Blog

A public records case over a leaked manifesto belonging to Audrey Hale, a transgender individual who shot up the Covenant School in a Nashville suburb – killing three 9-year-old children and three adults, has spiraled into a contentious legal battle which could see a journalist tossed in jail if he doesn't reveal his source.

On Monday, Chancellor I’Ashea Myles of Davidson County ordered Michael Patrick Leahy, editor and owner of the conservative news website The Tennessee Star, to appear in court. Leahy is to participate in a "show cause hearing" on June 17 to address why he should not be held in contempt over his publication’s use of the leaked documents.

Leahy has filed an emergency motion to stay her order…

…except the court of appeals is too busy handling slip-and-fall cases to care that a journalist is about to be jailed.

The documents, which appeared on The Tennessee Star, may have come from former lieutenant Garet Davidson, a figure already embroiled in his controversies with the Nashville Police Department following a significant complaint filed after his departure.

On Friday, meanwhile, a Nashville police lieutenant delivered a court declaration suggesting Davidson as the source of the leaks, intensifying the scrutiny in the case. Davidson’s actions, as alleged, raise profound questions about the motivations behind and the repercussions of leaking sensitive information from an active police investigation.

The situation has stirred a significant debate about the limits of press freedom, especially when it clashes with the law’s demand for confidentiality and respect for court processes. Legal experts argue that while the public’s right to know is paramount, the integrity of judicial proceedings must also be safeguarded to ensure fair and impartial justice.

For those who want to dig deeper, a well-assembled timeline from Deborah Fisher of TCOG can be seen below:

For now, Nashville awaits further developments as Chancellor Myles prepares to take the next steps in a case that has evolved far beyond its origins, challenging the community’s perceptions of justice, transparency, and the role of the press in public discourse.

As author and researcher John Lott Jr. noted last week regarding the leaked manifesto; 

The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released last week, the mainstream media completely ignored it. It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.

Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.

The school murderer was transgender, and her diary reveals a suicidal left-winger who hated whites. The FBI expressed concern that the release of the diary from a transgender person could lead the public “to dismiss the attacker as mentally ill,” which would “further permeate the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.” It worried that the diary could “potentially inflam[e] the public.”

The FBI worried that releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press.

But there is a lot of important information in the diary. As is very typical of mass public shooters, the murderer was suicidal: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.” She was also on the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, whose potential side effects include “abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.”

The FBI worries that the diary will help create a link in people’s minds between mass murderers and mental illness, but suicidal people presumably have some mental health problems. Nor should the link be particularly surprising given that the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that 51% of mass public shooters in the last 25 years were actually seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. That is 2.5 times the rate in the general public.