Sept. 3, 2026, 9:04 p.m. ET
Months after a warrant was issued against him, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has been arrested.
The arrest was made Sept. 3 by the Bourbon County Sheriff’s Office, just north of Lexington, according to a dispatcher with Paris-Bourbon County 911.
A request for comment sent to the former governor’s attorney was not immediately returned. The dispatcher did not have additional details when reached just after 7 p.m., other than to say Matt Bevin had been arrested on a warrant.
Requests for comment sent to the Bourbon County Sheriff’s Office and the local circuit court clerk were not immediately returned. A copy of his arrest citation was also not immediately available.
Jefferson Family Court Judge Angela Johnson filed the arrest order against Bevin – a one-term governor who took office in late 2015 – on May 29, a week after he’d failed to appear in court in person for a hearing involving his adopted son’s push for retroactive child support.
The warrant was issued after he missed a deadline to provide the court with financial documents opposing attorneys said were needed to prepare for a trial. He was given an option to bypass jail by paying a $250 fine and providing the filings within a week. He sent over several documents minutes before the June 5 deadline but requested additional time to produce the others. The judge denied his request hours later.
“Matt, as the perpetrator of civil contempt, holds the keys to his own jail cell,” the judge wrote in her ruling. “By consistently refusing to comply with Orders that he produce documents after having multiple chances to comply, he has locked the door behind himself.”
That arrest warrant, on a contempt of court charge, called for him to serve 60 days behind bars and pay a $500 fine.
Matt Bevin has missed several court dates in the case and did not attend the May 29 hearing in person as required by the judge, appearing via Zoom instead. He was in Maine, he said, after a property he owned had been damaged – “I have a very large boulder in the back of our house and I’m trying to deal with that,” he said.
Johnson had also issued an arrest warrant against him in March, ruling him in contempt of court at that time over failing to turn over the financial documents, including state and federal tax returns along with bank statements and other filings. That warrant was later recalled after a Court of Appeals judge determined the former governor had filed to have Johnson removed from the case before her warrant was issued.
In May, the Kentucky Supreme Court denied Bevin’s request to disqualify Johnson.
Matt Bevin has for months claimed Johnson is unable to afford him a fair trial and is using the case to gain attention from the media. He re-upped those claims in a June 5 statement, arguing the judge “seems singularly focused on finding some way to put me in jail” and her work on the case “makes a mockery of Kentucky and our court system, and comes at a great cost to those families whose real cases keep getting pushed aside for a case in which no legal basis even exists.”
The controversy is centered around a push by Jonah Bevin, one of four Ethiopian children adopted by Matt Bevin and ex-wife Glenna Bevin in 2012, to obtain retroactive child support.
Jonah Bevin has said he was abused over a number of years at several boarding schools for “troubled teens,” including Atlantis Leadership Academy in Jamaica, which was raided by law enforcement over allegations of mistreatment while he was in its custody. Jonah Bevin’s adoptive parents did not attend a custody hearing after it was shut down, briefly leaving him as a ward of the state in the Caribbean nation. His attorneys have also argued the high school diploma he later received is not valid and was not issued by an accredited school.
The case went to trial in late July, with the former governor not in attendance. A ruling in the case has not yet been issued.
“No one is above the law, and that’s been demonstrated today,” two attorneys for Jonah Bevin, John Helmers and Melina Hettiaratchi, said after the Sept. 3 arrest.
This story will be updated.
Courier Journal editor Bailey Loosemore contributed. Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com.