Kim Davis, the far-right Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk who rose to national prominence by refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, has still not been held accountable eleven years later — and she now stands accused of concealing her assets to avoid paying a judgment worth more than half a million dollars. Her 2015 defiance sent her to jail for five nights on contempt charges in September of that year, during which her deputies issued the licenses without her.

According to a Thursday report from The Friendly Atheist, courts have repeatedly told Davis that she must write a check to the couple for violating their civil rights. That fee began at $50,000 but has since ballooned to more than five times that amount, and Davis has refused to pay it, continuing to fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The stakes today are less about liability, which courts have settled, and more about enforcement: whether a civil-rights judgment can be collected from a defendant accused of moving her assets beyond the reach of litigation.

In 2022, a federal judge ruled against Davis, saying her personal beliefs do not override the law, which she swore to uphold. A jury then assessed the case for damages the following year and eventually ruled that Davis owed David Ermold and David Moore $50,000 each, the report recalled. The damages suit, captioned Ermold v. Davis, arose from the couple's 2015 attempt to obtain a license from her office.

Liberty Counsel, which takes on cases it believes can advance "religious freedom" laws, argued in Davis' defense that she had "qualified immunity and couldn't be sued." The jury did not agree. Davis and her legal team appealed and failed in case after case. By that point, she owed $246,026.40 in attorneys' fees and $14,058.30 in expenses. Davis tried to get the amount down to $100,000, but the judge would not do it.

She and Liberty Counsel then took the case to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. The additional litigation meant Davis had to pay a further $201,592.60 in attorneys' fees. In the end, Davis owed the couple and their lawyers a total of $565,285.91. As of July, she had still refused to pay and was accused of hiding her inheritance money so that litigation could not access any of her funds.

"They want a judge to void the transfer of Davis' half-interest in property she inherited from her mother last year and later gave to her husband," The Lexington Herald-Leader reported. The share in her mother's home was worth more than $400,000, and it was immediately transferred to her husband.

Davis swears she is broke, but the July suit called that claim a lie. Asked under oath whether she had transferred any property worth more than $2,000 over the previous five years, her answer was "no."

"That turned out to be a false statement because we have copies of the deeds by which she conveyed these properties just eight or nine months earlier," said attorney Michael Gartland. "This is a slam dunk as far as I'm concerned. These transfers will get undone and it will be as if her brother and her own them again... we will have a lien on these three properties and we will move to settle to get our clients paid."

Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver maintained that Davis was not lying, arguing she had been asked about what she "owns," not what she "owned." According to the Friendly Atheist report, "It seemed pretty obvious she was deliberately lying about what she had done. And that was a problem since Kentucky has a law called the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act that says, among other things, property transfers can be voided if you were trying to hide it to avoid paying off a debt you owe." The report added: "There was clear evidence that Davis hid her inheritance from the couple she owed money to, and that she transferred the land for 'no monetary consideration,' further shielding how much she was actually worth."

Liberty Counsel then dropped Davis as a client. Davis, who left the clerk's office in 2019, owes the judgment in her personal capacity, and the plaintiffs' stated plan is to undo the transfers, place liens on the three properties, and push toward a settlement. On Monday, a judge demanded to know why Davis did not disclose her inheritance, and Liberty Counsel said it would respond to the ruling, Weka reported. The next developments to track are Liberty Counsel's promised response and whether the judge moves to undo the property transfers, as Gartland predicts.

The Friendly Atheist said Davis will eventually have to pay for what she did. "Prayer ain't gonna get her out of this one," the site wrote. It also argued that she should be held in contempt for lying to the court.