A New Orleans criminal court judge attempted to weaponize the criminal justice system against a local CBS affiliate after it aired an investigative segment she found unflattering — and the effort fell apart because the law she cited no longer existed. The sequence is straightforward. WWL Louisiana investigative journalist David Hammer reported in August that Judge Kimya Holmes had received a $765,000 home donated by her then-fiancé Arthur Allen, who had been criminally charged weeks before the donation with fraudulently collecting more than $712,000 in taxpayer-funded Covid-19 pandemic relief. Holmes said she didn't know about Allen's offenses until around his guilty plea in April, after they had broken up. She continued living in the house while Allen paid the mortgage. On 10 September, the courthouse's judicial administrator Robert Kazik sent WWL a letter demanding removal of Holmes's home address and images of a Corvette license plate photographed in the courthouse garage. The letter cited a Louisiana law imposing misdemeanor penalties — up to 90 days' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine — on media outlets that failed to remove certain personal information about judges within three days of a judicial administrator's request. WWL initially complied by taking down videos, then reposted them with the address and plate blurred. That same day, Holmes filed a criminal complaint with the NOPD, arguing that Hammer's story "placed her in harm's way" and seeking charges against the station and all those responsible. But the enforcement mechanism she relied on had been repealed by the state legislature, with those repeals taking effect on 1 August — weeks before Hammer's story even published. WWL's legal representative wrote to the NOPD on 25 September pointing out the repeal. Detective Marcus Dubuclet then contacted Holmes, who conceded she "was unaware of any revisions" to the law and acknowledged she had "no grounds for a criminal complaint." Dubuclet's supplemental report concluded: "There is no violation … or criminal offense." The case was closed with no further action. The episode sits inside a broader pattern at the New Orleans criminal courthouse. Just months earlier, a WWL investigative producer and a station attorney were handcuffed by courthouse deputies while covering an indictment filed against the state's attorney general — an indictment ultimately dismissed. Louisiana media attorney Scott Sternberg, who lobbied for the very repeals that gutted Holmes's complaint, called the provisions "wildly unconstitutional" and said he couldn't imagine a public official filing a criminal complaint in response to reporting whose accuracy was never challenged. The structural concern is not one judge's bad legal research. It is the ease with which judicial office holders can activate police investigations against journalists, consuming newsroom resources and imposing a chilling cost on reporting — even when the underlying legal theory is baseless. Holmes's complaint was not filtered out at intake. It was investigated, required detective time, and only closed after the station's lawyers intervened with the relevant legal facts.
