Thrown for a Loop

The press release arrived October 4, 2024: “Cox Enterprises Acquires Loop Tackle.” Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises Inc. is a 127-year-old, privately held, global media and automotive empire worth around $30 billion. Its purchase of a relatively small European flyfishing brand seemed odd. But, free country and all that.

In August, Loop launched a six-part video series titled Wild Fish, Wild Places, hosted by brand ambassador Emilie Björkman. The first episode takes place in Montana and features, among others, Casey Hackathorn, Montana State Director for Trout Unlimited. About halfway through the video Hackathorn shares the following: “In Montana we have a very robust stream-access law that allows the public to access any stream or river below the high-water mark. That accessibility is really important to people around here, and it provides a stronger connection to the place. It’s not something you can take for granted either, because it’s not that way in all places. So, it’s worth fighting for.”

The irony of this quote being used in a Loop-sponsored video is that James Cox Kennedy, chairman emeritus of Cox Enterprises, spent a decade fighting against Montana’s stream-access law. 

Kennedy owns property along eight miles of Montana’s Ruby River. Around 2003 he began having fences—some of them electric—erected along three public bridges over the Ruby that had previously been used to legally access the river. The following year, Bozeman-based Public Land and Water Access Association (PLWA) sued Madison County, seeking to keep the accesses open. Kennedy intervened, joining the lawsuit as a defendant.

In fall of 2008, Judge Loren Tucker ruled that Kennedy could not prevent access to the river from two of the bridges—Duncan Road and Lewis Lane—because public easements on those bridges were sixty-feet wide. Kennedy appealed the ruling on Lewis Lane, claiming it violated his private property rights. The Helena Independent Record newspaper offered a summary of the case: “Kennedy claims that his property rights are being violated, but his goal is to deny the public the right to its property.”

Meanwhile, PLWA appealed the ruling on the third bridge, at Seylor Lane. The cases wound up at the Montana Supreme Court, and Kennedy eventually lost both of them. In January 2014, in a 5-2 ruling, the Court upheld Montana’s stream-access law.

As the decisions were being widely celebrated across the state, another story began to emerge: Montana Supreme Court Judge Laurie McKinnon, representing one of the two no votes on the ruling, had been strongly supported in the 2012 Supreme Court election by a dark-money group called the “Montana Growth Network.” The group spent nearly $900,000 on the 2012 Supreme Court election, and $100,000 of it had come from Kennedy.

With this in mind, it seems fair to ask if Casey Hackathorn’s views on public access, revealed in Loop’s new film, are also shared by the parent company and its chairman emeritus?

To be clear: Kennedy has been extremely philanthropic over the decades, donating millions to conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. But he has also used his influence with these large nonprofits to exert pressure on those who don’t share his views. In 2015, DU fired longtime columnist Don Thomas after Thomas wrote an article for Outside Bozeman that criticized Kennedy’s legal battle over the Ruby.

Donations aimed at maintaining a healthy river have a different feel when the donor is simultaneously trying to privatize it. And all those dollars Kennedy poured into a legal fight with the State is money that could have gone to conservation. Indeed, the greatest gift James Cox Kennedy ever gave to anglers may be his decision not to appeal the Montana Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling.

Did Kennedy have a change of heart? Or was he perhaps just worn out and embarrassed by the lengthy legal defeat? “It’s a rebuttal of the attempt of a very rich individual to control access to streams in Montana,” said John Gibson, then President of PLWA, in 2016. “And he was defeated by a bunch of volunteers.”

Below is an email sent to Loop prior to publishing this story. The company has yet to respond.

Tomeca,