Entergy Arkansas sued reporters and a records requester seeking a gag order over public-records reporting on its Google deal

On September 1, 2026, Entergy Arkansas LLC filed an emergency federal lawsuit and sought a temporary restraining order against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Times, Democrat-Gazette reporter Sydney Sasser, Arkansas Times editor Austin Gelder, and private citizen Jessica Kivell, seeking to block further publication of documents detailing Entergy's power agreement with Google for a data center in West Memphis, Arkansas. The documents showed that, despite public assurances from Entergy and Google that Google would cover the full cost of a new solar array built to supply the data center, Google is paying only about a third of the $1.6 billion project — with Entergy Arkansas ratepayers covering transmission upgrades and the remainder — and that the data center will eventually consume the array's entire output. Kivell, a nurse and mother who had filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission over the data center's costs, received the documents from the commission and shared them with Sasser; both were apparently unaware the commission had released the documents, some marked confidential, in error.

At an emergency hearing before U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky that ran nearly four hours, an attorney for Entergy went further than seeking to block future disclosure, asking the court to order the Democrat-Gazette to retract the story it had already published, on the grounds that the material contained protected trade secrets. Kivell, who had no legal representation at the hearing, was questioned in a closed portion of the proceeding about how she obtained and shared the documents; she was visibly distressed leaving the hearing. Entergy's suit sought to enjoin further disclosure of the documents and their contents on trade-secret grounds — an action asking a court to stop publication before it happens rather than punish it afterward, the paradigm case of a prior restraint on the press.

Updates

2026-09-02 — Judge denied Entergy's TRO, ruling it sought an unconstitutional prior restraint [3, 5, 6]

U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky denied Entergy's motion for a temporary restraining order, ruling from the bench that even assuming Entergy had "a fair chance" of prevailing on its trade-secret claims, the First Amendment barred the relief sought against the press defendants because it amounted to a prior restraint on publication. Rudofsky cited New York Times Co. v. United States and Procter & Gamble Co. v. Bankers Trust Co., noting he was aware of no case that had actually upheld a prior restraint barring the press from publishing trade secrets on facts resembling this one, and that Entergy had pointed to only one, unpersuasive, state-court precedent. The denial covered Kivell as well as the news outlets and their staff. Democrat-Gazette executive editor Lee Wolverton said the ruling was about "doing all that we can to inform the public about an issue of high interest," and Arkansas Times editor Austin Gelder said it "affirmed that the courts cannot and will not intervene to protect powerful interests from embarrassing disclosures about their questionable behavior." A request for a preliminary injunction against further disclosure remained pending as of the most recent reporting.