that are personal, professional, petty and otherwise.

Into that morass stepped Newell, Meyer said, with her identify theft complaint, handing the police chief and others a convenient excuse to dig into what the paper knew.

“I’ve said this could be a movie,” Meyer said, “but it would be too long and nobody would believe it.”

He went on.

“If the lightning rod attaches to her,” Meyer said of Newell, “everybody escapes.”

If anyone should draw heat, he said, “it’s got to go to the mayor, and the police chief. The county attorney has some culpability here. And that magistrate judge. She was a safeguard. The county attorney was a safeguard.”

Back at Kari’s Kitchen, Newell served cold drinks on a 100-degree day like it was any other. That evening, she mingled with her restaurant’s guests.

“I support her any way, any how,” said a resident. “Things are not going to scare her off. She’s too tough.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Kari Newell’s previous driving infractions before her 2008 DUI. That list is corrected in this version.