Supreme Court Blinked—$800 Daily Fines Roll

The Supreme Court building with an American flag waving in front

The most consequential press-freedom cases rarely arrive wrapped in obvious heroism — sometimes they come in the form of a civil damages lawsuit filed by a woman who was never charged with a crime, seeking to know which federal official leaked her FBI file to a national news network.

At a Glance

Yanping Chen, a Chinese-born educator never charged with any crime, sued under the Privacy Act of 1974 after Fox News reported on a counterintelligence investigation into her activities — reporting she alleges was fed by an illegal government leak.
Both the district court and a unanimous D.C. Circuit panel ruled that Chen met the legal threshold to overcome journalist Catherine Herridge’s First Amendment privilege, because identifying the leaker is the heart of her case.
Herridge refused to name her source and was held in civil contempt, accruing fines of $800 per day — a figure the Supreme Court temporarily stayed before ultimately declining to halt.
The case sits at the collision point of two durable legal principles: a citizen’s right to sue the government for illegal disclosure of her records, and a journalist’s qualified privilege to protect confidential sources.
The D.C. Circuit’s “centrality and exhaustion” test — not an absolute privilege — governs when reporter protection yields, and Chen satisfied both prongs under that framework.

The Legal Machinery: How Reporter Privilege Actually Works in the D.C. Circuit

American journalists enjoy no absolute constitutional shield against compelled source disclosure. What the First Amendment provides — at least in the D.C. Circuit, where federal government leak cases almost inevitably land — is a qualified privilege, meaning it can be overcome when a litigant demonstrates sufficient need. The operative framework comes from a line of cases culminating in the circuit’s “centrality and exhaustion” test: a party seeking to pierce the privilege must show that the source’s identity is central to the litigation, and that she has exhausted all reasonable non-media avenues for obtaining the information before turning to the journalist.

That test matters enormously here, because it defines precisely what ground Chen had to cover — and what she did cover. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper found in August 2023 that Chen had sought the information from non-media sources first, without success, before subpoenaing Herridge. He concluded that her need for the evidence overcame Herridge’s qualified privilege. A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit affirmed that ruling in September 2025, finding that neither the First Amendment nor federal common law shielded Herridge from disclosure in this specific Privacy Act context. The press-freedom framing that dominates public discussion of the case is real and important — but it does not change the legal conclusion that two separate courts reached after applying the circuit’s own established standard.

The Underlying Claim: Why the Leaker’s Identity Is Genuinely Irreplaceable

Chen’s lawsuit rests on the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits federal agencies from disclosing records about individuals that were compiled as part of government investigations — precisely the kind of counterintelligence file the FBI assembled on her. Fox News published reporting in 2017 that, according to Chen’s complaint, insinuated she was a Chinese spy. She was never charged; the investigation was closed without charges. The damage to her reputation and livelihood, she argues, flowed directly from the leak of those protected records.

Here is where the legal structure becomes almost paradoxical: in most Privacy Act cases, as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has itself acknowledged, the identity of the leaker is “the heart of the matter.” Without knowing which federal official disclosed her file, Chen cannot prove who violated the statute, cannot establish causation, and cannot recover damages. The D.C. Circuit panel addressed Herridge’s argument that most of Chen’s damages were actually caused by the Department of Defense’s independent funding decisions rather than the leak itself — and rejected it, noting that some of her alleged damages predated DoD’s actions, and that at least some of Herridge’s reporting plausibly derived from Privacy Act-protected materials, including photographs seized from Chen’s home during an FBI search. The frivolousness argument fared no better: the court observed that Herridge herself did not deny an actionable Privacy Act breach had occurred.

The Contempt Order and the Supreme Court’s Moves

When Herridge refused to comply with the discovery order — declining even to provide information about when and how she received the leaked materials — the district court held her in civil contempt and imposed a fine of $800 per day until she complied. That figure is not punitive in the criminal sense; civil contempt is a coercive mechanism, designed to produce compliance rather than punish past conduct. The daily accumulation is the lever.

Herridge petitioned the Supreme Court for emergency relief. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay on June 26, 2026, giving Chen until July 1 to file a response and halting the fine’s accrual while the Court considered the application. The Court ultimately declined to halt the fine on a permanent basis — a decision that, while not a ruling on the merits, left the contempt order standing and the coercive pressure intact. Fox News responded with a statement affirming it “stands firmly behind the First Amendment and the principle that reporters must be able to do their jobs without the threat of crippling fines or forced exposure of their sources.” That is a principled position, and it commands respect — but it does not engage the specific legal analysis that two courts applied and the Supreme Court declined to disturb.

The Press Freedom Argument: Genuine Stakes, Specific Limits

The journalism community’s concern deserves a fair accounting, because it is not manufactured. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the News/Media Alliance, and twenty-five other news organizations filed amicus briefs urging the D.C. Circuit to reverse the contempt order, warning that forcing journalists to identify sources in Privacy Act cases would chill national security reporting and compromise the whistleblowers who make that reporting possible. That structural argument is serious: if Privacy Act plaintiffs can routinely reach through reporters to identify government leakers, the pipeline of confidential sources dries up — and with it, a significant share of accountability journalism about how federal agencies handle information about private citizens.

But the counter-argument has its own structural force. The Privacy Act exists precisely because Congress recognized, fifty years ago, that the government’s power to compile dossiers on citizens creates a corresponding obligation not to weaponize those dossiers through selective disclosure. When a federal official leaks an investigation file to damage a private person who is ultimately never charged, that person has a concrete legal injury and, in principle, a right to redress. The D.C. Circuit’s centrality-exhaustion test attempts to honor both interests — protecting reporters from casual or pretextual subpoenas while allowing disclosure when the source’s identity is genuinely the only path to justice and the plaintiff has nowhere else to turn. Chen satisfied that test. The press freedom argument, however weighty in the abstract, does not become a specific rebuttal to that factual finding.

Former Fox and CBS reporter Catherine Herridge faces devastating fines of $800 (£598) a day after the US Supreme Court rejected an emergency bid to shield her anonymous sourcehttps://t.co/n7lsAxZHPX

— Vinay Patel (@VinayPBPatel) July 3, 2026

A Pattern Older Than This Case

Chen v. Herridge is not an anomaly. The Reporters Committee documented this pattern as far back as 2009: “Increasingly, subjects of unfavorable news stories that use information held in confidence by the federal government are suing under the Privacy Act,” with courts ruling that plaintiffs must identify not just the agency but the specific government staffer who leaked — a requirement that inevitably points toward the journalist who received the information. Several reporters before Herridge have faced escalating fines and contempt threats in precisely this posture. The legal architecture has been stable for decades; what changes is the prominence of the parties and the political valence of the underlying story.

That context cuts both ways. It confirms that Herridge’s situation, while acutely uncomfortable for her and for the institutions that depend on confidential source relationships, is the product of a long-established legal framework rather than a novel judicial overreach. It also confirms that the underlying tension — between a government employee’s statutory right to sue over illegal leaks and a journalist’s relational obligation to protect sources — is not resolvable by principle alone. Courts have been threading this needle for two decades, and the needle has not gotten any easier to thread.

What the Evidence Supports

The legal record in this case is unusually clear on the core question. Two courts applied the D.C. Circuit’s established standard and reached the same conclusion: Chen met her burden, Herridge’s privilege yields in this context, and the contempt sanction is lawful. The Supreme Court’s refusal to halt the fine — after briefly staying it to allow briefing — does not resolve the merits, but it does not signal the kind of institutional hesitation that would suggest the lower courts erred. The press freedom arguments marshaled against disclosure are genuine and important for the long-term health of investigative journalism; they simply did not, under the applicable legal framework, constitute a sufficient basis for quashing this particular subpoena in this particular case. Herridge’s refusal to comply is principled, and its costs — financial and professional — are real. So is Yanping Chen’s claim that an unknown federal official destroyed her reputation by leaking protected government records about her to a national news network, and that she has a right to know who did it.