Rhetorical Pitfalls of Careless “Abuse” Reportage (40 Years’ Worth)

December 30, 2017July 11, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

To beg the question, a phrase whose semantic decay journalists are as culpable for as anyone, means to avoid the question. It means to assume, and assumption is reportorial sacrilege.

NOTE:

Allegations ≠ “facts”;
An accuser ≠ a “victim”;
Repeated allegations of abuse or violence ≠ a “history of abuse” or a “history of violence”;
A spike in allegations of violence ≠ an “escalation of violence”; and
Rampant allegations of violence ≠ an “epidemic of violence.”

Decades of complacency by society’s watchdogs have permitted the rise of a system of laws in which, for example, what is called “violence” may be nonviolent. With their cooperation, if not their blessing, language itself has been jettisoned down the rabbit hole. To point a finger today is ipso facto to be nominated a “victim,” requiring that a victim be relabeled a “survivor,” a word formerly suitable to constructions like these only: “Holocaust survivor,” “cancer survivor,” “shooting survivor.” Today, “rape survivor,” “domestic abuse survivor,” and even “peer abuse survivor” are common, which phrases suggest most victims of these forms of abuse are killed. They are not.

Similarly, what was yesterday called critical commentary would now be denounced as insensitive—if not “violent.”

Can Anyone Publish and Criticize a Judicial Ruling (Including a Restraining Order)?

December 29, 2017July 11, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

A judicial ruling, like a law, is among what the U.S. Copyright Office terms edicts of government, and edicts of government cannot be hushed. “If either statutes or decisions could be made private property, it would be in the power of an individual to shut out the light by which we guide our actions.” Wheaton v. Peters, 33 US (8 Pet) 591, 668 (1834). Public access to judicial documents is a common law right.

Why is this worthy of mention?

Below is an excerpt from testimony given during an aborted trial proceeding that sought to have this writer jailed in 2016 for contempt of a judicial injunction. The speaker is Phil Bredfeldt, husband of Tiffany Bredfeldt, a woman the writer knew for three months in 2005 and hasn’t had any contact with since 2006, who admitted during the same prosecution that she had accused the writer “to the Court multiple times [and] to multiple police departments, detectives, federal agencies, and other officials in several states [over what has become an 11-year period].” She was eager to impress this upon a judge but less keen for the whole world to know about it. The Bredfeldts petitioned an injunction against the writer in 2013 that unconstitutionally prohibited him from talking about his own case.

One of the many heinous consequences of a restraining order process run amok is the erroneous faith, held by both trial court judges and complainants eager to conceal mischief, that judicial rulings may be suppressed. They may not be. Similarly, defendants may not be prohibited from talking about their experiences in the judicial meat mill. It’s unconstitutional.

American plaintiffs want to exploit court process yet remain anonymous; American attorneys want to bend or break the rules without having reminders of infractions they’ve been caught at available for public consumption; and American trial judges want the freedom to enter sketchy rulings and the security of knowing that those sketchy rulings will never be scrutinized.

They’re in the wrong country.

What Defamation Is and Isn’t: On Writing about Abuses of Process

December 27, 2017July 11, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Defamation is the general term for a legal claim involving injury to one’s reputation caused by a false statement of fact and includes both libel (defamation in written or fixed form) and slander (spoken defamation). The crux of a defamation claim is falsity. Truthful statements that harm another’s reputation will not create liability for defamation (although they may open you up to other forms of liability if the information you publish is of a personal or highly private nature).”

—Digital Media Law Project

No honest lawyer would deny that a whole lot of lying goes on in court—though there are more than a few jaded veterans of legal process who would deny there’s such a thing as an honest lawyer.

Either way: a whole lot of lying.

A purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the citizen’s right to register disapproval of anyone or anything, for example, rampant lying in court. If a plaintiff lies in court and prevails because of it, a defendant may have no means to reverse the court’s opinion after the fact. The plaintiff will, for legal purposes, have gotten away with it.

That doesn’t, of course, mean s/he didn’t lie.

It also doesn’t mean the defendant is prohibited from bringing the truth to light in the court of public opinion. What transpires in a courtroom is public property, and the right of a witness to talk about that (and his or her life) is sacrosanct. There’s an obvious public interest, besides, in knowing lying occurs in court, which makes speech about lying in court political, and political speech is what the First Amendment is preeminently there to safeguard.

Journalism is the true court of last resort, and bloggers enjoy the same privileges as the institutional press. A trial judge may not recognize that, but the law does.

A purpose of a plaintiff’s lying to the court to procure an injunction (a “restraining order”) is always to shut the defendant up (possibly to conceal unethical or unlawful acts s/he has committed). The same plaintiff who thought it was perfectly fine to lie up and down about the defendant under oath will be livid if s/he’s then exposed for it in a public medium that could be read by friends, family, and coworkers. Bottling the truth to maintain appearances was the point of misleading the court in the first place.

The plaintiff’s immediate turn-to recourse will be to claim the defendant violated the injunction by writing about him or her. This is invalidated by the First Amendment, but a trial judge may not know that (talking or writing to someone may be properly prohibited by the court; not so talking or writing about someone, which is protected speech). Additional to alleging harassment, a plaintiff will likely claim s/he has been “defamed.”

Defamation is a word that’s applied casually to any negative speech about a person. As the epigraph shows, the significance of the word in the law is very narrow, however: to qualify as defamatory, speech must be false. Speech that’s merely critical, offensive, upsetting, or coercive (i.e., meant to urge someone to change his or her ways) is protected by the First Amendment.

To ground this discussion, let’s say a man cheats on his wife, and let’s say the unknowing mistress finds out and threatens to tell her—and his friends, his boss, etc.—unless he apologizes and comes clean. The man gets a restraining order to silence the woman, maybe alleging harassment or stalking…or threats against his pet bunny. (He can make up anything he wants—and if there are a few angry emails or texts, easy-peasy.)

This disarms the woman (who is the actual wronged party), robs her of credibility—“She’s just some crazy person who’s obsessed with me; I had to get a restraining order”—and besides humiliates and terrifies her: She is instantly the creep.

Now what if instead of contacting the man’s wife (boss, friends, etc.), the deceived woman subsequently writes about the ordeal in a blog? Contrary to what most may think, including lawyers and judges, this is protected one-to-many speech—like orating on a campus quad or in the town square, or wearing a sandwich board and marching up and down the sidewalk. Willing listeners can attend; everyone else can turn away.

Negative speech about a person usually will qualify, by the dictionary definition of the word, as defamatory. Certainly if I call someone a “scumbag,” it’s not likely to enhance his or her image and popularity. Is calling someone a name actionable? No.

So speech can defame and still be defensible. Liability for defamation requires that unwanted speech be false.

If I think someone’s a scumbag, that’s not false speech; it’s my opinion. So it isn’t defamatory according to the law…even if a judge might believe otherwise.

Let’s help him or her out: Is pronouncing that someone is a criminal defamatory? Certainly. But judges do it all the time. Defaming people is their business. Generally speaking, judges’ defamatory speech is the most harmful kind.

The distinction is, if someone is sentenced for the commission of a criminal act, s/he is ipso facto a “convicted criminal” (and maybe even a “felon”). Saying so is defamatory, but it isn’t “defamation” by the standard recognized by the law. It isn’t false.

Similarly, if someone committed a crime (like perjury) and wasn’t caught, that doesn’t mean s/he didn’t lie under oath. (Parenthetically, there is no one who has never told a lie so just calling someone a liar can never be defamatory by the legal standard.)

In a courtroom, a person’s allowed to make any defamatory allegation against someone else, whether true or not. Judges (and everybody else) get hung up on the question of what you can say outside of one. It’s as if they imagine what happens in court isn’t public or “doesn’t count.”

An irony lost on judges is that lies uttered with impunity in court procedures can carry grave and permanent consequences. A judge will just stonily sit there and listen. (The author, for example, was accused in 2013 of “propositioning” a woman he’s been in and out of court with for almost 12 years. It never happened, but the judge didn’t bat an eyelash.) “Objectionable” opinions and truths spoken outside of court may well arouse a judge’s ire, though. This is a prejudice, and it’s more than a little backwards.

Critical speech cannot help but defame. That doesn’t mean it’s unjust, and it doesn’t mean it’s punishable.

We don’t say the truth hurts for nothing.

*An Arizona Superior Court judge in 2013 ruled speech of mine to be “defamatory on its face.” Defamation is a jury question (as any superior court judge should know…and I wasn’t even afforded a bench trial). The law doesn’t recognize the instant conclusion “defamatory on its face” (i.e., at first glance). Many of the conclusions drawn by the judge who declared my speech “defamatory on its face” were flagrantly unlawful. His administration of the 2013 case, Bredfeldt v. Greene, violated both the state constitution and the Constitution. Judges can do that, you ask? They can and they do—all the time.

How to Reform Corrupt “Abuse” Laws: VOTE THEIR SUPPORTERS OUT

December 20, 2017July 11, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

Various ways to effect change present themselves to earnest, reasonable, civic-minded people who’ve been savaged by abuses of family court, domestic violence, and/or restraining order procedures but still expect sense to prevail over madness.

Here are some of those ways:

Start a petition (one started by the writer was censored by its host the moment his back was turned);
Attend “men’s rights” or “parents’ rights” meetings (both roundly mocked in the mainstream press);
Initiate a class action against the government (hugely expensive; little sustained interest);
Expose violations by writing about them on the Internet (also frequently subject to censorship);
Write to lawmakers and demand that they act (rarely answered).

They’re good thoughts all, but they don’t work. They don’t work. Victims of bad laws are demoralized, and they’re distrustful and should be. There is no solidarity base to tap nor is there a sympathetic audience in power. The only way to realize change is to change who is in power.

The answer is simple but distasteful to many: Vote out the opposition. “Abuse” laws are liberal feminist products that generate billions of dollars in revenue for their beneficiaries. That makes them very resistant to change. Lawmakers who in the past have rejected renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, for example, have been publicly shamed for it irrespective of their motives.

Maybe the reader who has had his or her life derailed by a corrupt legal process disagrees with conservative climate or energy policies, or values Obamacare, or lives for “Science Friday” on NPR. It’s a matter of priorities: You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

Generations of judges have been trained according to tailored social science and had it all but mandated how they should rule, and politicians in the minority know that rejection of “abuse” laws is career suicide. The course to realize reform is to provoke a values reset.

That’s easy. The number of people whose lives have been irreparably damaged by those “abuse” laws is today a broad swathe of the voting public (in the tens of millions). All it has to do is vote down supporters of those laws—with their feet, their wallets or pocketbooks, and their ballots.

How?

In retention elections, vote against every judge on the ballot. In every election, vote against any politician with “D” (Democrat) beside his or her name. Don’t donate to NPR, and don’t subscribe to newspapers that ridicule your suffering. If you think their news and commentary are mostly smart, listen for free and read at the library. Female victims of procedural abuse may be attracted to feminist magazines and websites. Don’t be fooled: They are the first and loudest to deny that so-called “women’s law” is abused. You know better.

Don’t, in short, reward your torturers and critics.

Erode the solidarity base and revenue streams of those who’ve diminished your life, and put government on notice. This is within your power. Remember: If liberal politicians valued you or your vote, you wouldn’t be in constant pain—and ignored. Write to libertarian and conservative candidates you vote for instead and say you chose them because you want to see legal reform and believe they are the people to make it happen.

When a consensus in government exists that will listen to you, you can then start a petition to promote free healthcare or tell politicians that you believe oil-drilling in Alaska needs to be curbed or that a Great Wall of China across the southern border is excessive.

It’s a lot easier to educate those who will listen to you than to reeducate those who consider you worthless.

It’s Court, Sport: Lying Isn’t Punished; Only Losing Is

December 18, 2017July 11, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

A falsely accused defendant facing trial, especially a scrupulously honest one, should meditate on the title’s maxim long and hard.

If it inspires one or more of the following conclusions, then reflection on it has paid off.

The truth doesn’t matter if it’s ineffective.
The defendant who considers him- or herself a “defendant” and not a combatant is meat (and boy and girl scouts are prime cuts).
Judges decide “truth” based on “evidence,” which can be represented any way either litigant wants.
Compelling narration is more important than truth.
The counteractive story that controverts a lie and that can be supported by the “facts and evidence” is more effective than denial of the “facts and evidence” (especially if the “facts and evidence” are histrionic claims and interpretations that can’t be disproved).
There is no “what really happened”; there’s only what a judge is moved to believe really happened.

Truth is the concern of philosophers. Judges are not philosophers.

Don’t Talk to Police, and Don’t Shake Hands with Reporters

November 5, 2017February 16, 2018Moderator 1 Comment

Why the accused shouldn’t talk to police (“without an attorney present”) is explained here:

Why the accused, or anyone else, shouldn’t shake hands with reporters is a matter of hygiene: All but a few have had one thumb in their mouths and the other up the opposite end of their alimentary canals for decades.

See left.

Rape Is a Violation Not an Excuse for Violation

July 25, 2017February 12, 2018Moderator Leave a comment

scaly justice
No other violations merit concern, a broadly held conviction insists, because rape “occurs.”

Yet rape, no one would dispute, has always “occurred.”

Recent decades have spawned new modes of violation in response to a priority to deter or arrest physical and sexual assault, because they were not decried shrilly enough by generations past.

To “stop” violations that have always occurred, in sum, we’ve authorized a host of other violations, facilitated by the state, that would not previously have been possible.

“We” call this progress.

A Response to Sandra Newman’s Claim That “False Rape Accusations Almost Never Have Serious Consequences”

July 20, 2017June 24, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

“Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.

“But my research—including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations—suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong.”

—Sandra Newman, Quartz (May 11, 2017)

The quoted article is titled, “What kind of person makes false rape accusations?” Its URL slug, in contrast, is “the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations.” Plain from article’s slant is that its author wasn’t motivated to discover what kind of monster makes false rape accusations but rather to vindicate her conviction that false rape accusations, and false accusations generally, aren’t significant.

Having grudgingly waded through slurries of feminist rhetoric over the past decade, I’m led to conclude that the failings of feminists’ reasoning owe less to a shortage of intellect than to a willful failure of imagination. Ms. Newman is a novelist, from whom we might have expected better, and I’m more than cynical enough to wonder whether her chilling position wasn’t motivated to improve sales of her books among frothy feminist bluestockings.

A person possessed of an egalitarian imagination who was tasked with the same brief Ms. Newman assigned herself would be moved to satisfy questions like these: What happens to someone who has been accused of rape, and how does it feel?

Such exercise of imagination used to characterize what we call journalism—never mind creative writing.

Rape is broadly defined as any sort of intimate physical violation involving “private parts.” Is it likely that a goodly number of people who are accused of rape are forced to submit to invasive physical “examinations” that in a different context would be called assault? The question is rhetorical. Merely being taken into custody may make such examinations compulsory.

Ms. Newman’s thesis is that “it’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time” so being falsely accused of rape “almost never ha[s] serious consequences.”

By the same logic, since victims of rape are never imprisoned, being raped never has serious consequences.

The chinks in her reasoning are saliently obscene.

Ms. Newman also conveniently ignores that being accused of rape (among other felony crimes) may begin with incarceration, months of it. The accused’s being granted bail and being able to pay it is hardly a given—though it may be among members of Ms. Newman’s social caste.

Notably, Ms. Newman, a Brit, doesn’t bother to address the question of effects of false accusation to anyone who has actually felt them but instead limits her “investigation” to “academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations.”

We’re to ignore, I guess, that she would hardly expect the effects of rape to be fully qualified by such sources. “Journalistic accounts” of false accusations of rape that this writer has digested have, besides, included such cases as these: a man falsely accused of rape, imprisoned, and then released only to learn his mother had committed suicide believing him to be a rapist; two women seducing a man and then accusing him of rape so their boyfriends didn’t learn what they’d got up to; women accusing men who spurned them or who disappointed expectations; a woman accusing a man of rape to have him murdered; men falsely accused of rape killing themselves. There is no dearth of “journalistic accounts” that contradict Ms. Newman’s assertion that being falsely accused is innocuous. See, for instance, Google.

Finally, Ms. Newman limits her contemplation to criminal cases. In this country, at least, home of the “National Registry of Exonerations,” rape accusations can also be brought in civil court, where they are adjudicated according to the very lowest standard of proof and can be credited by “default.” Faith in exonerations to provide a clear picture of the frequency of false accusation is faith in a golden calf. The conviction that only imprisonment is a “serious consequence” of being falsely accused, what’s more, is as execrable as the conviction that only rape victims who sustain permanent physical debility are worthy of sympathy.

Among a few others “types,” Ms. Newman fobs off instances of false accusation on the personality-disordered, whose prominent characterological trait is lack of empathy. Almost as defining is their resistance to self-criticism.

*This piece was originally titled: “Give Me Three Pieces of Information, and I Can Make Any Adult You Know a Rape Defendant for the Rest of His or Her Life: A Proposition Inspired by Feminist Writer Sandra Newman’s Claim that ‘False Rape Accusations Almost Never Have Serious Consequences.’” I decided, though, that articulating how I could do this might have motivated someone in earnest to apply the method—which is simple.

Weston Solutions Dirt Engineer Phil Bredfeldt Complains to the Court That He’s Been Stalked

November 8, 2016June 22, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

UPDATE: Allegations by psychiatric patient Tiffany Bredfeldt, wife of Phil Bredfeldt, the subject of this post, were invalidated in July of 2018, and Phil’s wife is expressly prohibited by order of the court from making false or frivolous accusations to law enforcement officials in the future. Phil Bredfeldt’s own claims to the court were dismissed entirely.

Philip (“Phil”) Bredfeldt is a geoscientist employed by Weston Solutions in Austin, Texas. The writer babysat Mr. Bredfeldt’s wife for three months in 2005 (September through early December). During the 2016 court procedure this post describes, the latest of many initiated or inspired by this couple over a 10-year period, Mr. Bredfeldt testified he “never met” the writer, which is true. No one the writer knows ever so much as glimpsed or heard a word about a “Phil” when his wife was a regular presence on the property where the writer lives, and Mrs. Bredfeldt took care never to use her last name at all.

In 2012, one of Phil Bredfeldt and his wife’s witnesses (in both 2013 and this year) told the writer that Mr. Bredfeldt had been known as “the phantom husband” in 2005, because none of his wife’s pals had ever seen him either, and his wife “never talked about Phil at all” (but did complain of marital dissatisfaction and did talk about the writer to “EVERYONE…at the time”). The same witness (their witness) said Phil Bredfeldt’s wife, Tiffany, had been “considering an affair” with the writer and that she had known Tiffany Bredfeldt for “years maybe?” before learning the woman was married herself.

Ray Bredfeldt MD, Raymond Bredfeldt MD, Dr Ray Bredfeldt, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, ABCBS, Ruth Bredfeldt

Among Phil Bredfeldt’s slated witnesses in 2016 was his daddy, who was also Phil’s best man in 2001. Over the years the writer’s family has been sickened by Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt’s effluvia, Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, an M.D.—but no less a political creature for that—rented his credentials to Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The starting salary for a regional medical director approaches $200,000, and Dr. Bredfeldt held the position for some dozen years. Above is his mugshot from Blue and You, the corporation’s quarterly magazine. It conveys the correct impression of caring and trustworthy professionalism. When Dr. Bredfeldt’s family’s invasive violations began in 2006, the writer’s mother was in chemotherapy for breast cancer, and his father was hospitalized and died, skeletal and too weak to move, while the Bredfeldts’ latest attack was in full swing. Dr. Bredfeldt, who has been a deacon of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and lauded “Arkansas Family Doctor of the Year,” has shown nothing but indifference. To avoid paying any damages caused by his family’s conduct, he has temporized for over 10 years and was last summer prepared to testify in court to have the writer incarcerated to conceal what this preface bares.

These facts are undisputed: Phil Bredfeldt’s wife was frequently outside of the writer’s residence at night (alone) in 2005, never wore a wedding ring, and never identified herself as married or made any reference to a spouse. She gave in evidence to the court months later (March 2006) the statement that the writer had been “nice” to her and that she had “never felt the need to explain” to him that she was married. Then Mrs. Bredfeldt testified to multiple judges (including in her husband’s presence) that the writer had serially sexually harassed her. Fully seven years later, in 2013, the court was told the writer had “propositioned” Mrs. Bredfeldt and “ask[ed] for” or “offered her sex.” During the same procedure—a two-hour hearing with a six-month coda that violated both the state and federal constitutions—the court was informed Mrs. Bredfeldt “would not wear a wedding ring” while she was outside of the writer’s residence at night.

A normal mind might wonder why a woman’s husband wouldn’t have intervened if she said she was being sexually harassed. Most (non-phantom) husbands would.

Mr. Bredfeldt testified to the court in the procedure this post introduces that he only heard the writer’s name for the first time months after the alleged sexual harassment…right about the time the writer demanded (in three emails sent over a weekend) that Mrs. Bredfeldt explain her behaviors at his home—which behaviors shouldn’t be difficult for the reader to imagine (“Where I come from, it’s considered rude not to at least invite a person onto your porch”/“Breasts aren’t shaped that way”/“Are you cold?”).

Mr. Bredfeldt compensated for his absenteeism in 2005 by emailing the writer and calling him a “SICK FUCK.” The Bredfeldts sent the email and cc’ed it to the University of Arizona Police Department the same day they got a restraining order, which prohibited the writer from responding. The officer the email was cc’ed to, who said the couple had been on the phone with her when the email was sent, told the writer she believed Mrs. Bredfeldt “wore the pants.” The court injunction Mrs. Bredfeldt secured emphatically forbade the writer from speaking to her husband, a total stranger whose name twice appears on the form—including in a section demarcated for little kids at risk.

No allegations of sexual harassment were ever made to the police, whom Mr. Bredfeldt’s wife provided with a completely different narrative from the one she would present to the court two days later (and then three weeks after that, three months after that, and seven years after that). Mrs. Bredfeldt told the police that she had admitted to the writer she was married and that he’d subsequently left her alone…but did seize her phone, copy her number from its back against her wishes, and “[proceed] to contact her.” The writer never spoke to Mrs. Bredfeldt on the phone. There was no need: He could find her outside of his house most nights.

Phil Bredfeldt identifies himself as a victim and recently testified to the court that he’s “frighten[ed].” The relief from “fear” the Bredfeldts have sought is punishment of the writer for reporting what he has in this preface. That’s supposed to make them feel “safer.” During his testimony, Mr. Bredfeldt avoided meeting the writer’s gaze. The Bredfeldts’ game has gone on for over a decade…and it has eroded lives.

It’s a novel argument—and impressive as much for its preposterousness as for its ability to influence a judge.

In the latest of a series of abusive prosecutions initiated or inspired by Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt against the author of this site, it was alleged on July 15, 2016, by the couple’s attorney, Christopher Scileppi, that I had “contacted” the Bredfeldts by repeatedly setting off Google alerts that one of them had followed the above steps to activate.

Any time a specific word or phrase Phil Bredfeldt had asked Google to be alerted about appeared in anything I published online (like “red herring,” say), an email was automatically generated by Google and transmitted to Mr. Bredfeldt.

This, attorney Christopher Scileppi told Pima County Superior Court Judge Richard Gordon, represented a communication FROM me TO Mr. Bredfeldt.

Why the ridiculous stretch? I’ve had no contact whatever with Tiffany Bredfeldt, a woman who was routinely to be found outside of my residence at night in 2005, since her accusations against me began in the spring of 2006, and I’ve never met the husband Mrs. Bredfeldt denied having. Tiffany—and I only knew her as “Tiffany”; she was careful to hide her last name—presented a cover story to the police and courts in 2006 that she has repeatedly sued me to maintain for over 10 years. She says I stalked and sexually harassed her. Never mind that I have never been to her house (at midnight or any other hour)…or eagerly told her about my body or my underwear.

Role reversal by false complainants is standard operating procedure.

Because no-contact-in-over-10-years more than lames the allegation that I have “stalked” and “harassed” the couple, they had to get creative. Satisfaction of stalking and harassment statutes requires that some conduct be directed AT the so-called victim (e.g., phone calls TO him or her, or emails or texts sent TO him or her). In the past decade, I’ve only ever written ABOUT the couple, who live in a different state, and speech ABOUT people is protected by the First Amendment. So the Bredfeldts concocted a workaround: They set up an automated service to contact them and then alleged that contact from Google equated to contact from me.

In testimony to the court, Phil Bredfeldt explains how he “set up” the Google Alert he claimed represented “contact” by the author of this blog.

What should have elicited a derisive scoff from the judge instead inspired his rapt attention.

Judge Gordon made no effort to conceal he knew little about computers or the Internet, and Mr. Scileppi, the plaintiffs’ attorney (a criminal attorney), produced an expert witness on computers and “cybercrimes” to testify (also a criminal attorney). The expert, Brian Chase, a scrupulous man, did not propose to the court that a Google alert represented a communication from me to the plaintiffs. But the effectiveness of nonsense arguments isn’t determined by their legitimacy; it’s determined by the air of legitimacy that the right theatrical elements confer.

What distracts, works.

Here’s an analogous argument: I ask someone to monitor my neighbor and tell me every time she says good morning; she says good morning every day; thus I’m harassed every day. My spy’s bulletins to me about my neighbor’s activities are “the same” as if my neighbor contacted me.

Why absurd arguments work like magic spells in cases like this is that what should be obvious becomes muddied by prejudicial associations: “court order,” “Internet,” “cyberstalking,” etc. Such arguments also exploit judicial credulity. They’re conceived to manipulate the court.

Mr. Scileppi concluded his remarks during the hearing by asserting I was manipulating the court.

Get it?

*I was represented by a talented lawyer, Kent F. Davis, whose appointment was only permitted because the plaintiffs insisted that I be jailed. Mr. Davis objected to the “entire line of questioning” during the July 15 hearing, because it was irrelevant. A good half of the day was consumed by testimony about “tags,” the keywords at the bottoms of posts that catalog their topics (and that haven’t been used by any major search engine in forever). There are very few conceivable ways that tags could be used that wouldn’t be constitutionally protected. Mr. Davis’s objection was offhandedly overruled. Had he not been there to demand a stay of the proceedings, what do you suppose the outcome would have been? And had he not been there, who in the system do you suppose would have cared?

How Blindness to the Consequences of False Accusation Is Perpetuated

September 30, 2016June 22, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

The last post highlighted the murder of a woman’s cherished dog by police officers responding to a false report.

First thing, then, let’s acknowledge that false accusation can do more than “inconvenience” the accused: It can kill.

Why then isn’t it roundly criticized? Why aren’t multitudes clamoring for accountability? Answer: politics.

Few who are sympathetic to the effects of false accusation are induced to crusade against it, journalists who appreciate the consequences of lying tend to believe that nothing short of being false accused of rape is even worthy of complaining about in the first place, and vociferous critics of complaints of false accusation deny it’s ever a big deal (if they even allow it occurs).

The latter position, particularly, assumes that the falsity of false allegations is always detected before any real harm can be done (always wrong), and that the falsely accused therefore are only ever “hassled” and will recover after a shower and a Xanax.

The result of this wanton idiocy is that citizens (traditionally men) who’ve been falsely accused of “lesser” violations of catastrophic significance to them (like “domestic violence” or “stalking”) find reasons to question the validity of rape claims (and there certainly are some legitimate ones), because only false rape claims pique press attention (and maybe they think that exposing false rape claims will make people scratch their chins and say, “Hey, if people lie about rape, what don’t they lie about?”). They’re also provoked to hit back against a virulently sexist advocacy base where they know it will sting most.

This, in turn, confirms to the false-allegations-are-no-big-deal crowd (which is a powerful and noisy contingent) that complainants of false accusation are simply misogynistic cranks (“See?”) who should not only be discounted but denounced.

This finally translates to the inane formula: Critics of false accusation and its consequences are rape deniers.

Accordingly, for example, innocent citizens must continue to have to watch impotently as their dogs are gunned down by the police at their own homes. (The cops are criticized; the false accusers escape notice.)

*However objectionable mainstream feminists may find the phrase false accusation culture, there’s no denying that a culture that tolerates false accusation is a culture that fosters it. (Exasperatingly, deniers of false accusation culture point out that rarely is anyone prosecuted for lying and assert that fact to be “proof” that lying rarely occurs…even as they bombard government with objections to prosecuting anyone for lying.)

“I Reckon”: The Standard of Proof Applied by Judges to Restraining Order Cases

September 30, 2016June 22, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

As the story goes, civil restraining orders are awarded to plaintiffs who demonstrate by a “preponderance of the evidence” that they need one. According to this story, a judge determines by actuarial science that there’s a 51% or greater probability that the petitioner’s need is valid, that is, that s/he’s representing some facts and his or her feelings about them more sincerely than not and that those facts and feelings fall into some legal definition of trespass (that’s typically as voluminous as interstellar space).

So concludes Harvard Law Prof. Louis Kaplow (who actually does the math).

The important thing is that the process sounds just.

Restraining order judges rule with mallets—and no subtler instruments. While they may be formulaic, their opinions (and they’re not called “opinions” for nothing) aren’t arrived at by the application of algebra. The phrase preponderance of the evidence is a rhetorical affectation used to lend those opinions an air of gravitas…because “I reckon” sounds a little squishy.

The suggestion that they’re the products of painstaking moral computation is supposed to make rulings sound dignified and conclusive. It’s not important that the defendants in what may be 10-minute “hearings” aren’t fooled.

It’s only important that everybody else is.

*The reader who retorts that judges rule with their minds—and their minds are subtler instruments than mallets—has never actually been before one in a restraining order “trial.”

Kansas City PD, murdered dogs, Brandee Buschmann, Sierra

Murdered Dogs: Among the Consequences of False Reports to the Police

September 25, 2016June 22, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

Kansas City PD, Kansas City Police Department, KCPD

On July 30, Kansas City’s finest invaded Brandee Buschmann’s property unannounced and fatally shot her dog, Sierra, while Sierra tried to reach the safety of her house. According to Ms. Buschmann, the report that “authorized” the trespass (at close to midnight) was false. One minute she was watching TV in the security of her living room; the next, cradling her dying companion.

I signed a petition recently in support of Brandee Buschmann, a 43-year-old mother of two, whose dog, Sierra, was shot by the Kansas City police when she ran out to see who was in her yard at 11:30 at night. When Sierra was fired upon, she tried to run back inside to the safety of her family and was gunned down. Ms. Buschmann had shrieked, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” One of the officers sarcastically answered, “Too late.” Then they asked if she wanted them to call Animal Services to have her friend’s body removed. Neither acknowledged fault or offered succor as Ms. Buschmann lay draped across her dying dog. Sierra was 11 years old.

Brandee Buschmann’s dog, Sierra, plainly aged and unimposing, was shot and killed by Kansas City police officers at her own home in response to a report that Ms. Buschmann says was “completely false.”

Ms. Buschmann has no idea what business the cops had being on her property.

The police trespass onto my property in the middle of the night, guns drawn, fingers on the trigger, take aim at my home, my front door, taking a stance, and prepare to shoot whoever or whatever may come out the door. [They knock] on my door, failing to even announce that they were police, fire two shots in my direction with the front door open, hitting and killing Sierra at my feet with the second shot, based on a call that is completely hearsay…?

The official claim was they were responding to a reported “disturbance” involving “yelling and loud noises.” Ms. Buschmann had been watching TV; her boyfriend, Scott, was in the shower.

Brandee Buschmann, distraught by the senseless slaying of her dog

Below, Ms. Buschmann relates the incident to KMBC News—and makes it clear the police, who approached her door with guns drawn, had advance notice of the presence of a dog and still neglected to identify themselves (emphasis added):

“You see that he has his gun out. He has his gun out. He knocks,” said Buschmann, showing surveillance video of the incident.

She said she heard a knock at the door and her dog, Sierra, heard it, too.

“She barks and I get up and we both come to the door,” Buschmann said.

A few second later, the door opened and Sierra came out toward an officer. Buschmann said that officer fired one shot to scare the dog away.

“I heard a pop and I’m, like, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ and I come out the rest of the way and that’s when they shot her the second time,” Buschmann said.

KCMO PD spokeswoman Sgt. Stacey Graves said the officers face no disciplinary action. “Officers are put in tough situations,” she said by way of apology. “If that officer was in fear of his personal safety [from] a large pit bull attacking him, then that’s how he felt, and that’s the decision he made.”

What the “tough position” the officers were “placed in” in this case wasn’t clarified. On the surveillance video, they’re seen loitering after the shooting like bumptious oafs embarrassed about blundering while playing commando.

Family isn’t replaceable. Nevertheless, I recommended on Ms. Buschmann’s petition that she call every personal injury lawyer in the state and find one who’ll sue, because bureaucracy doesn’t respond to reason or conscience. It only responds to negative attention—the kind that comes from substantial jury awards and social rejection.

A legal fundraiser for Sierra (in memoriam) is here.

Ms. Buschmann’s petition calls for the following:

Appropriate action be taken against the officers for reckless discharge of their weapon.
KCMO PD immediately implement a Use of Force continuum applying to pet encounters that prioritizes de-escalation, to include mandatory HANDS-ON canine encounter training, be equipped with tasers or batons, and exhaust all reasonable means in defusing situations before resorting to lethal force.
KCMO PD implement a policy requiring officers to intervene if they witness improper use of force by their colleagues, and to report it to their supervisors and Internal Affairs.

Ms. Buschmann seeks accountability and policy reform. Social reform is called for, also: People need to acknowledge that involving the police in other’s lives has consequences. Kicking a hornets’ nest is not something that should be done casually. Quoting Ms. Buschmann, abuse of the state’s power “rip[s] lives apart and destroy[s] public trust while…families are left to pick up the pieces for years to come.” Significantly, she says:

The call [to the police] was completely false, and I will be trying to get a lawsuit against the caller since they played a part in all this as well.

Sound familiar?

Like many visitors to this site, I’ve been falsely accused (serially, for over 10 years). My principal accuser reported to the court this year that she has accused me, besides to at least seven judges, to “multiple police departments, detectives, federal agencies, and other officials in several states.” Is that the kind of thing that could bring a swarm of cops into a person’s yard unannounced at any hour?

Of course.

False accusers never consider that or any of the other effects of legal abuse, like, for instance, the corrosive consciousness of being constantly vulnerable to police interference.

My companion dog who had been my only emotional ballast during a decade under a toxic cloud, died last year, unquestionably sooner than she should have and having been denied the rich life I had meant for us to share (and I was restrained in how aggressively I fought back by the certain knowledge that I could be incarcerated, and she would be left in the lurch). Had cops ever approached my yard at 11:30 p.m., they would never have reached the gate. She would have charged to investigate, and she would have barked maniacally. She was part Rottweiler, and I have no doubt now about how the confrontation would have concluded.

How cavalierly vocal critics of those who denounce false accusation tend to dismiss its consequences as trivial is no less reprehensible than how cavalierly false accusers lie. All critics of complaints of false accusation “understand” is that, perhaps, someone was “inconvenienced.”

Making false (or merely histrionic) claims to the police and the courts—whether of “abuse,” “disturbance,” or “danger”—authorizes hotheads with guns to interject themselves in other people’s lives.

That merits reflection, particularly from people who consider themselves “contemplative.”

Restraining orders, the go-to instrument of false or vindictive accusers (because they can be procured based on any three-minute fish tale), are registered in police databases (including federal) and subject the accused to warrantless arrest at any time…possibly for years and even possibly indefinitely. (And it’s common that people who exploit court process also lie to the police. Some respondents to this blog have reported being rousted daily. Restraining orders can provide gateway highs to people of a certain mental constitution. Accusation, far from being simply an act, can become a lifestyle. One of my accusers, who prosecuted me twice this year and whom I’ve scarcely ever met, has since 2012 been a party in four prosecutions against me and also prosecuted her own husband.)

Because they’re petitioned in civil court, even restraining orders that are tossed out aren’t expunged. They stay in those police databases, possibly under a title like “domestic violence protection order” or “stalking protection order.” That’s even if the judge berated the accuser and angrily dismissed the case. People who are accused stay in the system, and they stay accused. “Dangerous” is the implication of almost any interpersonal injunction issued by the court, even though any lawyer will tell you injunctions are commonly based on little more than he-said/she-said evidence.

For those on the fence about the morality of restraining orders—and especially for those of the liberal-PC mindset who recite by rote that they’re critical to safeguard society’s most vulnerable (and especially especially for the faction that believes the police need to be granted further poetic license)—consider how a police officer’s mind is preconditioned to interpret what s/he reads on his or her screen, how s/he’s predisposed to act if alerted to a “violation” (or even an unrelated “disturbance”), and what the possible ramifications could be.

This post highlights one.

*According to the documentary Of Dogs and Men, which quotes Laurel Mathews, a representative of the U.S. Justice Dept., 10,000 dogs are shot by U.S. law enforcement every year.

The companion animal of the restrained man in this still (who’s pleading, “Don’t shoot my dog!”) was moments later killed after being induced to lunge. The officer on the left, who leans in and provokes the dog, escalates a volatile situation and creates an excuse to fire. The dogs in the preceding images were also casualties of the police.

If Restraining Order Cases Are Only about Narrative, How Do You Beat a Liar in Court?

September 16, 2016June 24, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

The next to last post stressed the importance of narrative in restraining order cases.

Stories complainants tell pursuant to obtaining a restraining order don’t particularly matter. “I’m afraid” may suffice.

In contrast, defendants’ narratives are critical.

Strategic defense is not about “telling the truth.” It’s about telling the better story. Competing narratives are universally regarded as “he-said/she-said” (so to speak: Restraining orders are not strictly procured by women against men). The only thing that counts is whose story a judge favors when the end-of-the-round bell dings. (Significantly, there’s only one round, and it’s often only a few minutes long.)

Fraudulent claims in restraining order affidavits are commonplace—and what restraining orders do, especially ones whose grounds include false allegations, is inspire those who’ve been accused to register betrayal, indignation, and outrage. Since opportunities to defend may come and go in a few days’ time, those emotions aren’t likely to settle (and may be compounded by many others: fear, bewilderment, uncertainty, vulnerability, etc.).

The urge of defendants will be to stress in court how they’ve been wronged: “It’s really [him or her] who’s the bad guy, Judge.” This urge must be resisted.

The judge couldn’t care any less if s/he were paid to—and s/he is paid to.

Defendants need to defuse whatever has been alleged against them. Merely relating a meandering history (or “history”) of mistreatment can work great for plaintiffs; it does nothing for defendants.

This may seem unfair. It is, and that doesn’t matter—and that’s what a defendant must focus on: what matters.

Sometimes what matters is the law. For example, many recent posts here concern allegations that writing about someone online is “harassment” or “stalking.” One-to-many speech (online or otherwise) is neither, and it’s protected by the First Amendment. To qualify as “harassment” or “stalking,” someone has to contact someone else, repeatedly, after being told not to. Contact must be one-to-one or through a middleman. No confrontation, emails, texts, phone calls, letters, or relayed messages means no contact, and that means no grounds for court interference. Cases in which a constitutional defense is strictly applicable, however, are rare.

(The author of this post is in such a case right now with a woman who he has been told has been diagnosed with a mental illness. The law is clear: The woman has admitted I’ve had no contact with her in years; therefore there were no grounds to authorize an injunction. Making the law clear to a municipal trial judge is a different story. Do I start by playing a voicemailU that this woman, who claims I’ve stalked her since I met her in 2005, left me in 2012, in which she urges me to call her? Maybe. That kind of evidence makes a good first impression. It says—without saying it—that she’s lying. It upsets her narrative. Do I start by saying, “She’s crazy”? No. That’s aggressive and makes a poor impression. It would only get the judge’s hackles up.)

What makes a good narrative? First, follow the creative writer’s maxim: Show, don’t tell. Sometimes defendants have contradictory evidence to present; sometimes there is none. If there is evidence, it must be framed with care (and defendants are recommended to read it aloud in court and not to depend upon a judge to “get it.”) Legal method proceeds from evidence to conclusion. Defendants shouldn’t start with the conclusion, for example, “He’s lying.” They should present a story that gives a convincing impression. Then they can say, “He’s lying.” Attorney Gregory Hession, a specialist in restraining order defense, would call this highlighting plaintiffs’ “ulterior motives” (their real reasons) for petitioning a restraining order. These may include malice, for example, or cover-up.

Defendants shouldn’t rile the judge. What riles a judge is defending by accusing the other guy. Defendants’ narratives should do that. Judges actually think it’s incomprehensible that defendants should be irate, even defendants who’ve been lied about. Expressions of anger by defendants inspire theirs. Misrepresented defendants must seem misrepresented. (No normal human reactions should be expected from judges, furthermore, and normal human reactions from judges should not be relied upon. Judges will often be very civil even as they insert the knife. Defendants should never be lulled into thinking judges are on their side until after the gavel falls in their favor.)

Narratives must be organized, coherent, and taut: no jangly pockets to upset the seams.

Obviously, they should be rehearsed.

Narratives, too, shouldn’t be one-sided. Defendants should cross-examine (ask questions of) their accusers with the aim of tripping them up, and they should anticipate accusers’ answers. If an accuser has made contradictory claims to the police, for example, a way to obviate an outright denial is to phrase a question like this: “Would it surprise you to know that Officer [A] recorded that you said [X] on [date], and Officer [B] recorded that you said [Y] on [later/earlier date]?” (Any defendant who has been accused to the police should obtain the complete file and scour it. It’s there for the asking.) The objective is not to show that plaintiffs are capable of lying but that they have lied about something material (that is, about something that would tend to influence the judge’s understanding and verdict). Exposed details or contradictions should be relevant and significant details or contradictions.

Defendants with documents that corroborate their narratives and contradict their accusers’ should bring them to court in triplicate. Trial judges are seldom sage; they’re just people doing a job. Anything that appears to be “evidence” should be exploited.

Restraining order trials are storytelling competitions. Whether or how defendants embellish the facts is a question for their consciences. In a criminal trial, a defense attorney will flatly deny anything that can’t be proved by the plaintiff, even if the attorney knows the denial isn’t “the truth.” The attorney’s job is to exculpate his or her client: “Can you prove my client even knows you?”

Being storytelling competitions, restraining order trials are not won by telling “truer” stories. They’re won by telling stories that are more appealing to the listener.

If You’re Determined to Write about an Unjust Restraining Order (or Other Procedural Violation), There’s No Point in NOT Naming Names

September 16, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

The title of this post requires qualification. There is a reason not to name names in critical speech, especially speech that’s published: It’s safer, because you’re less likely to provoke the subject’s wrath. The catch is that if you write so innocuously (i.e., so generally and anonymously) that the subject doesn’t care, then your speech will have exerted no coercive effect. Coercive speech (speech intended to make someone reconsider his or her conduct) is protected by the First Amendment…which does not mean a trial judge will know it is. The only “safe” speech is no speech. Similarly, though, speech that fails to have any resonance may as well have been unexpressed.

Critical speech ABOUT a person, including speech intended to exert a coercive influence, is protected by the First Amendment. Putting someone on a dunking stool by holding up his or her conduct to public scrutiny in a one-to-many medium (like a blog or other online forum) is NOT “stalking” or “harassment” (because it doesn’t “contact” any unwilling listeners)—nor is it “defamation” if it only expresses facts and opinions, irrespective of whether those facts and opinions are emotionally upsetting or objectionable to the person criticized.

Matthew Chan, the author of ExtortionLetterInfo.com (ELI) and Defiantly.net, is an object lesson in the risks and rewards of coercive speech. Mr. Chan’s odyssey into what First Amendment authority Eugene Volokh has called the “wild world of ‘civil protective order[s]’” began when Mr. Chan publicly criticized the practices of poet Linda Ellis, who threatened to sue anyone who published a creative work of hers without permission unless the “copyright infringer” ponied up a good chunk of money.

Mr. Chan’s untamed criticisms (and those of his forum members) were labeled harassment (and “stalking”), and a trial judge issued him a restraining order that prohibited him from speaking about Ms. Ellis on his website…ever again.

He appealed the order to the Georgia Supreme Court on constitutional grounds and prevailed: The injunction was reversed. That’s because publicly criticizing someone to a willing one-to-many audience (e.g., in a blog or other online forum) is protected speech—even if its intent is coercive, that is, even if it’s intended to “shame” someone for his or her behaviors and actions.

Excerpt from a letter to Matthew Chan from Greg Troy, a copyright “extortion letter” victim

Consult any of Mr. Chan’s posts on Defiantly, which is largely concerned with court injunctions and free speech, and you’re going to find names in it. Mr. Chan, a businessman, would probably tell you that anything less “aggressive” would be a waste of his time—besides timid and shallow reporting.

Like Mr. Chan, the author of this site was censored by the court in 2013.

The attorney who opposed the dissolution of the order alleged, among many other things, that I was a fraud, because I represent this blog, he said, as talking about the abuse of restraining orders, while my true motive is to out my accusers’ misconduct.

There’s no contradiction there (attorneys are often poor logicians—and often on purpose).

If I hadn’t been misrepresented to the police and the courts, I would hardly have been inspired to pour thousands of hours of my time into what would otherwise have been a randomly conceived boondoggle. People who do this are responding to an injury, which should be obvious to anyone. The attorney’s basic claim to the court was that any speech that did more that innocuously “debate the issues” should be prohibited and punished.

The claim was emotionally based and had no legal footing at all. We don’t enjoy freedom of speech in this country just so we can flatter people or criticize them obliquely. Quoting from a brief prepared by one of my attorneys, Kent F. Davis, a talented civil rights specialist (who cites law applicable in any state in the nation):

“Most of what we say to one another lacks ‘religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value’ (let alone serious value), but it is still sheltered from government regulation,” United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 479 (2010), and the “guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories…that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits,” id. at 470. There are only a few categories of speech that are not protected in all circumstances: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, speech integral to criminality, id. at 468, and true threats, Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 359 (2003). Speech that does not fall into one of these categories is protected, including: coercive speech, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. 886, 910 (1982); emotionally upsetting speech, Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 322 (1988); and offensive speech, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726, 745-46 (1978); Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576, 592 (1969).

Speech about my accusers, what’s more, represented but a tiny fraction of this site’s content. Generously estimated, five percent. So saying this blog was “dedicated” to them, as one of them claimed to the police in 2015, was ridiculous (though if the blog did exclusively concern my personal experiences, it would still be fully protected). Also, you can’t “terrorize” with a blog, as my accusers’ lawyer claimed I had. A blog can only be read by consent: A person has to seek it out. The same lawyer alleged that I “demonized” and “defamed” his clients.

Such claims exemplify what anyone who engages in criticism of another, especially if it’s valid, can expect to face. Trial judges are easily swayed by emotional appeals like those of the attorney I’ve characterized, and many rulings of the court are issued in violation of the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

Attorneys like the guy I opposed charge in the neighborhood of $300/hr. (sometimes more) to tell judges that people like me should be content to speak about “the larger picture” (to no effect) and receive no value on their investment of time.

If you believe someone has behaved unethically, you’re entitled to say so, and there is scant point in speaking about anything BUT your experiences and the impact they’ve had on your life.

Education is great; so, too, trying to rouse public outrage against illogic and unfairness. The truth is, though, that writing about actual instances of procedural abuse is at least as edifying and eye-opening. We’re animals that respond to stories. It’s in our DNA.

A passion for justice is, also, and nothing outrages our sense of justice more than stories of violation. They’re relatable. We can feel the experience and identify.

It is important for people to understand the politics and perversions that have engendered a corrupt system that eagerly facilitates its own abuse. What makes that corruption and abuse palpable, though, is the effect on the lives that are violated by it.

Victims should name names.

Restraining Order Cases Are about One Thing: NARRATIVE

September 15, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

The universal conviction is that the court involves itself in a citizen’s life because the citizen did something wrong. Even judges are inclined to believe this.

It’s wrong, and they’re wrong—and it’s very wrong of them to be wrong about something so important.

The court involves itself in a citizen’s life because someone (automatically designated a “victim”) told it a narrative, one that characterized the citizen as a miscreant. Someone told it a story.

That’s it. It would accordingly be swell if administrators, legislators, the judiciary, the general public, and the press recognized this.

If a story the court is told is true, there are consequences. If a story the court is told is untrue, there are consequences. The consequences, however, are always borne by the accused, that is, the person the story is about, irrespective of whether the story is true.

The accuser may be rewarded, or s/he may not be rewarded: “No harm, no foul.”

This goes a long way toward explaining why the universal conviction is that the court involves itself in a citizen’s life because the citizen did something wrong: S/he’s the only one who’s ever implicated in wrongdoing (and, whatever the circumstances, s/he is never called a “victim”).

The inequity is obvious. This inequity is magnified in restraining order cases, because stories are subject to minimal or no scrutiny in procedures that may be mere minutes long.

The “standard of proof” is how trial judges feel, and that may actually be reflected in states’ statutes, which in cases explicitly authorize judges to do as they “deem appropriate.” (Who determines whether they actually do what they think is right? They do.)

This is why it’s impossible to answer questions like this: “Can someone get a restraining order on you for calling her a bitch?” The law says one thing (no); a judge may feel otherwise.

“Justice” in this arena is freewheeling, as First Amendment authority Aaron Caplan has remarked.

In other sorts of cases, defendants may appeal a judge’s decision. Not only are few able or inclined to do so in restraining order cases (which can cost a defendant $5,000 based on a three-minute fish tale that’s swallowed hook, line, and sinker—or force him or her to cross the country to answer charges in a 10-minute hearing); there may be no point. The standard applied by appellate judges, barring arguments like violation of civil rights, is “clear abuse of discretion.” Since trial judges’ discretion is without limit, satisfying the “clear abuse of discretion” standard isn’t strictly possible. Post-trial defense is almost always an exercise in futility.

A narrative that works…works. It doesn’t matter if it was false. That had to have been proved at trial, and it had to have made an impression on the judge, who isn’t obligated to dismiss a complaint that’s fraudulent. S/he doesn’t have to justify his or her decision. It’s indisputable.

A narrative that works…works.

*The process is derisible for many more reasons than this. Significant to take from this post is that restraining order cases are storytelling competitions. There is no justice or accountability. All a defendant can do is endeavor to tell the better story. To be continued….

The Difficulty of Deciphering NUTS: Why False Allegations by People with Character Disorders Elude Recognition

September 11, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

The postscript to a recent post observed that one of the most devastating lessons of being the target of false allegations of abuse is how eagerly even people who should least react to them from the gut…do.

Trial judges often fail the victims of false allegations leveled by the disturbed. Subsequently, wronged defendants may follow the natural inclination to reach out to others for understanding and help…only to be disappointed all over again.

Those others might include members of their own social circles and families. Formal accusation is very divisive. Pastors and Ph.D.’s alike—contrary to their training and the ethics of their professions—will “reason by reflex” (ironically, exactly like someone who’s mentally disturbed).

On the one hand, shame on them. On the other hand, preconditioned prejudices mute the objections of better judgment—and they’re only reinforced when the people who bring fraudulent charges are convinced they’re telling the truth (really, their truth).

People with disordered personalities believe they’re victims. They may know otherwise, but what they know is overruled by what they feel. Their “truth” is precognitive. In a legal context, such people are called “high-conflict,” and they’re often serial abusers of process, because they’re drawn to it; it appeals to (and rewards) their compulsion to blame.

Some may think sociopaths, for example, have no feelings. That’s wrong. They may lack empathy—an appreciation for others’ feelings—but they’re acutely sensitive to their own emotions (albeit that those emotions may span a shorter spectrum than is typical). Their sensitivity to insult or anything that offends their sense of justice is particularly keen (as are their sense of entitlement and instinct for self-preservation). This is also true of “lower-functioning sociopaths,” like people with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. If they feel insulted, they will go into blame overdrive like it’s life-or-death.

People with character disorders (who fixedly occupy the center of their universes) will lie to exact “vengeance” and perceive no moral conflict—and they’ll defend their lies with their final breaths. Their conviction is passionate and absolute (so, too, their need to dominate).

This makes them very persuasive and capable of any extremity of expression, even sobbing and hysteria (which may be as sincere as any brat’s is).

Law depends on visible, material contradictions to reach a determination of fraud. So do just folks.

Even victims of legal abuses who have significant evidence of lying—like letters, for example, or emails—find themselves tearing at their hair when they try to elucidate that evidence, because a personality-disordered person will lie to someone who knows s/he’s lying (this is called gaslighting). A letter to a victim from his or her accuser, for instance, will likely include some self-exculpatory narrative that the victim knows is false but that sounds totally plausible to a third party…and makes a firm impression. The contradictions in what mentally aberrant but socially conscious people say may be small, nested here and there in numerous statements, and finding a discerning audience among others who suspect the worst of him or her is nearly impossible for the accused to do.

Borderline personalities may be very domineering—notwithstanding that what they say may be totally off the wall (no one dares contradict them)—and narcissists may be excellent social engineers.

Process, furthermore, favors economy, and standards of evidence that accusers are required to meet may be very low—or even, practically speaking, nonexistent. Accusations leveled in civil court, for example pursuant to procuring a restraining order—a highly accelerated procedure—may only have to satisfy a judge’s “emotional read.”

Possibly most fiendish is that people with personality disorders aren’t necessarily great tacticians, but their impulsive lies perfectly accord with the expectations of normal people. Their programmed behaviors and responses, which after a while victims can readily anticipate, exactly synch with the (equally mindless) programmed behaviors and responses of their auditors. They hit the right chords.

They don’t have to be plotting; they just have to do what comes naturally.

*It doesn’t help that the prevailing status quo that obtains in the “justice system” is predisposed to afford victim status to anyone who points a finger. Nor does it help that judges may ignore even clinical diagnoses (nominating them “privileged,” “private,” or “irrelevant”) or that psychologists depend on voluntary admissions by the disturbed to make formal diagnoses in the first place.

How to Determine if a Defendant Has “Contacted” a Plaintiff in Violation of an Injunction: A Tutorial for Trial Judges (Whose Knowledge of Constitutional Law May Be Sketchy)

September 10, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

It’s surreal to sit in a courtroom knowing you’re the only one aside from the plaintiffs who knows the truth of the matter and that almost everyone else’s impressions are completely wrong. I had this experience (not for the first time) in July. The court staff, for example, thought it remarkable that the plaintiffs in a tort case (a civil trial) were represented by a criminal attorney. Did this mean, they wondered aloud, that the attorney was changing what kind of law he practiced?

I knew the answer: No. There was nothing remarkable about the plaintiffs’ choice to me. The job of a criminal attorney is to pelt judges and jurors with alternative (including screwball) theories to make those judges and jurors scratch their chins and think hmmm. His or her job is to divert scrutiny and blame from his or her client(s).

In the case in which I was recently the defendant, the plaintiffs’ criminal attorney was there to obfuscate, distract, and confuse. The primary question addressed during what was a several-hour procedure was whether I had “contacted” (and thus “harassed”) the plaintiffs by writing ABOUT them.

The plaintiffs’ attorney said I had contacted third parties about the plaintiffs (“literally hundreds”!), that Google Alerts (created by one of the plaintiffs) had emailed them with notices about my online speech, and that I had used the plaintiffs’ names in HTML meta tags (keywords associated with the content of my online speech—see, for instance, the bottom of this post). All of these were alleged to constitute “contact” with the plaintiffs.

(HTML lexical tags were especially emphasized, and the plaintiffs’ criminal attorney called an expert witness, also a criminal attorney, to talk about them. They were alleged to have some kind of spooky—and very sinister—potency: WooOooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo. In fact, Google doesn’t pay any attention to them at all, and they’re completely passive: They just catalog topics that particular posts are about and interconnect those topics within a site.)

For the first time in over 10 years of being prosecuted by the same monsters, I had an attorney, so I didn’t say a word.

If I had addressed the court, however, this is what I would have told the judge: “Your Honor, you can clear up this question of ‘contact’ in 10 seconds by asking the plaintiffs how they learned about anything I’ve ever written. If their answer is not one of the following, there has been no ‘contact’:

‘The defendant confronted us.’
‘The defendant emailed us.’
‘The defendant called us.’
‘The defendant texted us.’
‘The defendant Skyped us.’
‘The defendant sent us a letter.’
‘The defendant asked an intermediary to convey a message to us for him.’”

The plaintiffs didn’t even allege that I had contacted them directly, so only option 7 was available. Did I ask a third party to contact the plaintiffs (e.g., “Kindly tell them they’re going to burn in hell and that they should lay in a store of asbestos diapers now”)? No, nor was it alleged I did. Did I ask Google Alerts to email the plaintiffs? No, nor was it alleged I did. Do HTML tags send emails, make phone calls, or write letters? No, nor was it alleged they do.

That simple.

*Speech ABOUT people, for instance, or legislation or products or institutions (including critical speech)—whether posted on the Internet (“The guy’s a soulless pig!”), megaphoned in the town square (“Obamacare stinks!”), or tacked to a bulletin board (“Monsanto is destroying the planet!”)—is speech protected by the First Amendment, and it does not “contact” its targets. Speech can’t contact; it can only be listened to or ignored. “Google indexed his blog post, and I clicked on the link and read it”: NOT contact. “A friend saw what she wrote and told me about it”: NOT contact. “He used my name”: NOT contact. “She published what I said in court”: NOT contact. “He told my boss I’m a liar”: NOT contact. “She said my [product or service] was unreliable”: NOT contact. Knowledge that criticized parties might read what a person writes in a blog or on Twitter, for example (or on a review site), doesn’t mean the author “intended” for the criticized parties to read it…even if s/he knows they monitor his or her every action.

NoEthics.Net Holds Judges and Lawyers Accountable to the Laws They Ply

September 5, 2016July 4, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

David Palmer’s website NoEthics.net provides a service that may not be its author’s first priority but is certainly a valuable one: It puts the shoe on the other foot. Mr. Palmer outs officers of the court who’ve been publicly censured for misconduct—and more than a few of them have felt the pinch.

Here’s how one website (now defunct) characterized his commentary:

David Palmer is taking data off the Bar Association of any infraction, which is public information, and then adding misleading insults to injury and pouring salt on people’s wounds to make it sound 10 times worse than what the incident really was.

Any veteran of court process who’s been characterized by a member of a state bar association would probably describe the experience exactly the same way—and the consequence may have left him or her destitute, with allegations on his or her record that reside in police and/or court databases indefinitely, whether true or not.

This writer’s response to Mr. Palmer’s critic is too bad, so sad. The real objection of the anonymous critic, furthermore, is that Mr. Palmer is making public information more publicly accessible.

Good for Mr. Palmer.

Anyone who has had his or her character impugned in a courtroom, especially falsely—and there will always be an element of “falsely” in any set of charges—carries that weight every day. Lawyers may disgorge any bilious slime they can concoct about the opposing litigant. Judges drop the hammer and go shoot a round of golf. Impacts to a defendant (or a plaintiff) can be much graver than some unfavorable publicity. People’s lives can be extinguished by courthouse games.

If Mr. Palmer succeeds in coercing some empathy from political creatures with (possibly high) six-figure salaries, cool. Coercive speech is fully protected by the First Amendment, as are factual reportage and name-calling. The likes of “ethical leprechaun” and “screwball” are, besides, hardly scathing criticisms.

We’re talking here about actual things that actual lawyers and judges were actually paddled for, not accusations and innuendo, which lawyers spew and judges act on in the practice of their professions as a matter of course. It’s a lot easier to implicate someone as a batterer or a stalker, including falsely, than it is to have a judge or a lawyer censured.

A citizen falsely implicated in a quickie restraining order procedure, for example, can end up sleeping in his or her car after being deprived of everything that made his or her life meaningful, and his or her name will be fed into a number of police databases permanently. Attorneys and judges, in contrast, are rarely meted stern punishments even for misdeeds they’ve actually committed.

Yet marvel at the histrionics when they’re merely criticized. Attorney Patrick Rocchio has a dedicated page on his website denouncing Mr. Palmer’s comments about him as “defamatory”…because Mr. Palmer riffed on his name and referred to him as “Roach.” Mr. Rocchio was also termed an “ambulance chaser.”

Anyone can publish anything he or she desires today on the internet regardless of whether it is scandalous, libelous, dishonest, or untruthful and David Palmer is proof of that fact. Unfortunately, Google and other high powered search engines disclaim any responsibility for what their mysterious trade secret algorithms produce in response to a natural word search. And, practically speaking, there is no way to silence weird people like Mr. Palmer and his malicious words about those he judges to be unworthy of his approval. I have no explanation for why his untruthful and unflattering words about me are produced as a page one listing in response to a Google search which includes my name.

Coming off a trial in which the plaintiffs’ attorney, Chris Scileppi (who has a dedicated page on NoEthics.net), made the identical argument about my speech, I’m freshly struck by how remarkably sensitive plaintiffs and attorneys, who may blacken others’ reputations just because, are to any negative speech about them…at all. Are we to imagine lawyers and judges scruple about the consequences to defendants’ “names” when they prosecute their clients’ claims or render their verdicts?

Lawyers never exaggerate and make things “sound 10 times worse” then they were? They never allege anything “scandalous” or “untruthful”? Judges never force-fit conclusions? They’re above petty motives? Yeah.

There are no innocents among practitioners of law.

*I’ve never heard an attorney or a judge apologize for his or her misconduct, only deny that it’s blameworthy. A judge this year insisted that I pay a sanction ordered during a 2013 case that should have been dismissed, in which I had been denied a trial (in violation of multiple provisions of the state and federal constitutions). The administration of the 2013 case was a flagrant mockery of civil procedure. The 2016 judge who ordered me to pay the sanction even concluded that actions of the prior judge, Carmine Cornelio (who also has a dedicated page on NoEthics.net), were “not legal.” Judge Cornelio faced no comeuppance (though he was shamed off the bench for other reasons in 2016), and his $350 sanction was used to ransom a civil liberty of mine of which he had no jurisdiction to deprive me in the first place.

Why Judicial Process Is Corrupt: The “Customer” Is Always Right

September 2, 2016June 23, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Everyone angered by procedural abuse has a different grievance: false allegations of domestic violence, civil rights violations, wrongful claims of child abuse, exploitation of process to silence critics, and even lying about rape, to name a few. Typically, it’s what sort of procedural abuse a person has experienced—or someone close to that person has experienced—that determines the particular subject of his or her outrage. (Restraining order abuse—the abuse of court injunctions—is associated with all of them, and is often discounted as merely incidental to a “bigger problem.”)

There are some broader categories of offense, for example, hyped claims of abuse by women (of whatever nature). Prominent female advocates against procedural abuse, like Wendy McElroy, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young, often take aim at social science that’s negatively skewed against men and blame prevailing prejudices promulgated and reinforced by what’s loosely called “mainstream feminism.” These prejudices have conditioned how accusations of abuse are treated by employers, university administrators, the police, and judges—and how they’re reflexively perceived by the public at large. Then there are First Amendment advocates who catalog and decry a plethora of misapplications of law to speech, which may be silenced by wrongful accusations of “abuse” (including violence), “harassment,” “(cyber)stalking,” “defamation,” “copyright infringement,” “trademark infringement,” etc. There’s a dominant tendency among trial court judges to pay heed to anyone who alleges something “unwanted” has been said about him or her or his or her business, especially on the Internet, which to many judges is still a suspect medium.

The success of procedural abuse boils down to a basic corruption of ethics and perception: The customer (the complainant) is always right; s/he is a “victim,” not an “accuser” or even just a “plaintiff”: a “victim.”

This characterization is inscribed in state statutes and, as a matter of form, used by prosecutors and judges in court. Even the “free press” may use it instead of “alleged victim,” and that says everything. It means there are no objective influential voices. Both judges’ and journalists’ determinations conform to a script.

People who falsely accuse seldom or never risk punishment; accountability is almost nil. The only party in jeopardy is the accused. For that reason alone, skepticism by arbiters of fact is mandated by morality.

A judge once told this writer that he considered his court the “last bastion of civilization.” Consider the implications if that supposed bulwark against societal anomie is just a puppet stage where players are issued halos and black waxed mustaches depending on which of them was first up the courthouse steps.

What Does It Mean When a Defendant Is Enjoined by the Court from Making “Indirect Contact” with the Plaintiff?

September 2, 2016June 24, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“If the writing does not request or direct a third party to contact you vicariously, and or request a third party to forward any communication to you, there is no indirect contact. Essentially, the restrained party is not prevented from communicating about you, but rather communicating with you… [emphases added].”

—California attorney Timothy Miranda

Mr. Miranda, who identifies himself as a domestic violence lawyer, puts it succinctly and correctly.

“Indirect contact” is often prohibited on civil injunctions, and this prohibition is typically expressed this way: “no third-party contact.” This doesn’t mean the “restrained party” on a restraining order is prohibited from talking about the plaintiff with anyone (or the world at large); it means she can’t communicate with the plaintiff, either directly (e.g., by phone, email, text, or in person) or through another.

An example of violating a “no third-party contact” prohibition would be asking a mutual friend to convey a message from you to the “protected party” or so-called “victim.” (Worth parenthetical mention is that some courts may interpret attorney-mediated contact to be a violation, so grave care should be exercised even in that instance. A respondent to this blog reported he was jailed for merely asking his attorney to communicate a message. The attorney didn’t fulfill the request. The man was incarcerated, anyway, for his intent to indirectly contact the plaintiff, his ex-wife.)

Washington attorney Derek Michael Smith elucidates the distinction between lawful speech to a third party and unlawful “indirect contact” with a plaintiff on a restraining order.

That’s the clean-and-tidy stuff. Motives for restraining orders are often other than they appear, however. Often, preventing a defendant from talking about him or her is a plaintiff’s (ulterior) motive for petitioning a restraining order from the court, and it’s all too easy for a plaintiff to persuade a trial judge that speech about him or her to others is “harassment.”

Moreover, it’s not uncommon for plaintiffs to want a defendant jailed on any pretext. Spite and malice are not atypically (among) the reasons plaintiffs seek court injunctions in the first place.

Speech about someone that isn’t false or threatening is protected by the First Amendment, even if that person has a restraining order against you. S/he may object to that speech, but if it isn’t directed to him or her, no legal grounds exist for calling it harassment. Coercive, objectionable, and even emotionally upsetting speech about someone is protected. Opinions about and truthful criticism of others that don’t threaten and aren’t directed to them is not “harassment.” Such criticism may defame—saying someone “stinks” is hardly likely to burnish his or her reputation much—but legal liability for defamation requires that a statement be untrue, not merely unwanted, unpleasant, or unseemly.

That said, I’ve been prosecuted three times this year based exclusively on my writing about the plaintiffs (and all three actions were coordinated by the same people). Two of the procedures exposed me to immediate jail time (16 months total), and none of them was summarily dismissed for lacking meritorious grounds.

Writing about someone is easily represented today as “cyberstalking,” “harassment,” “threat,” etc. These words are nebulously defined and provoke knee-jerk reactions from prosecutors and trial judges. All a plaintiff need do is claim speech is “frightening” or “invasive.” No judge is likely to read and assess the speech, and police and judicial bias in favor of complainants who allege “fear” has been conditioned by billions of dollars over the past 20 years under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Responses by agents of the justice system are all but automatic.

Too, it’s well-established that the law is two decades out of step with the times. To trial judges, the Internet is still newfangled and suspect.

As Judge Roger Titus clarified in U.S. v. Cassidy, the Internet is just an electronic “bulletin board” that someone may elect to look at or not. Publications on a blog, for instance, do not “contact” people, even if they’re indexed by Google. If someone you talk about on Facebook or Twitter chooses to read what you’ve said, that’s a decision s/he is responsible for not you. (An exception is “tagging” a comment in Facebook, which does cause the comment to appear in the tagged person’s Timeline. There’s a case of a New York woman’s being held in contempt of court for tagging her ex-boyfriend, who had a restraining order against her. She called him “sad” and “stupid,” so the guy tearfully ran to the courthouse and cried foul. Even such a case as this has been excepted. See, for example, David v. Textor, in which the Florida District Court of Appeals ruled that “where comments are made on an electronic medium to be read by others, they cannot be said to be directed to a particular person.” )

It’s the rare state trial judge who’s as enlightened as Judge Titus, though, and who knows to consider one-to-many speech on a website differently from one-to-one, interpersonal “contact.”

In my most recent superior court trial, for instance, it was alleged that I had “indirectly contacted” the plaintiffs by Google Alerts and by my use of keyword meta tags on this site. One of the plaintiffs requested that Google inform him of my posts. Google’s emails to him were represented as “contacts” from me. The claim is absurd, but there you go. Similarly, the keywords beneath posts here that catalog their topics were said to “contact” anyone whose name appeared among them. I wish I could say such arguments are met with derisive scoffs, but the judge in the case took notes. “Meta tags” were new to him—and sounded sinister enough.

This nonsense works. (A police detective told me in January that he believed I had “caused a contact” with one of the plaintiffs merely by using her name online or inspiring someone else to comment on her conduct.)

Probably a judge would not consider writing someone’s name on a bathroom stall a “contact,” but because the Internet is a public medium that anyone can access with a computer and a few key strokes, the distinction between speech and contact becomes muddled.

It’s further obscured by snivels and protestations of grievous violation by vindictive and attention-seeking plaintiffs, which trigger preconditioned judicial impulses.

Unless a defendant “gets in touch” with the plaintiff, it is NOT “contact.”

*See also the dictionary.

Eugene Volokh Is a Name Restraining Order Defendants Should Know

June 14, 2016June 21, 2023Moderator 6 Comments

Above, Prof. Eugene Volokh argues before the Georgia Supreme Court in Chan v. Ellis (2014). Prof. Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law at UCLA School of Law.

“If you post on social media about your life, is that going against a restraining order if you don’t mention the petitioner’s name?”

—Search term that led someone here last week

As UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh has doggedly emphasized in his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (formerly hosted by The Washington Post), the answer to this question is no, it isn’t going against a restraining order if you write ABOUT the order, ABOUT the person who petitioned it, or ABOUT the impact it’s had on your life. Your right to express your opinions and talk about your life to the public at large is protected by the First Amendment.

A person may legitimately be prohibited by a judge from communicating something TO someone (by phone or text, say, or by email or in a letter, or in person), but a judge “can’t order someone to just stop saying anything about a person.”

The citizen’s right to talk about him- or herself, about someone else (including by name), or about anything (excepting state secrets) is sacrosanct. It’s protected by the First Amendment, and a trial judge has no rightful authority to contradict the Constitution.

Note that the key phrase here is rightful authority. A judge can act in ignorance, and s/he can even act in willful contravention of the law.

Why Eugene Volokh’s is a name to know is that Prof. Volokh has endeavored to make the distinction between speech that may be prohibited and speech that may not be prohibited everyday knowledge. He’s done that by writing in a medium accessible to everybody, a blog, rather than exclusively in law journals, as well as by framing in simplest terms the difference between speech that may be censored and speech that may not be.

He’s building steam, too. These posts are from last month alone:

It’s important to observe that nothing in the restraining order arena is hard-and-fast, because judges can rule however they want. When what they do clashes with the law, an abused defendant’s only recourse is to appeal, and the intrepid writer should be prepared to do that…right on up the ladder. (S/he should also know that s/he has the right to request reimbursement for lost time, for costs, etc.)

A blogger wrote last month to report that an ex-boyfriend’s claims of “domestic violence” were laughed out of court and that the motive for the accusations was that she had criticized him in a blog. The guy went back to the courthouse a couple of weeks later, petitioned another order from a different judge, and that one stuck. His abuse of process had recent precedent, and it didn’t matter.

Such manipulations of the justice system by false complainants and spongy decision-making by judges owe to 20 years of mainstream feminist rhetoric decrying “epidemic” violence. Judges have been trained according to tailored social science and had it impressed upon them what their priorities should be. Too, they’ve traditionally been given no cause to second-guess themselves.

Eugene Volokh is changing that.

A steady stream of cogent arguments against the due process violations (and statutory and conditioned inequities) that make the restraining order process contemptible has been voiced by influential critics since the ’90s…to little effect.

Rather than appeals to reason and social conscience, what may finally turn the tide against a corrupt procedure of law is an indirect attack on its legitimacy. Once it’s commonly known that speech about its victims’ experiences cannot lawfully be squelched, and that both the issuers of orders and their petitioners can be exposed, warts and all, what has been an unaccountable process no longer will be. Shadowy (and shady) proceedings that have enjoyed invisibility will have to tolerate the glare of spotlights.

And bullies don’t like reading about themselves.

*The motives of a goodly proportion of false complainants are to cause pain and have the party they’ve injured gagged. Restraining orders are the perfect tool for this. But what people say on public record (e.g., in a courtroom) is public property. It’s supposed to be the opposite of hush-hush.

“PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED”: Camden County, New Jersey’s Idea of a Just Order of the Court

June 2, 2016July 24, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

NOTE TO THE COURT: Facts in this post were gleaned by its author and do not originate from its subject, Bruce Aristeo, who had no influence on its composition. Commentary, likewise, is solely that of its writer.

A recent post on this blog highlighted the case of Raines v. Aristeo, out of Camden County, New Jersey.

You can find the post on Google. You won’t, however, find an association between that post and the name of the plaintiff, Jody Raines, if you use that name as your search term (or the name of her business, WebMarCom). That’s because the judge returned a verdict on April 26, 2016, against defendant Bruce Aristeo requiring that any such association be severed.

I got a chance to look at the judge’s order this week. To call it an offense against free speech (and some other constitutional guarantees) would be like calling public defecation impolite.

Bear in mind that Mr. Aristeo was prosecuted for posting satirical videos ABOUT Ms. Raines on YouTube. That’s the basis for his being nominated a “criminal stalker”—also that he’d previously been issued something called an “indefinite temporary restraining order” (unique to Camden County, New Jersey). Mr. Aristeo’s videos purportedly violated this “indefinite temporary” whatchamacallit and were represented as “harassing” and therefore evidence of “stalking” and “domestic violence.” (Don’t strain to find logical connections. You’ll give yourself a nosebleed.)

This is actually how the order, issued by Judge Frederick J. Schuck, reads:

The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from entering the residence or place of employment of Jody Raines and shall be further prohibited from being present upon the grounds or property surrounding said locations whether in the State of New Jersey or another jurisdiction as specified below.
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any future acts of domestic violence against Jody Raines enumerated in J.S. 2C:25-19a and specifically from following, monitoring, surveilling, stalking, harassing and/or threatening Jody Raines.
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all personal contact with Jody Raines.
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all communication to or about Jody Raines and her business (see paragraph 8).
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from causing any communication to or about Jody Raines and her business and any contact to be made with Jody Raines directly or indirectly, or through any third parties, mediums or agents.
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from any and all communication or personal contact with any family members, friends, employers and co-workers of Jody Raines or other persons with whom communication would be likely to cause annoyance or alarm to Jody Raines.
The Defendant shall be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from utilizing any internet and/or social media postings, directly or indirectly, or through any third parties, mediums, or agents regarding, referring to, or simulating, characterizing or alluding to Jody Raines, her family, her friends, her business, or her pets in any form, including but not limited to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Prohibited contact or communication in Paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 above shall include any form of communication made by any means, including but not limited to, any verbal or written communication, communications conveyed by any electronic communication device or medium, including but not limited to, a telephone, including a cordless, cellular or digital telephone, computer, or any other means of transmitting voice or data, including but not limited to text message, email, social media, social networking sites, internet or other communication via computer or electronic device, including but not limited to the posting or publication of images or audio recordings of Jody Raines, and communication made by sign or gesture and the physical presence of the Defendant in proximity to Jody Raines or at the specified prohibited locations.
The Defendant shall further be PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from communicating, sharing, disclosing, or disseminating to any third party, medium or agent any information referencing Jody Raines, her business, her family, or her pets via any method described [above].
The Defendant shall cause to take down and remove from the Internet any and all publications or postings over which he has control that mention the name of Jody Raines or any business owned or operated by her, exhibit her image, or contain audio recordings of her voice.
A violation of this Order shall be governed by J.S. 29-9a; however, nothing in this paragraph shall preclude the filing of additional criminal complaints based upon the act(s) constituting a violation of this Order.

Remember that Mr. Aristeo, a former schoolteacher, was found guilty of “stalking” (in contempt of a “temporary indefinite” restraining order) for publishing some one-to-many satirical videos.

(Ironic of that is how the judge’s order reads like satire: “including but not limited to, any verbal or written communication, communications conveyed by any electronic communication device or medium, including but not limited to, a telephone, including a cordless, cellular or digital telephone, computer, or any other means of transmitting voice or data, including but not limited to text message, email, social media, social networking sites, internet or other communication via computer or electronic device, including but not limited to….” How can you not hear that in the voice of John Cleese?)

Mr. Aristeo is now PERMANENTLY PROHIBITED from publicly referencing (“including but not limited to”) a goldfish Ms. Raines might own—and congratulations to county prosecutor Tracy Cogan for that snot blob on the Constitution.

Mr. Aristeo, whom Ms. Raines has had jailed before, was sentenced to 364 days behind bars (less 190 previously served). There’s more, too:

Four (4) years’ probation, subject to standard conditions.
Defendant shall undergo a psychological evaluation and treatment if necessary.
Defendant shall abide by all of the terms of the Permanent Restraining Order entered separately this date.
Defendant shall provide a DNA sample.
The Court separately shall enter a permanent stalking restraining order pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2C:12-10.01.
The State’s request for forfeiture of the Defendant’s Mac Pro Laptop Computer, and Apple Desktop Computer is denied. The State shall return to the Defendant any property seized from him immediately upon his release from incarceration, unless the State otherwise has initiated an appropriate civil action pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2C 64-3.

He was also fined: VCCA Assessment, $50; Law Enforcement Officers Training and Equipment Fund Penalty, $30; Safe Neighborhood Services Fund, $75; Probation Supervision Fee, $5; Domestic Violence Offender Surcharge, $100.

Fittingly, the judge’s name, Schuck, is just one letter shy of an earthy Yiddish slang word that means dick.

*The arrests and prosecutions of Bruce Aristeo have cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, for which they stand to be refunded $260 (if the judge corrects his math) by a man the state has left indigent (with a corrupted public record). If Mr. Aristeo now has grounds to sue the state for obscene abuses of power and false imprisonment, that may mean tens of thousands of dollars more drained from the public till, from which the costs of Mr. Aristeo’s housing, as well as the filing fees for his appeal, will also be drawn—all because he published some satirical material online representing his accuser as a toy monkey.

The Female of the Species Is More Deadly than the Male: A Restraining Order Plot Twist That Fans of Novelist Gillian Flynn Will Appreciate

May 29, 2016June 26, 2023Moderator 5 Comments

The previous post concerned the interpersonal and legal travails of a blogger who brought her story to my attention last week.

Jenny has twice been served (this month) with restraining orders alleging “domestic violence” that were petitioned by an ex-boyfriend with whose son she had formed a parental attachment.

The “man” resents her talking about him online and has sought to hurt her by falsely representing her as violent. After his first complaint was dismissed, he promptly petitioned a second order alleging Jenny had a gun and mandating that she attend a 52-week “Batterer Intervention Program.”

Because he could.

Intermediately, Jenny has been attacked online by an anonymous heckler-cum-terrorist:

My suspicion was that her ex was playing ventriloquist and writing in different idioms to give the effect that more than one person was outraged by Jenny’s blog (like anyone else could care).

I believe the speaker who identifies “themselves” as “Active Reader” likely is her accuser. He tries to rationally justify her ex’s being an ungallant sniveler.

Jenny says she knows who the second voice belongs to, though, and it’s not who you’d guess. “Anonymous” is the guy’s sister (the little boy’s auntie).

As Jenny’s case shows—and as I’ve presaged in posts past—men are hopping on the passive-aggressive bandwagon and abusing process to satisfy spiteful impulses. It’s there, it’s easy to exploit, and there are no consequences for lying…so why not?

As Jenny’s case also shows, however, when it comes to catty malice…men are still the lightweights.

*Gillian Flynn, mentioned in the title of this post, is the writer of Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects, novels in which women are the villains (and all of them stellar tales). As any genuine feminist would appreciate, none of Flynn’s female characters is passive anything.

The Use of Restraining Orders to Bully Women: Jenny’s Story

May 26, 2016June 19, 2023Moderator 12 Comments

The painted fingernail in this image isn’t that of the person who filed the domestic violence restraining order; it’s the fingernail of the person against whom the order was issued (wrongly).

A woman named Jenny brought her blog to my attention yesterday. Jenny reports she was falsely accused of domestic violence for no better motive than to hurt her, and she prevailed in court.

I broke down during my turn to defend myself, but I couldn’t help it. My heart hurt so badly. I was in so much pain. The judge took no time at all to throw the case out. He pretty much laughed Mr. Wrong out of the courtroom for his petty allegations and…what he was trying to use as proof of domestic violence….

As Jenny puts it, she was “slapped with a restraining order.” She should have said “SLAPPed.” Her accuser, whom she calls “Mr. Wrong,” implied the worst about her that the boilerplate bureaucratic form allowed—to shut her up: She’d published a warning about her ex-boyfriend online and invited his friends to read it. That’s protected speech (besides nonviolent), and the judge was right to vacate the order.

Don’t break out the champagne yet, though.

Jenny, who has been served with two falsely petitioned restraining orders alleging “domestic violence” (this month) besides heckled on her blog as a “crazy bitch,” a “joke,” a “loser,” and “just a booty call that didn’t leave in the morning”

In her latest post, Jenny reports she was yesterday served with a second domestic violence protection order. Yeah. The motive is the same: to shut her up and hurt her. Jenny had left a note asking if she could see her accuser’s son, a boy she had parented and whom she cared about and missed.

This time around, Mr. Wrong ticked a box on the form mandating that Jenny attend a 52-week “Batterer Intervention Program” (funded by the tax-paying public).

He also ticked a box indicating Jenny owned a gun, which she says she never has. That doesn’t matter, of course, nor does it matter that the same guy petitioned the same order a few weeks before and was ultimately denied. Restraining order proceedings are conducted ex parte, which means orders are issued blindly, and the priority is to “protect” plaintiffs. There’s no cap on how many times vexatious plaintiffs can play this game. Defendants aren’t consulted or considered. They’re just handed orders that say the court has reason to suspect they’re batterers (or stalkers or child abusers or rapists, etc.).

Jenny has besides been serially ridiculed and taunted by “anonymous” commenters on her blog (who could “they” be?). She’s been called a “crazy bitch,” a “joke,” a “loser,” and “just a booty call that didn’t leave in the morning”:

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), domestic abuse includes “coercion and threats”; “intimidation”; “emotional abuse”; “isolation”; “minimizing, denying, and blaming”; and “using children.”

The NCADV and other “women’s advocacy groups” defend restraining orders as deterrents of abuse…and thereby make the abuse of people like Jenny not just possible but easy.

*Contrast this story with how complainants of false accusations of domestic violence are represented by feminist advocates like UC Davis Prof. Kelly Behre.

A Man’s “Tasty Little Balls…What a Treat!”: On RAINES v. ARISTEO, Free Speech, and Censorship

May 16, 2016June 26, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

Typical of cases stemming from court injunctions, the case that occasions this post, Raines v. Aristeo, is a he-said/she-said quagmire. Not disputed is that the woman and the man had a four-month relationship in 2010. He says he ended the relationship after learning “disturbing…information” from her ex-husband about her. She says she ended the relationship because he became “strident,” “demanding,” and “threatening.” Both acknowledge they had a business relationship outside of their personal relationship. He says she owed him money and brought criminal complaints against him to get out of paying. This post doesn’t belabor the backstory but instead raises some questions: Is this, as in so many similar instances, a tempest in a teapot? Has a public interest been served by a man’s serial arrest and prosecution, or has it only sated a single woman’s rancor? Should this be countenanced? And, finally, is it lawful? The only pointed observation this post makes is that a woman has been annoyed, and a man is in jail.

Jody Raines, WebMarCom, Raines v. Aristeo, Bruce Aristeo

In her YouTube video “Smiles for Ruger,” Internet marketing adviser Jody Raines imitates feeding a man’s “TINY, TINY, TINY” testicles to her dog.

“Agitator” Matthew Chan, who introduced me to how restraining orders are used to squelch protected speech, brought this search engine return to my attention on Friday:

This notice greets the person who queries Google either about Jody Raines, a woman who describes herself as a “recognized expert with Social Media, Internet Marketing and Website Development,” or Bruce Aristeo, a former schoolteacher she has prosecuted, not for the first time, and had sentenced to three months in jail.

Bruce Aristeo

The two dated in 2010, besides having a business relationship at the same time. Beyond these details, accounts predictably differ. Beyond question, however, is that Mr. Aristeo has been jailed for expression protected by the First Amendment.

His “crime” was posting satirical videos on YouTube ABOUT Ms. Raines—and even asserting that much is subject to interpretation. The basis for Mr. Aristeo’s arrest and subsequent incarceration was his being issued something called an “indefinite temporary restraining order” (unique to Camden County, New Jersey) in 2012. This bizarre instrument (issued in a state long-known for its harsh judicial treatment of male defendants) exposes Mr. Aristeo to warrantless arrest anytime for the rest of his life.

Prior to the most recent prosecution, Ms. Raines has had Mr. Aristeo arrested multiple times and jailed for over half a year. (Whatever Ms. Raines’ talents as a marketer outside of court may be, inside of one she’s proven herself to be highly effective.)

The conflict between the two inspired a YouTube “cold war” that went preemptively nuclear in 2015. Ms. Raines’ latest prosecution concerned Mr. Aristeo’s videos. This post examines one of his and one of hers.

Among Ms. Raines’ reported passions are motorcycles and Belgian Malinois dogs. One of her personal pets is called Ruger (also the name of a gun manufacturer). Mr. Aristeo waggishly produced a video “promoting” a brand of breakfast meats called “RU Burger Farms” (RU…ger).

The vid’s “production company,” “MonkeyCom Banana Strategies,” both identifies the work as satire (which is protected speech) as well as takes a poke as Ms. Raines’ company, WebMarCom, which advertises marketing strategy advice. In the video, Mr. Aristeo (clad in a scarf and a fuchsia sweater) lustily tucks into some “Malinois sausage patties,” and his narration includes tongue-in-cheek patter like this: “I love to prepare my Malinois like the Amish do, where they put a little syrup on top after….”

This apparently is supposed to represent a “true threat” to either Ms. Raines or her dog, neither of whom is explicitly identified. The video wasn’t brought to Ms. Raines’ attention by Mr. Aristeo—that is, he didn’t contact her—which means to have seen it, she had to have sought it out.

Ms. Raines responded to Mr. Aristeo’s homemade flick with a satirical video of her own. It suggests she has castrated Mr. Aristeo and is feeding his testicles to her dog. It’s called, “Smiles for Ruger.”

Here’s a still from it:

The word troll in the frame that follows is Internet slang for a person who lurks in forums and sows discord on the Internet for self-amusement. Its application here is an ill fit, because Mr. Aristeo didn’t plant his video anyplace with the intent to provoke: Ms. Raines had to know where to look.

The frame below intimates that Ms. Raines’ video was inspired by Mr. Aristeo’s “picking on” Ruger (who’s an intelligent dog but doesn’t speak English) with his video.

Ironic is that the video documents Ms. Raines’ taunting Ruger before finally letting him devour the “TINY balls.” The video also taunts Mr. Aristeo. It doesn’t just mock his genital size and virility but concludes with Ruger’s “saying”: “Yes, they taste like CHICKEN.”

Ms. Raines plainly means Mr. Aristeo is a chicken. She taunts a man whom she had already had arrested several times and jailed.

A question the court might have considered during sentencing this year, if not before that, is whether this is the act of a woman who’s “afraid.” Another question it might have considered is whether a sophisticated online spat justifies interference by the state at taxpayer expense. Finally, it might have considered whether it was constitutionally sanctioned to stick its nose in, which it wasn’t.

Ms. Raines meanwhile is performing a post-trial mop-up for “image maintenance.” Her video “castration” of Mr. Aristeo remains online, however, and has not been targeted for censorship by Google or age-restricted by YouTube.

*How many tens of thousands of dollars of public funds have been chewed through to sate what is arguably one woman’s yen for vengeance is anyone’s guess. Besides the costs of the trials, arrests, and incarcerations, Mr. Aristeo was jobless and homeless while prosecuting his defense, and living on the state’s dime in government-subsidized housing. Worthy of reflection, too, is the setback to citizens’ constitutional entitlement to free speech:

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Category Restraining order abuse