For 18 days this summer, veteran journalist Catherine Herridge walked to her Washington DC mailbox and dropped off a check for $800. The money was required by law to cover a judge-imposed sanction after she was found in contempt of court in 2024 for refusing to disclose her sources. It fell to her 21-year-old son James to provide the moral support Herridge needed. “He understands the pressure that I’ve been under,” she said. “It was very hard, personally.”
The check drop is now on hold. The judge who issued that order, Christopher R Cooper, has since clarified that Herridge doesn’t need to pay the fine until she has a chance to plead her case to the supreme court, which she petitioned late last week.
If that petition is unsuccessful, and there is good reason to believe it will fail, then something rather extraordinary in American history will commence: Herridge will be on the hook for the daily fines until or unless she reveals her sourcing for a series of 2017 stories about the Chinese-American scientist Yanping Chen, who had been federally investigated – but not charged – over her ties to China’s military and whether a Virginia school she operated was secretly aiding the communist country.
