Kim Davis still owes $565,000. A new lawsuit says she hid her inheritance to avoid paying it.

The former Kentucky clerk allegedly transferred her share of $400,000 in property to relatives—then denied under oath that she had done so

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Let’s say it all together now: Christian bigot Kim Davis is back in the news.

That’s because the former Rowan County, Kentucky clerk who defied the law in 2015 when she refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples, and who already had to pay $100,000 to one of the couples whose civil rights she blocked, and who was forced to pay that couple’s lawyers over $260,000 in legal fees, is apparently trying to hide from the courts how much money she has so that they can’t take it from her.

For those of you who are lucky enough to forget she exists, let me remind you of Kim Davis’ inherent hypocrisy: opposing same-sex marriage while engaging in all kinds of straight shenanigans of her own.

This is a woman who, in chronological order, married Husband 1, had twins with Husband 3, divorced Husband 1, married Husband 2, divorced Husband 2, married Husband 3, divorced husband 3, and then remarried Husband 2.

(Just like Jesus wanted.)

How did she justify her personal life with the whole “sanctity of marriage” thing? Simple. “God still wasn’t in the picture” until Husband 2’s mother died, she wrote in her book, and they went back to church in 2011. So she wasn’t a hypocrite, everyone; she just wasn’t a Christian yet.

In fact, in that book, she chalked up the whole hypocrisy charge to “divine irony.” God took a woman married four times and used her to defend marriage against the gays. Isn’t that so mysterious of Him?!

But her legal history is what matters here. In 2022, a federal judge ruled that Davis broke the law when she refused to sign a legal marriage license for a gay couple on account of her bigoted Christian beliefs. She was a government worker and her personal beliefs, the judge said, couldn’t override the law she had sworn to uphold. When a jury heard the case in 2023 to assess damages, they didn’t buy any of the arguments offered by her attorneys at Liberty Counsel, a Christian hate group, so they eventually ruled that Davis owed David Ermold and David Moore $50,000 each. Liberty Counsel argued that Davis had qualified immunity and couldn’t be sued. The jury, on the other hand, was persuaded by the principle of fuck around and find out.

At the time, Liberty Counsel said they would appeal the decision… and, of course, that went nowhere because Kim Davis clearly broke the law. When it came to the legal fees she owed, the couple asked for “$246,026.40 in attorneys’ fees and $14,058.30 in expenses.” Davis’ team tried to whittle that down to a little over $100,000, but the judge didn’t buy any of the Davis team’s arguments. (Even if you don’t follow legal cases, his decision was a pleasure to read.)

Liberty Counsel kept appealing, all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they kept losing, which I’m sure they didn’t care about because she was great for fundraising. In any case, the additional litigation led a district court to award the couple’s side another $201,592.60 in attorneys’ fees.

If you do the math, that means Davis owes Ermold/Moore and their lawyers $565,285.91.

But she hasn’t currently paid out a single dime. Why not? Because she says she’s broke.

According to a new lawsuit from the lawyers of Ermold and Moore, however, that’s a lie. Davis, they say, inherited quite a bit of money and land when her mother died—her share was worth over $400,000—but she immediately transferred her half of the property to other members of her family so that the courts couldn’t take it away from her.

… Kim Davis and her brother Darold Rayburn Bailey Jr. transferred a Morehead home in their mother’s estate to Bailey Jr., his wife, and Kim Davis’ husband Joe Davis, effectively writing her off of the deed, according to court records. Then, in May 2025, Kim Davis and her brother transferred a 50-acre farm parcel and a separate three-bedroom home to a trust for which her husband and son are beneficiaries. The transfers were made for “the love and affection which the parties have for each other ... and for no monetary consideration whatsoever,” but their fair cash value would have exceeded $400,000, half of which belonged to Davis, the attorneys say.

What makes that so damning is that, in late 2025, she had to answer, under oath, a question about whether she had transferred any property worth more than $2,000 over the previous five years. She said 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,” [Attorney Michael] Gartland said.

Gartland said the couple supports the lawsuit and he expects the court to reverse Davis’ transfers.

“This is a slam dunk as far as I’m concerned,” Gartland said. “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.”

Gartland is specifically asking the court to nullify those transfers and use the inherited money to pay off her judgment.

Given all this damning evidence, how does Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver defend what Davis did? He says she totally told the truth under oath last year…

“She did not lie,” Staver said. “They asked a specific question, and she answered it exactly, truthfully the way they had asked it.”

The attorneys asked Davis to “identify each property you own, or in which you have an interest,” not the past-tense “owned,” according to a transcript of the December post-judgment discovery documents. The attorneys also used the present-tense when they asked about which trusts she is a beneficiary.

Good luck with that defense. It seems like she was deliberately lying about what she had done. 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. There appears to be 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.

Interesting side note: Liberty Counsel says that, while they represented Davis in the past, they’re not working for her anymore.

The funny thing is that Davis always had a simple option available to her: If she didn’t want to sign same-sex marriage licenses after Obergefell, she could have resigned. She would have still been a “martyr” for conservative Christians everywhere! Instead, she insisted on staying in her job while breaking the law. She has since become a laughingstock for the nation—a symbol of Christian hubris, selfishness, and hate.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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