Kim Davis Owes Gay Couple $360,000
Federal judge rules former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis must pay an additional fees to a couple to whom she denied a marriage license.
Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to several couples of all orientations in an attempt to avoid issuing licenses to same-sex couples, has been ordered to pay an additional $260,104 to one of the couples she rejected.
In a decision last week, U.S. District Judge David Bunning, of the Eastern District Court of Kentucky, ruled that former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis should be required to pay $246,026.40 in attorney’s fees and $14,058.30 in legal expenses incurred by the couple, David Ermold and David Moore, in the course of suing Davis.
Davis was previously ordered to pay $100,000 in damages after a jury decided that the men were entitled to $50,000 each for being denied a marriage license by Davis after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state-level bans on same-sex nuptials across the nation in mid-2015.
Ermold and Moore sued Davis after she declined to issue the couple a marriage license three separate times, and refused to permit her deputies to issue a license bearing her official name or title.
She argued that allowing the license to be issued would violate “God’s definition of marriage” and her personal beliefs opposing homosexuality as an Apostolic Christian.
During the fall of 2015, Bunning sentenced Davis to five days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to allow marriage licenses to be issued — not only to Ermold and Moore, but to several other couples, gay and straight — lest she be accused of discriminating against same-sex couples.
Following her release, she agreed not to block her deputy clerks from issuing licenses that had been edited to remove her name and title — although both she and her deputy raised concerns about the validity of such licenses.
In a tacit show of support for Davis, Kentucky lawmakers later passed a law to change rules that removed county clerks’ names from marriage licenses. Davis, who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, subsequently lost re-election in 2018.
Several couples who were turned away by Davis’s office during the summer of 2015 sued her, arguing that she had violated their constitutional rights.
Bunning later ruled that the state of Kentucky had to pay $225,000 to attorneys representing the eight plaintiffs who had sued Davis because the state had granted her authority to issue licenses as a result of her position.
Last year, in a separate lawsuit, Bunning ruled that Davis had violated Ermold and Moore’s constitutional rights, as well as the rights of a second same-sex couple, James Yates and Will Smith — who had been rejected five times by her office — when she denied them marriage licenses.
Trials were held in September regarding Davis’s financial liability with respect to her rejection of each couple, as well as any damages she may have owed due to emotional distress experienced by the two couples. She and her lawyers, with the right-wing legal firm Liberty Counsel, argued that, under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, Davis is protected from being sued for actions she took in her official capacity as Rowan County Clerk.
At trial, Ermold told jurors he still had concerns about his safety, and argued that the controversy — as well as the backlash from conservatives and Davis supporters — led him to fear for his and Moore’s personal safety. He said he lives in fear that someone may harm him, vandalize or burn his house, or harm his animals, saying the ordeal had exacerbated his post-traumatic stress disorder.
The jury subsequently found in favor of Ermold and Moore, but a separate jury ruled against damages for Yates and Smith.
Davis’s legal team argued that the proposed attorneys’ fees incurred by Ermold and Moore were too much, and called on Bunning to reduce the fees by more than 50 percent. But Bunning called one claim by Davis’s lawyers exaggerated and said another “belies logic,” according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Bunning also found the attorneys’ fees charged by Ermold and Moore’s legal team “reasonable,” noting that those lawyers had helped argue against a request for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an earlier appeal by Davis, thereby incurring additional fees. The Supreme Court ultimately declined to take up Davis’s appeal.
“Plaintiffs not only prevailed, but obtained the result sought. They sought to vindicate their fundamental right to marry and obtain marriage licenses; and they did so,” Bunning wrote in his ruling.
Liberty Counsel said in a press release it intends to file a motion seeking to “reverse the jury verdict” from September, arguing that there was “insufficient evidence to award the plaintiffs monetary damages,” and claiming that the lawsuit is an attempt to violate Davis’s right to express and live in accordance with her religious beliefs.
“This case is far from over,” Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said in a statement. “Because of Kim Davis, every clerk in Kentucky now has the freedom to serve as an elected official without compromising their religious convictions and conscience.”
Staver asserted that their appeal has the potential to extend religious freedom protections to other government officials, and hopes that the case will ultimately lead to the overturn of the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing marriage equality nationwide, reports The Hill. Staver has previously asserted that the case, Obergefell v. Hodges, “was wrongly decided and should be overturned.”
Even if the Supreme Court ultimately overturns its own ruling in the Obergefell case, same-sex marriages will still be permitted, thanks to the Respect of Marriage Act, which President Joe Biden signed into effect in December 2022.
Under that federal law, same-sex marriages performed in states without bans on same-sex marriage must be recognized by both the federal government and individual state governments. So even though Kentucky’s ban on same-sex marriage — which still remains on the books — would be reimplemented, the couples who sued Davis could marry in a state without a ban to ensure their marriages are legally recognized.
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