New Orleans criminal court judge Kimya Holmes filed a police complaint against CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana after the station aired investigative reporting on a $765,000 home donated to her by her then-fiancé, accountant Arthur Allen. Allen had been criminally charged weeks earlier with fraudulently collecting more than $712,000 in taxpayer-funded Covid-19 pandemic relief. The complaint cited a Louisiana statute making it a misdemeanor to publish certain personal information about judges — a provision the legislature had repealed effective 1 August, weeks before any of the relevant events occurred. The reporting, by investigative journalist David Hammer, explored how Holmes received the gated-community home from Allen while he paid the mortgage. Holmes told Hammer she didn't start dating Allen until four years after his crime and didn't learn of the charges until around his April guilty plea, after the couple had broken up. The accuracy of Hammer's reporting has never been challenged. The sequence of pressure escalated before the complaint. On 10 September, the courthouse's judicial administrator Robert Kazik sent WWL a letter demanding removal of the home's public-record address and images of a Corvette license plate photographed in the courthouse garage. The letter also demanded WWL reveal who photographed the car. Kazik cited the same law whose criminal provisions had already been repealed. WWL temporarily pulled the videos, reposted them with information blurred, but refused to identify its source. Holmes filed her criminal complaint with NOPD on 11 September. When WWL asked her campaign spokesperson for the legal basis, the response included an outdated version of the law — sourced from the state legislature's own website, which had not been updated. A legislature spokesperson acknowledged updates can take "many months" and pointed to a disclaimer making "no guarantee" of accuracy. The complaint landed amid a broader pattern of Louisiana courts pressuring journalists. In early July, deputies at the same courthouse handcuffed WWL investigative producer Danny Monteverde and station attorney Elana Beiser while they covered a since-dismissed indictment of the state attorney general. In August, a state jury awarded a $300,000 libel verdict to Louisiana Supreme Court justice Jeff Hughes against the Advocate newspaper over an editorial — a result press freedom defenders warn could weaken the "actual malice" standard. Media lawyer Scott Sternberg, who lobbied for the repeals and represented the Advocate in the Hughes case, told WWL that the repealed provisions were "wildly unconstitutional" and that he couldn't imagine a public official filing a criminal complaint over reporting that "seems to be accurate." He added that even inaccurate reporting "wouldn't warrant a criminal complaint." WWL's attorney Mary Ellen Roy wrote to NOPD requesting the investigation be "closed, forthwith." As of Tuesday, NOPD said its investigation into WWL was continuing. The structural picture is clear: a sitting judge, facing a contested November re-election, used the machinery of criminal law to target reporting about her personal financial entanglements with a man convicted of defrauding taxpayers. The law she invoked doesn't exist. The police investigation she triggered continues anyway.
