dpA New Orleans criminal court judge who filed a police report against a local CBS affiliate after it aired a segment critical of her ultimately conceded that her complaint relied on a section of law which she did not realize had been repealed, according to a public document obtained by the station and prepared by the detective investigating the case.
“There is no violation … or criminal offense” that had taken place when Judge Kimya Holmes tried to turn WWL Louisiana – a Guardian reporting partner – over to the New Orleans police department (NOPD) in September, Det Marcus Dubuclet wrote in the document that the outlet reported on in a story on Tuesday.
WWL was able to obtain that police report because the criminal case that Holmes sought to open against the station had been closed without any action being taken against the channel. The document – a supplemental police report containing a fuller summary of a case than one filed at an earlier stage of the process – concluded: “The detective will conduct no further investigation into this complaint and considers it complete.”
Holmes evidently got cross with WWL investigative journalist David Hammer after he published a story in August exploring how a $765,000 home was donated to her in 2025 by a man to whom she was engaged at the time.
The judge’s then fiance, Arthur Allen, had been criminally charged weeks before the donation with fraudulently collecting more than $712,000 in Covid-19 pandemic relief that was taxpayer-funded.
Holmes reportedly told Hammer she didn’t know Allen until years after he had committed the crime for which he was charged – and she maintained that she didn’t learn about the offenses until around the time he pleaded guilty in April, after the couple had broken up.
Hammer nonetheless reported on Holmes, Allen and the gated community home he donated to her – in which she continued to live while he paid the mortgage – on 24 August. That was less than two months ahead of a tough re-election race against a fellow judge whose section of court was eliminated by a new law.
WWL later reported receiving a 10 September letter from the New Orleans criminal courthouse’s judicial administrator demanding that the CBS affiliate remove a public record showing the address of the house Allen donated to Holmes.
Judicial administrator Robert Kazik’s letter furthermore demanded that WWL remove images of the license plate number of a Corvette sports car 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 identify who photographed the Corvette. The letter cited a Louisiana law that gave “third parties” such as 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.
WWL initially reacted to Kazik’s letter on 11 September by taking down videos with the information that the judicial administrator’s letter wanted taken offline. The outlet reposted them later with the address and license plate numbers blurred – and it declined to identify who photographed the Corvette.
That same day, police records show, Holmes filed a criminal complaint against WWL with the NOPD for allegedly “revealing her home address and vehicle information”. The NOPD’s supplemental report said Holmes argued that Hammer’s story “placed her in harm’s way and [she] would like to pursue criminal charges against [WWL] and all those responsible for releasing the news report”.
WWL eventually ensured the judge’s police complaint went nowhere by establishing that the state legislature had repealed the portions of the law cited by Kazik’s letter requiring news outlets to remove published information and considering it a misdemeanor if they didn’t do so. Those repeals took effect on 1 August, weeks before both Hammer’s story and Holmes’s complaint.
On 25 September, police later reported, a WWL legal representative wrote to the NOPD to make the agency aware that the provisions on which Holmes’s complaint depended had been eliminated and no longer “carried force or effect”. WWL, therefore, expected the investigation to be closed, according to the supplemental report.
That prompted Dubuclet, the NOPD detective handling Holmes’s complaint, to contact her and discuss “the new information”, said the investigator’s supplemental report, which redacted the judge’s name but made clear it was referring to her.
Holmes “stated that she was unaware of any revisions” to the specific law in question “and, if it’s true, then she does not have any grounds for a criminal complaint”.
The end of the detective’s supplemental report echoed that sentiment, saying the investigation was complete with no further action pending. But the report did assert that the sheriff’s office in charge of security at the New Orleans criminal courthouse would take over any additional investigation that might be necessary in connection with what it described as the photograph “of her vehicle” in the facility’s parking garage.
Louisiana media attorney Scott Sternberg had previously criticized the judge’s actions after Hammer’s reporting on Allen and the donated home.
“I can’t imagine a public official filing a criminal complaint in response to reporting” whose accuracy, according to WWL, was never challenged by Holmes, Sternberg said.
Sternberg did not represent WWL as it grappled with Holmes’s police report. He lobbied for the repeals that took effect at the start of August, saying they eliminated portions of law that he believed were “wildly unconstitutional” because press freedom is a fundamental right in the US.
Holmes’s unfounded police complaint against WWL was one of two high-profile matters pitting the station against New Orleans’ criminal courthouse in a matter of months.
Hammer’s WWL colleague Danny Monteverde – an investigative producer – and an attorney for the channel, Elana Beiser, in early July were handcuffed by courthouse deputies while the outlet covered an indictment filed against the state’s attorney general, which was ultimately dismissed.
