Kou v. Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, Inc. and Ben Albritton · No. 5D2025-3518 (Fla. 5th DCA) · Decided September 25, 2026
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A Lake County judge threatened to jail a man unless he paid a civil judgment. Florida’s Constitution says that can’t happen — and the Fifth District Court of Appeal just reminded a trial court of it, reversing a contempt order sought by the campaign committee of the sitting President of the Florida Senate.
The Underlying Fight
Bowen Kou sued the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate President Ben Albritton over a political mailer. He lost, and was ordered to pay the committee’s attorney’s fees and costs under section 768.295, Florida’s anti-SLAPP statute — a law designed to penalize lawsuits filed to punish or chill speech on public issues. When Kou did not pay, the trial court did not stop at entering a money judgment. It used its contempt power to threaten him with incarceration unless he posted a bond or deposited the full judgment amount into the court registry.
What the Court Held
The Fifth District reversed outright. Article I, section 11 of the Florida Constitution provides that “no person shall be imprisoned for debt, except in cases of fraud,” and Florida courts have applied that guarantee for decades to bar exactly this move — using contempt to force payment of a money judgment that has nothing to do with child support or alimony. The panel traced the rule back through six decades of Florida appellate decisions, from a 1965 Third District ruling to a 2018 First District case holding that a court “cannot convert a general payment obligation into something enforceable by contempt by simply characterizing it as an obligation to perform a specific action.”
The court went further, holding that the trial judge also lacked authority to order Kou to post an appellate bond or deposit funds into the court registry as a substitute for direct contempt — neither procedural rule is mandatory, and neither can be used to accomplish indirectly what the Constitution forbids directly.
Why It Matters
Anti-SLAPP fee awards exist to punish litigants who use lawsuits to silence critics — but a fee award is still a debt, not a criminal sentence, and this ruling reaffirms that a trial court cannot dress up debt collection as contempt of court no matter who is on either side of the case. The reversal came in a case involving one of the most powerful officials in Florida government, and a per curiam panel of three judges agreed unanimously that the trial court had gotten it wrong.
| Court | Fifth District Court of Appeal |
| Case No. | 5D2025-3518 |
| Lower Court | Circuit Court, Lake County |
| Decided | September 25, 2026 |
| Vote | Unanimous, per curiam |