A 98-year-old woman dead, a small town’s reputation in tatters, and 1st and 4th Amendment protections put to the test. That’s the outcome of a disastrous police raid on the Marion County Record in August 2023.
The story of the raid on the newspaper in Marion, Kansas and the national uproar it triggered is told in the documentary Seized, which just screened at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas after holding its world premiere in January at Sundance (the title comes from the headline “Seized… but not silenced” that bannered the Marion County Record after the raid). Director Sharon Liese is based in the Kansas City, KS area about two hours from Marion and headed to the town of 1,900 people after news broke of the incident.
“Normally… I don’t do something that’s right out there in the zeitgeist that big because I don’t want to get into the scrum with other filmmakers who are trying to tell the story,” Liese explained at a Q&A after the Bentonville screening. “This one, I was a little bit hesitant, but since it was so close to my house… I knew that other people couldn’t get to them as easily, so I just drove there and then met Eric [Meyer, Marion County Record publisher]. And Eric being the consummate newspaperman that he is, he was like, ‘You got here first, you get the scoop.’”
Liese begins the documentary by establishing the strong characters entangled in the raid and its aftermath, among them Meyer and his nonagenarian mother, Joan Meyer; Dave Mayfield, the Marion mayor at the time of the raid; current Mayor Mike Powers; local business owner Kari Newell; Newell’s ex-best friend Pam Maag; Gideon Cody, the Marion police chief in 2023 who conducted the raid on the newspaper office and on the home of Eric Meyer and his mom; reporter Deb Gruver and several other newspaper employees who had their cell phones and computers seized by law enforcement, and young reporter Finn Hartnett, who started with the Marion County Record after the raid.
“We wanted it to be told like the way people tell each other a story,” Liese said of how she structured the film. “You don’t tell everything linearly and it’s like, ‘Well, wait, you have to know this before. Let me tell you a little bit about Pam [Maag] before I tell you [more] about it.’ And so, the history of the tension between the newspaper and the community was really important… to be able to get into the story of how the raids happened, because it’s not something you can explain in 90 seconds.”
Battle lines had been drawn in the community well before the raid, between supporters of Meyer and his newspaper’s journalistic and investigative function and some local residents who found Meyer obnoxious and felt he used his publication to settle personal scores. Getting key figures from both sides to participate in the film became a major challenge for Liese and her producers.
“I emailed [Mayor Mike Powers] and said, ‘We want you to give your perspective,’” producer Paul Matyasovsky recounted at the Q&A. “At first, he was, ‘No way, I’m tired of cameras and being interviewed,’ and so forth. And we just kind of worked our way through it and I met with him, just the two of us. We talked. I kind of gave him our point of view of where we were trying to come into the story, that it wasn’t meant to be a hagiography of Eric Meyer or that Eric somehow had creative control — which was a rumor that had spread through town and was really hard for us to dispel.”
Matyasovsky added, “But once Mike Powers agreed to participate, he’s so respected amongst most of the people in Marion, the rest of the dominoes kind of fell from there.”
The raid appears to have been triggered by a complaint from Kari Newell – the local business owner-restaurateur – that someone had illegally obtained her past driving record, which included a DUI charge, and provided it to the Marion County Record. The newspaper didn’t publish that information initially but notified the local police department about the tip it had received. Chief Cody, who apparently was romantically involved with Newell, took up the case and went to the local district attorney with it. The D.A. then got a judge to sign a search warrant. Got all that?
Some elements of the dispute remain less than crystal clear, but what is certain is that Chief Cody’s actions eventually cost him his job. More tragically, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, Marion County Record co-owner, who was at home when the police showed up to seize computers and cell phones (they even tried to get hers), became so upset over the intrusion that it adversely affected her health, and she died the next day.
(Chris Mercer, who helped law enforcement serve the warrant on Joan and Eric Meyer, approached the filmmakers late in production, wishing to tell his side of the story. Notes producer Paul Matyasovsky, “When [Mercer] says [in the interview], ‘I got it worse than the guy who lost his mother,’ that’s pretty hard to hear for most people. But that being said, the effect that it had on him is interesting and I think worthwhile hearing. And what an audience watching [the film] does with that is up to them.”).
Seized won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Film at the Florida Film Festival, along with being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance. It screened earlier this month at DC/DOX and has also played at the True/False festival in Columbia, MO, Full Frame in Durham, NC, the Lighthouse International Film Festival in New Jersey, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival and many other festivals. Along with Liese and Matyasovsky, the film is produced by Sasha Alpert.
Deadline understands HBO has acquired the documentary, although it hasn’t officially released that news. With all the compelling characters in the real-life drama and the important constitutional issues raised by the law enforcement overreach, a fictionalized adaptation seems like a natural. Liese concurs, and even has a potential director-producer in mind, an Oscar winner who has taken on many fact-based stories, from Vice to The Big Short.
“We have the deck already,” Liese said at the Q&A. “Adam McKay, are you out there?”
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