Echoes of Nauvoo: Olympic Herald Defeats Bid to Destroy Newspaper

Washington State courts are designed to act as the ultimate backstop against unconstitutional overreach. When overlapping networks of religious and secular authority attempt to crush dissent, the courtroom must remain an impenetrable sanctuary for objective truth.

On May 28, 2026, the constitutional guardrails held firm in Kitsap County as the judiciary officially halted a draconian, multi-front campaign of paper terrorism aimed at silencing The Olympic Herald.

Having failed to bankrupt and censor this publication with a proposed $2,000-per-day fine in April, LDS Elder Benjamin Mavy returned to court demanding a sweeping judicial gag order designed to make it entirely illegal for an American journalist to write about him.

Furious over our coverage of his documented ties to Clallam County Judge Brent Basden, Mavy attempted to leverage a civil anti-harassment statute to execute a textbook prior restraint.

Those ties run deep into the local power structure. Judge Basden is the former President of the Port Angeles LDS Stake.

Following his tenure as Stake President, Basden served as a co-counselor in a local bishopric alongside fellow co-counselor Matt Kiddle, operating under Bishop Jason Bringhurst.

During this period, Mavy was a member of their ward and even lived at the home of co-counselor Kiddle.

Mavy has openly bragged about this ecclesiastical insulation, testifying on the court record in December 2025 that he and Judge Basden share one of their closest friends—a clear reference to Kiddle.

This is the exact closed-loop network of authority that Mavy sought to shield from public scrutiny.

The Bundy Precedent and the Flight Across State Lines

Mavy’s filings revealed a bizarre fixation on our previous investigative piece, “Overlapping Loyalties May Have Shielded Abuse in Forks.”

In that article, we analyzed the “Bundy Precedent,” examining how serial killer Ted Bundy historically integrated himself into an LDS ward to leverage an impenetrable shield of communal trust while masking his pathology.

Long before King County police detectives intensified their massive 1974 dragnet to connect Bundy to a trail of butchered women across Washington State, Bundy’s psychological patterns began with severe animal cruelty, including hanging and torturing local pets.

As King County authorities closed in, Bundy fled across state lines to the Intermountain West to join the LDS church and successfully evade immediate accountability.

His ward members completely bought into the disguise, later sending him letters of support and get-well cards signed by primary children even as he sat in a jail cell awaiting trial.

Mavy repeatedly complained in sworn declarations that the context of our reporting implicitly accused him of “being the same as Ted Bundy.”

If Mavy is intensely determined to draw this parallel, he needs only to look at his own pattern of flight.

Just as Bundy fled Washington for the LDS-heavy Intermountain West as King County closed in, court records indicate that Mavy executed his own desperate run across state lines to the Intermountain West.

According to a legal filing submitted on May 28, 2026 in another case involving Mavy, when Mavy was “faced with escalating law enforcement and Child Protective Services investigations,” he “unilaterally absconded” with his three youngest children to Wyoming on January 28, 2026.

The court records allege that Mavy fled Washington “without a signed final parenting plan authorizing the relocation” and “in direct defiance of an active injunction explicitly forbidding him from moving.”

The court document alleges that since that date, Mavy has “maliciously withheld the children” in blatant, bad-faith violation of the residential schedule.

Mavy did not just try to outrun his escalating legal realities, he actively defied the court to do so.

Given the severity of this cross-country abscondment, it is highly possible Mavy may ultimately face criminal charges under RCW 9A.40.060 for custodial interference.

Because his legal crisis spans multiple jurisdictions, it remains unclear at this time whether the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office, the King County Sheriff, or the Lincoln County Sheriff is leading the investigation into his flight.

But while their tactics of flight may rhyme, there is a stark distinction regarding how the two men operate within a legal framework.

Ted Bundy, for all his monstrous evil, was recognized by some legal scholars as a highly competent, articulate, and formidable pro se litigant who deeply understood the mechanics of courtroom procedure.

Benjamin Mavy, by contrast, is an utterly awful pro se pretender.

Mavy’s legal strategy relies entirely on “paper terrorism”—dumping a disorganized, 171-page mountain of uncertified transcripts, contradictory claims, and irrelevant grievances onto the defense just days before a hard deadline.

Rather than out-arguing his opposition on constitutional merits, Mavy attempts to financially exhaust this publication.

In doing so, his baseline incompetence repeatedly backfires.

By submitting his personal administrative bans, domestic incidents, and self-defeating complaints into the permanent court record, Mavy legally outs his own behavior and inadvertently proves the exact necessity of the independent press.

“The Truth Doesn’t Matter”

Mavy’s oral arguments are even worse.

Appearing pro se at the May 28 hearing, I stood before the bench to defend this publication against Mavy’s unconstitutional overreach and dismantled his oral arguments line by line.

I reminded the court that the architects of our nation did not place the Freedom of the Press in the First Amendment by accident, nor did they place it there so we could print pleasantries to flatter the connected class.

As George Washington famously warned, if the freedom of speech is taken away, “dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

Mavy was asking the court to lead the free press to the slaughter by banning me from publishing “identifying” statements and “unique contextual details.”

To expose the fatal legal flaws in Mavy’s argument, I cited the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling in Trummel v. Mitchell, which explicitly forbids the relief Mavy sought.

The Supreme Court ruled that an anti-harassment order must target unprotected, predatory conduct, not the constitutionally protected content of a publication.

A court cannot use a civil anti-harassment statute to impose content restrictions, nor is there a “harassment exception” to the First Amendment to ban the publication of lawfully obtained records.

Unable to defend his unconstitutional demands, Mavy’s facade of victimhood entirely collapsed.

Desperate to suppress the sworn declarations of his own adult children—who bravely went to the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office in July 2023 to formally report him for sexual assault—Mavy made a staggering admission.

Standing in open court, Mavy literally argued, “I don’t believe it matters if the sexual assault allegations are true or not.”

He demanded the court gag an American journalist, explicitly arguing that objective truth is irrelevant as long as the reporting causes him “substantial emotional distress.”

Yet the evidence proved that Mavy intentionally manufactured that distress by manually subscribing to The Olympic Herald to actively opt-in to receive the very publications he was complaining about.

He projected his own predatory behavior—which includes being formally, criminally charged in Wyoming for making false statements to unlawfully obtain an elk—onto the press, hoping the court would look the other way.

Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Houser delivered a blistering, on-the-record rejection of Mavy’s demands, confirming these exact constitutional boundaries.

In denying the proposed order, Judge Houser did not mince words, declaring that restraining a respondent from publishing identifying information is plain and simple prior restraint, rendering any such protection order entirely invalid and unconstitutional.

The Precedent of the Nauvoo Expositor

For Elder Mavy, who operated within this insulated ecclesiastical network, this aggressive effort to legally gag a newspaper chillingly echoes the most infamous attack on a free press in American history: Joseph Smith’s tyrannical destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor.

To understand the gravity of this modern legal assault, one must look back to June 1844. By that time, Joseph Smith had gathered tens of thousands of followers to Nauvoo, Illinois, consolidating a dangerous, unconstitutional concentration of power.

Smith served simultaneously as the LDS Church’s Prophet, the city’s Mayor, and the Lieutenant General of a private militia known as the Nauvoo Legion.

Behind closed doors, he had even formed a secret shadow government called the Council of Fifty, aiming to establish a global theocracy with himself crowned as king.

On June 7, 1844, a group of LDS dissenters published the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. The newspaper laid bare the truth, publicly exposing Smith’s secret practice of polygamy and explicitly warning the public of his corrupt mingling of church and state.

Rather than answering the paper’s allegations with speech or debate of his own, Smith weaponized the Nauvoo City Council to officially declare the newspaper a public nuisance.

Mayor Smith ordered a heavily armed posse of roughly 100 men to march on the paper, smash the printing press with sledgehammers, scatter the metal type in the muddy streets, and burn every remaining copy of the text.

Brigham Young and the Iron Fist in Utah

This violent hostility toward free speech and independent journalism became an embedded hallmark of the early LDS church as it migrated west.

Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, ruled the Utah territory with an absolute iron fist, utilizing a pervasive climate of terror and institutional intimidation to ruthlessly crush any dissenting voices.

When The Valley Tan—Utah’s first non-Mormon newspaper—began publishing in 1858, it dared to expose the dark underbelly of Young’s local theocracy.

The paper reported extensively on armed LDS police harassing non-Mormons and exposed secretive church councils.

Its ultimate sin was investigating the horrific Mountain Meadows Massacre, a mass murder of 120 innocent men, women, and children by the local LDS militia.

The cruelty extended far beyond the initial slaughter, revealing that seventeen young children were taken from the bloody arms of their murdered parents and distributed to local LDS families as spoils of war.

In direct response to this brave reporting, Brigham Young violently denounced the publication from his pulpit as a miserable little sheet, and through orchestrated mob intimidation, The Valley Tan was successfully forced out of existence.

A decade later, when a group of reform-minded Mormons known as the Godbeites founded the publication that would eventually become the Salt Lake Tribune, Young unleashed a coordinated, ruthless campaign of economic strangulation designed to destroy their livelihoods for daring to challenge his absolute authority.

Desperate Deflections

The parallels between Mavy’s current legal crisis and Smith’s historical downfall offer a striking thematic comparison.

Both men launched their attacks on the press precisely when their own dark realities were catching up to them. Joseph Smith ordered the destruction of the Expositor because the publication exposed his secret practice of polygamy and his corrupt mingling of church and state.

Mavy, similarly, attempted to gag The Olympic Herald while actively dealing with escalating law enforcement investigations, a King County sexual assault protection order case, and twelve Child Protective Services investigations.

For both men, attacking the press served as a desperate deflection from severe personal misconduct.

The ultimate resolution of their actions, however, highlights how the law eventually corners those who seek to evade it.

When Smith faced democratic outrage over his violation of the First Amendment, he refused to submit to the authorities, declaring martial law and mobilizing a private militia to violently insulate himself from accountability.

This tyrannical suppression of the press was the breaking point that led directly to Smith’s arrest for treason and his subsequent physical confinement in a Carthage jail cell.

Mavy’s downfall took a different procedural route but resulted in a similar form of absolute legal incapacitation.

When a King County judge issued a sweeping Order to Surrender and Prohibit Weapons against Mavy on May 14, 2026, the court effectively “jailed” his capacity to carry arms, stripping him of his physical power just as thoroughly as a cell block.

He was legally disarmed, neutralized, and forced to claim to a Wyoming sheriff’s deputy that he possessed no weapons except kitchen knives.

Just as Smith’s attempt to crush the press failed to save him from a jail cell, Mavy’s 171-page campaign of paper terrorism failed to protect him from the Superior Court stripping him of his weapons.

Today in Clallam County, well-connected figures are no longer smashing physical printing presses with sledgehammers, but the fundamental tactic remains exactly the same: exploiting local systems of power to silence inconvenient truths.

Fortunately for free speech advocates, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly and emphatically struck down this exact brand of legal maneuvering. We are no longer in 1844.

The Olympic Herald will continue to stand its ground, backed by a national community of free speech advocates, and fiercely committed to shining a light into the darkest corners of our local institutions.