A small-town Minnesota mayor facing re-election is now battling accusations that he recorded a woman in a state of undress at a 2020 bonfire and later pressured the local police chief to change the official report.
Luke Merrill, the mayor of Isanti, Minnesota, allegedly filmed a woman on his phone during a bonfire at his parents' house on September 19, 2020, then posted the footage online, all without her consent. Years later, after the woman filed a police report, Merrill texted the Isanti police chief directly, asking what he could do to "correct the factual inaccuracy" in the complaint. The police chief refused. The city attorney's office declined to file charges, citing an expired statute of limitations. And Merrill, who won a special election last year after serving as interim mayor, is now running to keep his seat in November.
The accusation, the texts, and the timeline paint a picture of a local official who, when confronted with a formal complaint, reached for his phone, not to cooperate with the process, but to manage it.
The alleged victim, Denea Donovan, told the Isanti Police Department that Merrill recorded "her and other females only wearing their brassieres and bottom pants on his Snapchat" during the September 2020 bonfire. The police report, obtained by the Daily Mail, states that Donovan told Merrill he "better not be recording," and that he allegedly replied he was only using his phone's flashlight.
The report goes further. Donovan said she gave a lap dance to a friend and to Merrill and accused someone present of filming her as she removed her brassiere. The police report's own language is blunt:
"In the video footage part of [redacted] breasts are showing, [redacted] stated she felt violated due to the fact she was intoxicated and never gave Luke consent to record her during those sexual acts."
Donovan said she did not report the incident at the time because she was not in the right mindset. She later gained access to the video after logging into an old Facebook profile and discovering a friend had sent it to her through the Messenger app. Sheryl Davidson accompanied Donovan when she went to give her statement to police.
Merrill has not denied the bonfire happened. He has denied the characterization. On social media, he called the episode "young, dumb & stupid at a bonfire" and insisted the police report was filed "for political reasons almost 6 years later."
Merrill posted a longer statement on his personal social media account, attempting to minimize the footage:
"There was no actual nudity in the original video either; the worst of it was cleavage. You'd see more 'nudity' going to a beach. The next morning I deleted the clip, after I was asked to. It was young, dumb and stupid on everyone's part, and I will absolutely own that fact. But it is not what is being weaponized here against me."
Two things stand out. First, Merrill acknowledged the video existed and that he deleted it only after being asked, not voluntarily. Second, he admitted the woman did not want the footage posted in the first place. In text messages to Police Chief Travis Muyres obtained by local ABC affiliate KSTP, Merrill said he did not know how to prove himself without posting the video again, which he conceded would put him in "a big pickle because she didn't want me to post it originally."
That sentence alone contradicts his public framing. If the video was harmless beach-level content, why would reposting it create a "big pickle"? And if the woman never wanted it posted, how does calling the complaint political change what happened?
The text messages between Merrill and Muyres are the most damaging element of this story, not because they prove the original allegation, but because they show how Merrill responded to it.
Merrill texted Muyres directly:
"Hey Travis, Is there anything I can do to correct the factual inaccuracy in that police report where it says her breasts were exposed?"
Muyres replied that the report stated only "part" of the woman's breast was exposed and denied any factual inaccuracies. When asked if he wanted to change the report, Merrill declined but asked whether he could add his own statement instead. In the same exchange, Merrill told the police chief he feared the report would be "weaponized" against him and said he was "kinda screwed by the inaccurate word choice."
A sitting mayor contacting a police chief, a city employee who reports up through the municipal chain of command, to discuss altering a police report about the mayor's own conduct is not standard constituent service. Isanti County Sheriff Wayne Seiberlich said Merrill's texts to Muyres "appear to be inappropriate and unethical."
Seiberlich added that while unethical, he did not believe Merrill violated the Minnesota Criminal Code. His office did not investigate the initial claims.
Merrill defended the texts by citing municipal procedure. He told KSTP:
"It is city practice for city council members or mayor to reach out directly to department heads, or the city administrator, not the subordinate officer. Reaching out to subordinate city employees creates a workplace conflict."
Muyres offered a different framing. He told the Daily Mail that under Isanti Police Policy 337, the standard directive was "to maintain professional distance by having the Police Chief as the first line of contact for elected persons." That policy governs routine contact between elected officials and the department, not a mayor lobbying to change a report in which he is the accused party.
Merrill's argument amounts to this: he contacted the police chief because protocol required it. But the content of his messages, requesting a correction, complaining about word choice, worrying about political fallout, had nothing to do with routine city business. He was not asking about a budget line or a staffing issue. He was asking the chief to revisit a report that named him as the subject of a complaint.
The Isanti city attorney's office declined to file charges against Merrill because the statute of limitations had expired. That legal reality does not resolve the underlying questions about his conduct, both at the bonfire and afterward.
Merrill has leaned on the dropped case as vindication. "There was no crime. The case was dropped," he wrote on social media. But a case dropped on procedural grounds is not the same as a case investigated and cleared on the merits. The statute of limitations expired because the complaint came years after the alleged incident, a delay Donovan attributed to her own state of mind at the time, and which Merrill attributes to political timing.
Donovan, who identified herself publicly as the alleged victim in an interview with KSTP, offered a simple statement:
"I want to believe wholeheartedly that the truth will prevail."
Merrill, meanwhile, accused Sheryl Davidson, the woman who accompanied Donovan to file her statement, of orchestrating a "political hit piece." In a separate post, he described his mayoral role as "essentially a volunteer position" and attached his Venmo account.
Merrill won a special election last year after serving as interim mayor. He is now running to keep the position in November. The timing of the complaint, filed roughly six years after the alleged incident and months before a general election, gives Merrill his strongest talking point. He has used it repeatedly, framing the entire episode as a political operation designed to prevent his re-election.
That argument may resonate with some voters. But it does not explain why, when a formal complaint landed on the police department's desk, the mayor's first move was to text the police chief and ask how to fix the report. It does not explain why he acknowledged the woman never wanted the video posted. And it does not explain why the county sheriff, not a political opponent, but a law enforcement official reviewing the texts, called Merrill's conduct "inappropriate and unethical."
Voters in Isanti will decide in November whether any of that matters enough to change the outcome. But the facts in the police report, the texts to the chief, and Merrill's own admissions on social media are now part of the public record, and no amount of Venmo links or claims of political persecution will scrub them from it.
When a public official's response to a complaint is not transparency but a text message asking the police chief to tidy up the paperwork, the voters deserve to know, and to draw their own conclusions.
