Roger Marshall's newest attack ad is about protecting children. To make it, his campaign took a photo of real young people sitting in a real Kansas camp chapel — and put it in a commercial about child sexual abuse, without asking anyone.

The camp found out and demanded he take it down.

What the ad shows

Kansas Reflector reported on October 5 that the 30-second ad, paid for by Marshall's campaign and carrying his voice saying he approved it, attacks his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton. Hamilton founded and led Church of the Resurrection in Johnson County. The ad accuses him of failing to act on a 2005 report that a church volunteer may have touched or tried to touch boys at a church program. "Parents were ignored and Hamilton never called police," the ad says.

Over that narration, the ad runs still photos: cottages, dorm rooms, a hiking trail, rural land — and a group of people sitting in rows, most with their backs to the camera, inside a distinctive chapel.

That chapel belongs to Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center, a nonprofit summer camp and retreat center near Linwood. It has nothing to do with the allegations in the ad.

"Events that did not happen here"

Tall Oaks says no one from the Marshall campaign asked to use the photo, and no one gave permission. Lea Ann Combs, president of its board, told the Reflector:

"This advertisement creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here. Protecting the dignity of these young people and accurately representing our organization should be a shared priority."

Combs said Tall Oaks had permission to photograph the young people for one reason: promoting the camp. That never covered a political ad, and certainly not one about sexual abuse. The camp asked Marshall to stop running the ad until the photo was gone, and to scrub it from every platform tied to his campaign. Tall Oaks made clear it wasn't taking sides in the race. It just didn't want anyone watching to think its camp, or those kids, were connected to abuse.

"Corrected" — except it wasn't

Marshall's chief of staff, Brent Robertson, said the campaign thought the picture was a "stock image" anyone could use. "The image has already been corrected," he said, adding that "Kansas families care far more about Hamilton's failure to protect kids from a child sex predator than what cabin picture was used."

But the Reflector checked. Hours after the campaign said the ad was fixed, a version of it on social media still showed the Tall Oaks chapel and about two dozen people sitting in its pews.

So the campaign that used children's images without permission called those children's images a "cabin picture," said it had fixed the problem, and hadn't.

A campaign that is quick to demand others pull ads

This is the same Roger Marshall whose lawyers sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter on September 28 over an ad featuring Meischa Zimmerman, one of the more than 700 patients his medical practice took to court over unpaid bills. Marshall called that ad "a complete lie." His lawyers' letter argued over why she was arrested — not whether.

When an ad hurts Marshall, he sends lawyers. When his own ad drags a children's camp into a story about abuse, the camp gets told nobody cares "what cabin picture was used."

The record behind the ad

Marshall wants voters to see him as the candidate who protects kids from predators. Hamilton's campaign pointed the Reflector to a vote that complicates that. In September 2025, Marshall cast one of the 51 votes that killed an amendment forcing the Justice Department to release the Epstein files — after saying they should be public — and called the effort a "political stunt."

For his part, Hamilton told the Reflector in July that two church employees looked into the 2005 claims and couldn't identify who did it, and that he should have gone to the police instead of relying on church staff. When new allegations came out in 2006, the church informed police. Voters can weigh that. What they shouldn't have to weigh is a camp full of kids who had nothing to do with any of it.

The bottom line

Roger Marshall's campaign ad about child abuse used a photo of young people in the Tall Oaks camp chapel without the camp's permission, linking a place and children to abuse that, the camp says, "did not happen here." His chief of staff called it a "cabin picture" and said the ad was corrected; hours later, a version online still showed the chapel. A week earlier, Marshall's own lawyers had sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter over an ad featuring one of the patients his practice sued.

Source

Roger Marshall's attack ad against Adam Hamilton contains unauthorized image of children — Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, October 5, 2026