The facts
New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge Kimya Holmes, who is running for reelection in the city's fall municipal cycle, asked New Orleans Police Department detectives on Sept. 11 to criminally investigate WWL-TV over a report that scrutinized a real estate deal which led to federal prison time for her ex-fiance, according to a police report obtained by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate.
The report, from which Holmes' name is redacted, said she met with detectives to "make a complaint of a news media outlet (WWL-TV) revealing her home address and vehicle information." It lists the complainant's occupation as "judge." WWL-TV on Tuesday identified Holmes as the complainant in an evening news report.
Holmes' complaint appears to invoke Louisiana Revised Statute 44:11.2, which bars dissemination of certain officials' personal information. But the state Legislature recently repealed the law's criminal penalties and narrowed it so that only official bodies, not "third parties" including journalists, are required to remove officials' information from the public domain upon request.
The complaint came weeks after David Hammer, a WWL-TV investigative reporter, published a story revealing that the judge's former fiance transferred ownership of the English Turn house to Holmes while negotiating his plea deal with the local U.S. Attorney's Office. Federal prosecutors had accused the ex-fiance, Arthur Allen, of defrauding COVID-19 relief programs of $712,000.
At a sentencing hearing the day after Hammer's Aug. 24 report aired, U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey said he had been prepared to sentence Allen to probation. But Zainey said he had known nothing of the property transfer until he saw WWL's story. Saying he felt "duped," the judge gave Allen two years. Last week, Zainey denied a request by Allen's attorneys to soften his prison sentence, writing in a Sept. 24 order: Despite defendant's assurances that he would make restitution as soon as possible, the Court learned for the first time the day before the sentencing, and confirmed at the sentencing, that within a few days of formal charges being brought against the defendant, the defendant donated the remaining portion of his ownership of his home. Zainey added: "It was obvious that he would be ordered to make restitution."
Hammer's Aug. 24 video report contained a small image of a document involved in the property transfer that contained the home's address. The Aug. 24 report also showed the license plate of a Corvette leased by Allen parked in the courthouse garage, which the station said Hammer obtained from a confidential source. WWL-TV says Holmes has never disputed the accuracy of its reporting.
On Sept. 10, Criminal District Court judicial administrator Rob Kazik wrote to WWL-TV President and General Manager Tod Smith demanding the station remove the images within 72 hours. "The court considers the publication and disclosure of this information to be a serious violation of the statutory protection afforded to all sitting judges, particularly Judge Holmes in this instance," Kazik wrote. He asked the station to reveal its anonymous sources on the report. The station said it removed the images from its online report within 24 hours and republished them with the license plate number and home address blurred over, but that it declined to reveal its sources to the court administrator.
Holmes lodged her criminal complaint with the NOPD's First District the day after the station received Kazik's letter.
In an interview last week and a statement provided Wednesday by her campaign, the judge said revealing her address and a license plate had put her at risk. The statement said her office received calls laden with racial epithets. "It's unnecessary," Holmes said in the interview. "That same story could've been told without ever posting where I live, without ever posting what kind of car I drive." The campaign's statement added: While the nuances of the laws protecting judges are evolving, we all understand basic human decency. No one should be threatening judges with hate speech, or taking pictures of our cars in a secure garage to win a political campaign.
Bruce Hamilton, director of Tulane University's First Amendment Clinic, called Holmes' request a "phenomenally bad decision." "These kinds of attacks on the press, specifically attempts to criminalize reportage and news gathering, are likely to have a chilling effect, which is to say they may make some reporters self-censor or become cautious about reporting the news," Hamilton said. "That makes for a less-informed public and a less robust marketplace of ideas."
Holmes' attempt to secure criminal charges against journalists came just under three months after court security officers, acting on orders from a different Criminal District Court judge, Leon Roche, handcuffed a reporter and First Amendment lawyer awaiting grand jury returns in the courthouse's hallway. WWL-TV producer Danny Monteverde and the attorney, Elana Beiser, had asked Roche to reopen his courtroom for the return of a grand jury indictment of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill. They were briefly detained and released without charges.
Our take
Kimya Holmes is a fucking judge. Her entire job is to know what the law is. So when she waddled her ass down to the First District station to file a criminal complaint against a TV station, she wasn't just being a petty cunt - she was demonstrating a catastrophic, professional-level failure to do the one thing she's paid for. She tried to weaponize a dead statute, Louisiana Revised Statute 44:11.2, whose criminal penalties were already repealed by the state legislature. This is like a chef calling the health department because a critic mentioned the restaurant's address in a review about the rat shit in the soup. The law doesn't do what she wants, but her vanity and panic are so immense she thinks she can just will it back to life.
Let's be clear about what she's trying to criminalize: the truth. The station's report was so accurate it got her fraudster ex-fiance a longer prison sentence. The federal judge, Jay Zainey, read the story, realized he'd been "duped" about the house transfer, and threw the book at the guy. Holmes has never once said the reporting was inaccurate. Her complaint is that they showed the address on a public document and a license plate in a courthouse garage. So her brilliant legal strategy is to punish journalists for doing their job so well they actually affected justice, while she sat on a house gifted by a guy negotiating a plea for stealing $712,000 in COVID relief. What a fucking hero.
Then this clown has the nerve to whine about "basic human decency" and the "nuances of the laws" in a campaign statement. The only nuance here, you absolute dickhead, is that you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar that your felon boyfriend stole. You want decency? Don't accept a fucking house from a man who's about to be sentenced for fraud. Don't run to the police with a complaint that's legally void because you're embarrassed. And maybe don't have your court administrator demand the station reveal its confidential sources - a request so transparently thuggish and anti-First Amendment it should get you laughed off the bench.
Bruce Hamilton from Tulane's First Amendment Clinic called it a "phenomenally bad decision." That's academic speak for this judge is a dangerous, vindictive asshole who wants to chill the press because they exposed her shady shit. This comes right after another New Orleans judge had a reporter handcuffed in the courthouse. The local judiciary is apparently trying to outdo each other in a contest to see who can most thoroughly piss on the Constitution. Holmes isn't protecting herself from threats; she's trying to use the police as her personal PR cleanup crew. It's the behavior of a coward who can't handle the consequences of her own life choices, so she tries to jail the messenger. What a pathetic, self-important cunt.
