A New Orleans state court judge filed a police complaint against a local CBS affiliate after it aired a segment scrutinizing a real-estate transaction in which she was involved, with the jurist invoking a section of law that no longer carries criminal penalties, according to the journalist who reported the story. The situation centering on New Orleans criminal court judge Kimya Holmes and investigative reporter David Hammer was only the latest in a series of high-profile matters pitting Louisiana journalists against members of the state’s court system. Deputies at the New Orleans criminal courthouse handcuffed Hammer’s WWL Louisiana colleague, investigative producer Danny Monteverde, and an attorney for their station – Elana Beiser – in early July while the outlet covered an indictment filed against the state’s attorney general, which was ultimately dismissed.
And in August, a state court jury awarded a $300,000 verdict to Louisiana supreme court justice Jeff Hughes, who sued the Advocate newspaper for libel over an editorial – an outcome some US press freedom defenders fear could weaken the “actual malice” legal standard which has long governed such cases. Hammer, whose channel is a Guardian reporting partner, published a 24 August story exploring how a $765,000 home was donated to Holmes in 2025 by a man to whom she was engaged at the time. Holmes’ then-fiancee, accountant Arthur Allen, had been criminally charged weeks earlier with fraudulently collecting more than $712,000 in Covid-19 pandemic relief that was taxpayer-funded.
The judge told Hammer she didn’t start dating or become engaged to Allen until four years after he had committed the crime for which he was charged. She maintained she didn’t learn about his charges until close to the time he pleaded guilty in April – after the couple had broken up. Hammer’s report on Holmes, Allen and the gated community home he donated to her – in which she continued to live while he paid the mortgage – arrived as she prepared for a tough 3 November re-election race against a fellow judge whose section of court was eliminated by a new law.
And on 10 September, a little more than two weeks after Hammer’s story, the New Orleans criminal courthouse’s judicial administrator sent WWL a letter demanding it remove a public record showing the address of the house Allen gave Holmes, the outlet reported on Tuesday. Judicial administrator Robert Kazik’s letter furthermore demanded that WWL remove images of the license plate number of a Corvette leased by Allen that had been photographed by a station source while it was parked in the courthouse garage in August. Kazik’s letter also requested that WWL reveal who photographed the Corvette.
Kazik’s letter cited a Louisiana law that gave “third parties” including the news media three days to unpublish certain kinds of personal information about a judge once a judicial administrator requested it. It also made violations of that law a misdemeanor crime punishable by up to 90 days’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Yet the Louisiana legislature repealed both the portions of the law requiring news outlets to remove published information and making it a misdemeanor if they don’t do so.
Those repeals took effect on 1 August – before Hammer’s reporting on Holmes’ donated house as well as Kazik’s letter. Hammer reported on Tuesday that WWL reacted to Kazik’s letter by having videos with the information that the judicial administrator mentioned taken offline on the morning of 11 September. The outlet reposted them later with the address and license plate numbers blurred.
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