The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an emergency appeal from former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, clearing the way for an $800-a-day contempt fine to proceed against her for refusing to identify the confidential sources behind a 2017 investigative series. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh supported granting the stay. The rest of the court let the penalty stand without comment.
The decision marks the end of Herridge's federal appellate road, at least for now, in a case that pits a reporter's duty to protect her sources against a citizen's right to find out which government officials allegedly leaked her private information to the press.
That citizen is Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist who was the subject of a six-year FBI counterintelligence investigation that never produced a single criminal charge. Chen filed suit in 2018 against the FBI and the Justice Department under the Privacy Act, which prohibits the public disclosure of private information about individuals without their consent. Her lawyers say they have exhausted every other avenue, including deposing dozens of witnesses, to identify the government official who leaked Chen's personal records. Herridge, they argue, is the last person who can answer that question.
In 2017, Herridge published a series for Fox News examining Chen's alleged ties to the Chinese military. The stories raised questions about whether a professional school Chen founded in Virginia was being used to help the Chinese government obtain information about American servicemembers.
The reports drew on material that Chen's lawyers say could only have come from inside the federal government. Court documents in the case describe the leaked items as snippets of an FBI document summarizing an interview conducted during the investigation, personal photographs, and information taken from Chen's immigration and naturalization forms and from an internal FBI PowerPoint presentation.
The fallout for Chen was severe. She received hate mail and death threats, the Associated Press reported. Her personal and professional life were disrupted. The Department of Defense stripped her school of funding after the reports aired, the Washington Examiner reported.
And yet the FBI never charged her with anything.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington ordered Herridge to answer questions about her sources during a deposition. He ruled that Chen's need to identify the leaker overcame Herridge's right to shield her source. When Herridge was interviewed under oath, she declined to answer.
Herridge invoked the First Amendment. As Newsmax reported, she told the court during her deposition:
"My understanding is that the courts have ruled that in order to seek further judicial review in this case, I must now decline the order, and respectfully I am invoking my First Amendment rights in declining to answer the question."
Judge Cooper held her in civil contempt and set the $800-a-day fine. But he did not do so casually. As National Review reported, Cooper acknowledged the stakes in his ruling:
"The Court does not reach this result lightly. It recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge."
He then added a harder edge: "Herridge and many of her colleagues in the journalism community may disagree with that decision and prefer that a different balance be struck, but she is not permitted to flout a federal court's order with impunity."
A U.S. Court of Appeals panel upheld Cooper's contempt order and the fine. The appellate judges appeared unsympathetic to Herridge's sweeping First Amendment argument. One appellate judge said during oral arguments, as the Washington Examiner reported, that it was "hard to take too seriously this sweeping language that the First Amendment protecting reporters' ability to broadcast information that is unlawfully disclosed is like this hugely overarching value that has to prevail in all but the rarest of cases."
Chief Justice John Roberts placed a short-term hold on the fine while the full Supreme Court considered Herridge's emergency application. On Thursday, the court denied it. Just the News reported the denial came on July 3, 2026. Only Kavanaugh noted his support for granting the stay. The full vote breakdown was not disclosed.
The fine now stands to begin accruing, $800 every day Herridge continues to protect her source.
This case does not lend itself to easy sloganeering. Both sides have a legitimate grievance, and conservatives should be honest about that.
Yanping Chen was investigated by her own government for six years. She was never charged. Somebody inside the FBI or the Justice Department took her private records, immigration forms, family photographs, internal investigative documents, and handed them to a reporter. Her attorney, Andrew Phillips, framed it plainly:
"Dr. Chen, like any other American citizen, is entitled to discover the identity of the federal official(s) who abused their access to an American's private information and leaked it to cause her harm. That type of corrupt, unlawful conduct is exactly what the Privacy Act was designed to address."
He is right. Government officials who leak a citizen's private records to damage her reputation, especially when the underlying investigation produced no charges, are engaged in exactly the kind of bureaucratic abuse that conservatives have rightly condemned for years. The weaponization of federal agencies against individuals is not a hypothetical. It is a documented pattern. And the Privacy Act exists precisely to give citizens a remedy when it happens.
But Catherine Herridge is not the government official who leaked those records. She is a journalist who received them and did her job. The principle that reporters must be able to protect confidential sources is not a progressive hobby horse. It is the mechanism by which government misconduct, including the very kind of leak abuse at issue here, comes to light in the first place.
Fox News Media issued a statement expressing deep disappointment and pledging to review options to continue the fight:
"Protecting the confidentiality of journalistic sourcing and the integrity of the newsgathering process is fundamental to a free and functioning democracy. While we are deeply disappointed by the Court's decision, our commitment to defending these critical First Amendment principles remains unwavering and we will be reviewing our options to further fight this injustice."
Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, warned about the broader consequences:
"Journalists facing contempt should not have to muster large payments to the court while they seek to vindicate First Amendment rights. And forcing them to betray source confidences always has a harmful impact on the free flow of information to the public."
The absence of a federal shield law is the structural failure that makes cases like this inevitable. Most states offer some statutory protection for reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources. The federal system does not. Gabe Rottman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the Herridge case "starkly highlights the need for Congress to pass a federal shield law that would protect journalists from being forced to identify their confidential sources," as the Washington Examiner reported.
Congress has considered such legislation repeatedly and never passed it. That inaction leaves reporters like Herridge, and citizens like Chen, caught in a legal framework that forces an all-or-nothing outcome. Either the reporter pays a mounting daily fine (or faces jail), or the citizen who was wronged by a government leak loses her only remaining path to accountability.
A properly crafted federal shield law could establish a balancing test with real teeth, one that protects source confidentiality in most cases while allowing narrow exceptions when a plaintiff has exhausted all other means and the information is genuinely central to the claim. That is roughly the framework Judge Cooper applied here, but he did it without statutory guidance, relying instead on a qualified First Amendment privilege that different courts define differently.
Several questions hang over this case. Has the $800-a-day fine already begun accruing, or does some procedural step remain? What specific legal options is Fox News exploring? Who are Herridge's attorneys of record, and what is their next move? And what is the current status of Chen's underlying Privacy Act lawsuit against the FBI and the Justice Department, the case that is supposed to hold the actual leakers accountable?
That last question matters most. The government officials who took Chen's private records and handed them to the press are the real wrongdoers in this story. They violated the Privacy Act. They abused their access to a citizen's personal information. They did it, apparently, to damage a woman the FBI investigated for six years and never charged.
Herridge's attorneys did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
The real scandal is not that a reporter kept her word to a source. It is that federal officials apparently broke the law to smear a citizen, and after all these years, nobody in government has been held accountable for it. The court is squeezing the journalist. The leakers remain unnamed.
