On August 11, 2023, Joan Meyer, the 98-year-old co-owner of the weekly Kansas newspaper The Marion County Record, sat stunned that police officers had raided both the paper and her home, accusing them of “Nazi stuff.”
A day later, she died, from what her son said was the shock of the raids. Another raid was conducted on vice mayor Ruth Herbel, who served as a check on the powers that be in Marion County. Police took her phone, which she needed to care for her husband, who had dementia.
If the police were hoping to silence the newspaper, they failed spectacularly. Seized, a wonderfully in-depth documentary that premiered Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, recounts in vivid detail how the raid turned the Marion County Record, a paper covering a community of less than 2,000 people, into a rallying cry for journalists around the country and even the globe.
The film, by Kansas-based documentarian Sharon Liese, goes into impressive detail about the petty grievances that led local authorities to seize their local newspaper’s computers, phones and records.
The purported reason for the seizures was that the paper may have somehow had a role in an identity theft, which is quickly proven to be preposterous. In truth, the paper was raided because it received, but did not publish, allegations that a local woman (with ties to a local cop) had gotten her driver’s license revoked, but continued driving and received a liquor license for her business.
Seized follows Joan Meyer’s son, Eric Meyer, the paper’s editor and owner, as he fights for his paper and becomes a cause célèbre. But he also does the daily work of attending public meetings, mentoring a young new reporter, and continuing to report on the hottest story in town — the raid on the Record.
You don’t have to think too much to see the raid as a microcosmic example of what can go wrong when the government decides what the press should and shouldn’t publish. As the film shows, the local authorities paid a hefty price for their overreach. But just days before the film’s release, FBI agents raided the home of a Washington Post reporter, in what could be another warning of worse things to come.
Liese fielded a few questions from MovieMaker about making Seized, what the First Amendment is really for, and being in Marion County when the national news wasn’t.
Seized Director Sharon Liese on the Marion County Record Raid
MovieMaker: Seized does an amazing job of explaining the very intricate small-town drama and grudges that led to this raid on a local newspaper. How would you briefly summarize what led to the raid, if that’s even possible?
Sharon Liese: You’re right to say that it’s very hard to summarize what led to the raids briefly as it was quite literally decades in the making. There is a line early in the film where the mayor of Marion says that “what happened here was a lot of itty bitty things and suddenly you’re on the news and not in a good way,” and I think that’s pretty accurate.
Certain people in power in Marion didn’t like Eric Meyer for a long time and by August of 2023, the tensions were very high. Combine that with a new police chief who fair, or not, felt the newspaper was out to get him and you have all the ingredients for something like this to happen.
MovieMaker: Seized also makes clear that Eric Meyer, the paper’s editor and owner, is a crusader and tireless watchdog — but that he also has his flaws. People in the town complain about him pointing out kids grammatical errors in letters to Santa, for example. And he needlessly reports that a local woman appeared in a racy ad 15 years ago. She says that the report caused her business to close. Did you want to emphasize that the First Amendment applies to unpleasant speech, not just admirable speech?
Sharon Liese: Absolutely. Civil Rights should not and can not only apply to people who you like or agree with. Eric is someone who is quite unpopular to certain members of the community and they have every right to feel whatever they want about him. But that doesn’t mean his first and fourth amendment rights are somehow no longer valid and that is something that I truly hope people take away from this film.
MovieMaker: The raid came after the paper did something unusual — they notified police that a friend of a local woman shared some disparaging information about her, even though they had no intention of reporting on it. Why did the paper do this? Reporters aren’t part of law enforcement. I was puzzled.
Sharon Liese: I don’t want to speak for Eric here because only he knows his true intentions for alerting the police, but as he points out in the film, his source implied that she got this driving information from “connections” and she also claimed that people in law enforcement knew about the violations and were, as she said, “turning a blind eye.”
Eric may have felt it was important that the chief and sheriff knew this information in case they needed to act on it in some way.
MovieMaker: How big a risk do you see of raids like the one in Seized happening again, in an environment where the president says journalists are the “enemy of the people”?
Sharon Liese: Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post had her home raided days ago, so the risk of this happening again is high especially in this climate. That being said, people in power have been trying to undermine journalists’ ability to report the news for centuries so this is hardly a new problem. That’s why it is so critical that the system doesn’t fall apart the way it did in Marion.
We are supposed to have guardrails and checks and balances that prevent an individual or a small group of individuals from violating our rights.
MovieMaker: Can you talk about how being a Kansan helped you really understand the nuances of this town in a way outsiders couldn’t?
Sharon Liese: I think being a Kansan helped me because I could access the story in a way others were not going to be able to. When I first found out about the raid, I knew I couldn’t call Eric because the police had taken his stuff, so I got in my car and drove two hours to Marion to talk to him in person. Other people didn’t have the ability to do that.
Journalism moves very fast, even in a small community like Marion, and to tell a story like this I think you have to have your boots on the ground as things are happening. There were many times where I was able to have my crew in Marion on less than 24 hours notice so being so close was invaluable.
As far as the nuances of the town, in a place as close-knit as Marion I don’t think that on its own, me being a Kansan automatically helped me understand it better. However, I do think shared interests like the Kansas City Chiefs or the University of Kansas did help people in town see me more as one of them than they would have otherwise, and I think that bought me some goodwill.
Seized is playing throughout the week at the Sundance Film Festival. You can read more of our Sundance 2026 coverage here.
Main image: Seized. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute.
