Kim Davis Is Accused of Hiding Her Inheritance From the Couple She Turned Away

Kim Davis has lost this case in every federal court that has ruled on it. A jury priced what she did to David Ermold and David Moore at $100,000 back in 2023. The Sixth Circuit ruled against her. And last November the Supreme Court declined to take up her appeal, leaving Obergefell v. Hodges intact and the judgment against her standing.

More than a decade after the former Rowan County clerk refused to give them a marriage license, their lawyers say, the two men have not been paid a dollar of it.

A complaint they filed on July 15 in Rowan Circuit Court argues that this is not an accident. Davis's attorney denies she lied about anything, and says the transfers carried out her late mother's wishes.

What the new lawsuit alleges

The filing centers on an inheritance. Davis and her brother, it says, came into an estate worth roughly $735,000 when their mother died in early 2025 — three parcels of Rowan County land among the assets. Between April and May of that year, according to the suit, Davis signed her half-interest away: some of it to her brother and sister-in-law, the rest into a family trust whose co-trustees are her husband and her son. Court filings put the value of her share above $200,000, and deed certificates value the three parcels together at more than $400,000. The suit says nobody paid her anything for any of it.

She is still living on one of the properties she signed over.

Then came December 2025 and post-judgment discovery, the stage where a creditor gets to ask a debtor what she owns. Michael Gartland, the attorney representing the couple, described the questions he put to her to WKYT: “…we asked her to identify all transfers in the last five years that were worth more than two thousand dollars and she wrote none.” What his office turned up, he said, were copies of the deeds — signed, in his account, eight or nine months earlier.

The couple's lever is a fraudulent conveyance statute, which bars moving property out of your name to duck a claim already sitting against you. Ermold and Moore are asking the court to void the three transfers, order a full accounting of the estate, and freeze any further movement of assets while the case runs. The number they want made whole is $565,285.91 — the jury's award plus the attorneys' fees and court costs the case has piled up since.

Gartland put it plainly. “It's a slam dunk, fraudulent transfer, in my view,” he told WEKU. “I've done several of these cases on both sides. This is the strongest one I've ever seen or heard about.”

What Davis's side says

Liberty Counsel, the legal group that carried her through the original fight, is no longer her counsel, per WKYT. In a statement reported by the station, it said Davis answered the plaintiffs' questions truthfully and turned over documents. Her attorney's position, as FOX 56 in Lexington, via Yahoo reported it, is that she did not lie about her assets — and that the transfers carried out her late mother's wishes.

That is the split in front of the court: the plaintiffs call the transfers a dodge, Davis's side calls them a daughter carrying out her mother's wishes. None of it reopens the civil rights ruling. This suit is only about collecting on it.

The part nobody covers

Here's our read. Everyone remembers the standoff: the license refused, the five days in jail, then-Governor Matt Bevin calling her an inspiration to the children of America — and then, once a court ruled the state would have to cover her legal bills, that same governor appealing so the bills would land on her instead. Almost nobody follows the collection. And collection is where a civil rights verdict either becomes a consequence or stays a press release.

Ermold and Moore have now spent more than a decade proving a point that was never really in dispute — that a government employee does not get to decide which citizens the government serves. They proved it in front of a jury. They defended it at the Sixth Circuit. They watched the Supreme Court decline to take up her appeal. And they are still filing paperwork to make a judgment mean what a judgment is supposed to mean.

The refusal was 2015. The verdict was 2023. The last federal door closed in November. The check is still a lawsuit.