Missouri Mayor Accuses Local Man of ‘Cyberbullying’ Over Online Joke, Gets Sued by Free Speech Nonprofit

Photo via City of Riverview, Missouri

People should be able to crack jokes about their elected officials without getting subpoenaed, a free speech nonprofit is arguing in a new complaint that seeks access to public records related to a small town in Missouri’s retaliatory inquisition against a local man’s online quip. The mayor’s attempt to silence his critic may end up backfiring as the resultant legal battles are poised to draw far more attention to the scandals he wanted to bury.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan organization that litigates free speech issues, has sued the city of Riverview, a town of about 2,500 residents on the northern outskirts of St. Louis, and its Mayor Michael Cornell after a local man was sent a subpoena over a joke he posted online referencing some scandalous accusations against Cornell.

The mayor is already the defendant in another lawsuit filed by a former city employee who is accusing him of luring him to move to Missouri from Texas for a city job, but then firing him four days after he started work after he rejected Cornell’s sexual advances.

Previously, in 2014, when Cornell was a civilian employee of the St. Louis Police Department, he faced multiple felony charges for allegedly impersonating a police officer as part of a scheme to manipulate a 14-year-old boy into a sexual relationship. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an internal investigation said Cornell had “regularly impersonated an officer and took over a young man’s life, culminating in several sexual assaults.”

The investigation’s report accused Cornell of “particularly egregious” and “sordid” conduct, saying he “groomed the young man and then dominated his life, threatening — and ultimately, inflicting — harm so he couldn’t leave,” including “the false arrest of his victim’s father” and “the victim’s 11-day incarceration on a bench warrant that typically would have resulted in release,” and “culminating in several sexual assaults,” reported the Post-Dispatch. Cornell’s employment with the SLPD was suspended without pay and then terminated.

Prosecutors ended up dropping the charges three years later, according to the Post-Dispatch, when the victim — who was by then an adult — was arrested and charged with murder (unrelated to the allegations against Cornell). Deprived of the key witness for the case, prosecutors agreed to a plea deal in which Cornell pleaded guilty to one count of impersonating a police officer, a misdemeanor.

In 2021, Cornell successfully petitioned the court to expunge the charges from public records, but that wouldn’t erase the knowledge from the minds of local residents.

James Carroll lived in Bellefontaine Neighbors, a town next to Riverview, for over a decade, serving as an alderman and occasionally attending Riverview city meetings. In 2022, he moved to Collinsville, another St. Louis suburban town just east of the state border in Illinois.

When Carroll saw a local news article on April 14 reporting that a 15-year-old boy was missing in Riverview, he wrote a post on his local Nextdoor forum, a neighborhood-based social networking platform, that shared the article and said, “SOMEONE CHECK RIVERVIEW’S MAYOR’S BASEMENT!”

Carroll told the Post-Dispatch that he had written the post referencing the accusations against Cornell because he thought local residents might not know about them since several years had passed and he wanted to remedy that.

“People should know about him,” said Carroll. “I don’t think he has business being mayor of Riverview.”

On April 15, one day after his Nextdoor post, Carroll found a subpoena on his door ordering him to appear before the Riverview City Council on April 16 and threatening “severe penalties” if he failed to show. The subpoena did not mention the Nextdoor post or identify any other specific incident but did list five topics about which he would have to testify: public safety and crime prevention, misuse of information regarding a missing juvenile, inciting violence against an elected official and police officer, cyber bullying Riverview residents, and slander and defamation of character. Another subpoena arrived at Carroll’s home on April 16; both were delivered by a process server whose company had previously employed Cornell.

The initial report by the Post-Dispatch noted analyses by several attorneys who specialize in local government and First Amendment law about flaws in the subpoena, as it lacked a court order, failed to meet other requirements in the Missouri statutes, and sought to command the resident of another state.

“They’re just making stuff up,” Carroll told the newspaper. “There is no reason by statute that they could subpoena me. It’s not a legal document.”

Carroll refused to comply with the subpoena and sued the city in St. Louis County court. The dispute has attracted the notice of reporters and free speech advocates around the country. The Institute for Justice, another free speech nonprofit law firm, sent Mayor Cornell and the city a letter urging them to drop the subpoena and any other “retaliatory actions” against Carroll, calling joking about elected officials “indisputably protected by the Constitution.”

FIRE has also stepped onto Carroll’s side of the legal battlefield.

On May 15 and May 19, FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh sent two public records requests to the city of Riverview pursuant to Missouri’s Sunshine Law, seeking specific communications and city meeting agenda and minutes that included mentions of Carroll, the Nextdoor post, and accusations of incitement, slander, libel, defamation, cyberbully, and the subpoena.

Despite repeated follow-up emails to the mayor and city clerk, Steinbaugh received neither the requested records nor the statutorily-required written statement describing the grounds for denying the requests.

In the complaint, filed Thursday afternoon by Steinbaugh and local St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth, FIRE argued that the records fell under the Sunshine Law’s definition of public records but the city had failed to provide the records by the statutory deadline or satisfy the law’s requirement for informing a person making a request of the claimed justification for a denial.

Missouri law imposes a “non-discretionary, ministerial duty” on the city officials to provide access to nonexempt public records, the complaint argued, asking the court to issue an order declaring that the city and mayor had violated the Sunshine Law and ordering them to “immediately release” the records. The statute also authorizes the court to impose civil penalties $1,000 to $5,000 and order the city to pay FIRE’s reasonable costs and attorney fees.

Reached for comment by Mediaite, Steinbaugh expressed confidence in FIRE’s case.

“This is a government that is illegally demanding that a critic appear before the city council and give them information,” said Steinbaugh. “But the same government won’t share public information the law requires it to share. Censorious, hypocritical, and lawless.”

Mediaite reached out to the Riverview City government by telephone and left a message, but did not receive a reply.

Besides what appears to be relatively simple legal issues regarding the public records requirements of Missouri law, Mayor Cornell may have other problems beyond his city having to pay civil penalties and FIRE’s attorney fees. Before the attempt to subpoena Carroll, the accusations against the mayor had received a scattering of local press attention, and the most salacious ones were over a decade old and the court records had been expunged.

Now, national media outlets including The Washington Post and Reason have covered the story, two major free speech organizations with experienced communications teams have taken notice and publicly denounced the efforts by the mayor and city to retaliate against Carroll’s exercise of his free speech rights, and the matter seems likely to get additional attention as time passes.

Just a few short months ago, the details of Cornell’s alleged grooming and sexual assault of a minor were in court records expunged from public view and fading away in mostly paywalled local media articles. That is no longer the case.

Welcome to the Streisand Effect, Mayor Cornell.

FIRE Complaint vs City of Riverview Missouri 2025.06.26 by sarahrumpf

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