Omaha Mayor John Ewing admitted to violating a resident’s First Amendment rights when he deleted her Facebook comment and briefly blocked her from viewing his official page over a comment about the longstanding sinkhole on 16th Street.
Lisa Kilker, a resident of the Regis Building, criticized Ewing in a Facebook comment on an unrelated post last October. Residents of the Regis, a condominium complex, have been in a dispute with the city over whether or not the building’s maintenance issues contributed to the sinkhole, which opened up in an alley in January 2025 and has not yet been repaired.
“The Regis building residents have just had to take out a $1 million dollar loan to pay for repairs for the sinkhole,” Kilker wrote. “You ran a campaign on promising to help us. What happened to those promises??”
Kilker’s comment was soon deleted and she was blocked from viewing Ewing’s public Facebook page before Ewing deleted the post entirely. She sued Ewing, alleging he had engaged in viewpoint discrimination and violated her First Amendment rights.
Last week, Kilker and Ewing entered into a consent agreement in which Ewing admitted to violating her First Amendment rights by deleting her comment and blocking her from the page. Ewing, through the City of Omaha, agreed to pay nearly $50,000 in Kilker’s attorney’s fees and $2 in nominal, or symbolic, damages.
“In a constitutional violation, when there’s no dollar value to what happened, the court awards nominal damages,” Kilker’s attorney, Mark Javitch, said. “Nominal damages seems like nothing, but that’s the gateway to get all the other court-ordered relief.”
In response to the lawsuit, Ewing said in court filings that the page ordinarily has the comments function turned off. In October, some posts with comment access were made, and Ewing interacted with some commenters. He admitted to seeing Kilker’s comment on either Oct. 10 or Oct. 11 and, “viewing it as harassment,” deleting her comment and blocking her.
Days later, Ewing said he instructed a member of his staff to delete the post entirely “to maintain consistency with the intended policy of not allowing any comments – favorable or otherwise.” Kilker filed her lawsuit on Oct. 13 – the same day the post was deleted. She alleged that the deletion of the post was in retaliation to her filing the lawsuit.
Kilker alleged two distinct First Amendment violations – the first when Ewing deleted her comment and blocked her from the page, and the second when he deleted the entire post. Ewing quickly admitted to the first violation, but attorneys argued that deleting the post after Kilker had already been blocked and her comment deleted was not retaliatory and, instead, was meant to bring the page back in line with the “intended policy.”
Since there was no dispute over the first claim, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon granted summary judgment in Kilker’s favor. But he found that there were factual disputes over whether or not Ewing’s deletion of the post was in retaliation for Kilker’s lawsuit.
Bataillon ordered a jury trial on Kilker’s second claim. That was set to take place later this month, but was paused pending an appeal to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Kilker had appealed Bataillon’s earlier denial of a preliminary injunction to force Ewing to put the post back on his page after he deleted it.
The consent agreement means the Eighth Circuit will no longer hear arguments in the case. Javitch said settling the issues without a trial is an ideal outcome.
“We weren’t trying to embarrass the mayor by forcing him to go to trial when he was willing to concede,” he said.” This is the best result.”