Kim Davis better have that money. After a decade, will ex-clerk have to pay up? | Opinion
It’s taken a decade for courts at every level to determine that former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis did indeed violate the constitutional rights of David Ermold and David Moore when she refused to grant them a marriage license in 2015, shortly after the Obergefell decision legalized gay marriage.
But just because the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule on the case on Monday, the plaintiffs — and their attorneys — shouldn’t expect to get their roughly $360,000 in damages and fees any time soon.
And to be honest, it’s making one of the attorneys quite annoyed.
“These are the most specious, ridiculous, nonsensical, and stupid objections I’ve ever heard of,” said Lexington lawyer Michael Gartland, one of the lawyers representing Ermold and Moore in the case.
In 2023, a jury verdict ordered Davis to pay $100,000 in damages to Ermold and Moore, in addition to the $260,000 she owed to cover their legal fees.
Those judgments were upheld by U.S. District Judge David Bunning in 2024. Davis and her lawyers — from the Florida firm of Liberty Counsel — appealed to the Sixth District Court of Appeals, which denied the request and upheld Bunning’s previous ruling.
When the Sixth Circuit denied them, Davis’ lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to both undo the payments and to overturn Obergefell altogether.
So Gartland served documents to find out what Davis’s assets are, asking for information about her bank accounts, her house, stocks and bonds, royalties from her book, “Under God’s Authority,” among other things.
But Daniel Schmid, one of the Liberty Counsel lawyers, objected, saying in a document all that information is privileged, therefore not accessible to the other side’s lawyers.
Simply put, the requests are too broad, said Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel’s lead attorney.
“They’ve got some really broad requests, and they’ll have to narrow them down,” Staver said in a phone interview. “We’ll respond accordingly to what needs to be responded to.”
Gartland called Davis’ objections a “bad faith delay tactic.”
“In 36 years of practice, these objections are the worst I’ve ever heard or read,” he said.
He’s planning to file a motion to compel and a motion to sanction Schmid by the end of this week.
“It’s really been a big waste of everyone’s time from day one,” Gartland said. “They never had a prayer.”
Lawyers are gonna lawyer, and we all understand that. But even by those standards, this process has gone on too long.
The four-times-married Davis has tried as hard as she could to stop the marriages of many others, and she has failed. Time to pay up and shut up.
Staver said that Davis does not have many assets, and won’t be able to afford the damages and fees. But Liberty Counsel has done plenty of lot of fundraising off this case; maybe they, and all the other people opposed to gay marriage can help Davis out.
After all, Staver said the fight to turn Obergefell will continue with other cases they hope to fight to the Supreme Court.
“This issue of challenging Obergefell does not end with Kim Davis,” Staver said. “We have other cases to challenge it — it needs to go, and it’s a matter of when, not if, it will be overturned.”
Maybe, maybe not. A majority of Americans support Obergefell, but then again, a majority of Americans supported Roe v. Wade, and we see where that got us.
Here in Kentucky, I think there’s a majority of people who are tired of hearing about Kim Davis. Ten years is a hell of a long 15 minutes of fame. She needs to pay the bill and go home.
This story was originally published November 12, 2025 at 10:08 AM.
