“An Asshole”: A Review of Jeffrey Marks, Tucson Attorney at Law (Who’s Disliked Even by His Heart Doctor)


Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal

This client review of Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks appears on Avvo.com, which notes that the number of times Marks has been endorsed by other lawyers is none.


In 2013, I told a cardiologist I knew, Lee Goldberg, M.D., that I was in court with some monsters and that they were represented by a degenerate attorney. Goldberg, who had a business relationship with my father at the time, guessed the attorney was probably one of his patients. Sure enough he said he’d seen Jeffrey Marks (whose heart I already knew was rotten). Goldberg described how Marks would commandeer his waiting room and set up shop there like the lord of the manor.

He’s an asshole,” Goldberg agreed.

My opinion had been cemented years earlier. I’d been in court with Marks in 2010, when he represented the same client he did in 2013, Tiffany Bredfeldt, a woman who has accused me serially since 2006 and whom Marks would go on to represent in 2016, too. But only briefly. Marks insisted I be jailed in that prosecution, I moved the court to appoint me counsel, it did…and Marks hastily took his leave of the matter.

It’s not as jolly squaring off against a fellow attorney as it is taunting a self-represented defendant (as Marks had delighted in doing repeatedly).

Here’s Marks cross-examining me in 2013:

Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal

And that’s nothing next to how Marks mocked the court. His first witness, Michael Honeycutt (who today chairs the EPA’s Science Advisory Board) testified:

Then Marks’s client, the prosecuting witness, who told her boss that I had “propositioned” her, told the court this:

Then Marks submitted a brief to the court a couple months later acknowledging this:

And Marks had already provided the court an email by his client to me that said I’d been “nice to [her]” and that she had “never felt the need” to tell me she was married.

Marks didn’t even try to hide obvious contradictions, which any disinterested onlooker might reasonably consider evidence of lying (of a grave nature) to whitewash hanky-panky. I think Marks enjoyed showing me just how stage-manageable judges of the Pima County Superior Court were.

Marks succeeded in coercing an illegal speech injunction against me that year from a judge who has since been shamed off the bench, Carmine Cornelio. It was indicted as unconstitutional in 2017 in an amicus brief to the Arizona Court of Appeals by UCLA law professor and distinguished First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh (who blogs about such violations of citizens’ civil liberties in The Washington Post). The injunction unlawfully prohibited me from disclosing facts about my own case like those I just have.

By trying to enforce the order in 2016, Marks made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit, but I had to relinquish my damage claims for constitutional injury this month in order to permanently arrest false or frivolous claims to the police by his client—who would face punishment were she to engage in this conduct in future.

The unlawful injunction Marks finessed was gutted (at a cost to the Arizona taxpayer of tens of thousands).

A low-rent opportunist, Marks has an advertisement on his Facebook page that says everything a prospective client should need to know about his character: “Don’t forget about our incredible October surprise: 25% OFF ALL MONTH LONG[—]Wills, Personal Injury Cases, Divorces, and More!!

His Twitter subscriptions include several about pets, including Baby Animals (@BabyAnimalPics), Cats (@Cats), Cute Emergency (@CuteEmergency), and Emergency Kittens (@EmrgencyKittens).

His Twitter subscriptions also include this (fourth among 40 when this screenshot was taken):


Tucson attorney Jeffrey Marks, attorney Jeff Marks, Jeffrey A. Marks, Southwest Legal


At least Marks doesn’t try to conceal he’s an asshole.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Hoax Prosecutions by Psych Patient Tiffany Bredfeldt & Co. against the Author of this Site Terminate: ILLEGAL SPEECH INJUNCTION COERCED FROM DISGRACED JUDGE IN 2013 IS GUTTED

Tiffany Bredfeldt, a toxicologist employed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the EPA who testified before the Arizona Superior Court in 2013 that she was in psychiatric care, has accused the writer to, in her own words, “the Court multiple times [and] to multiple police departments, detectives, federal agencies, and other officials in several states,” including the Arizona Dept. of Public Safety and the FBI. The writer knew Bredfeldt for three months in 2005, in and around his own home, where she “would not wear a wedding ring,” and he has had no contact with her since March 2006. All of her post-2006 allegations, which have included charges of sexual trespass/assault and which have corroded more than a decade of the writer’s life, were this month invalidated. Coincident with the conclusion of the case, Tiffany Bredfeldt was apparently dumped by her husband.


Tiffany Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt EPA, Tiffany Hargis, Bredfeldt TG, Dr. Tiffany Bredfeldt, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Loreal Stepney, Phil Bredfeldt, Ray and Ruth Bredfeldt, Jeremy and Kim Cheezum, Jeremy Cheezum, Kim Cheezum, Ray Bredfeldt, Ruth Bredfeldt, Governor Greg Abbott, GaLyn Hargis

TCEQ senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt, who lied to the court and law enforcement for over a decade, represented as the monster I believe her to be


“Defendant Greene agrees not to use the following terms and/or phrases in reference to Plaintiff [Tiffany] Bredfeldt, unless and until these words become true: perjurer, felon, felonious conduct, criminal, fraud or fraudulent within her profession, narcissistic personality disorder, [or] adulteress….”

Bredfeldt v. Greene, June 26, 2018 settlement agreement

Consenting to the foregoing clause in a “voluntary” settlement with a woman who has accused me broadly since 2006—and twice attempted to have me jailed in recent years for exercising my First Amendment liberties—was a compromise I had to make to gain the substantive dissolution of an illegal speech injunction, or “prior restraint,” that she coerced in 2013 from a since disgraced superior court judge, Carmine Cornelio, that literally prohibited me from speaking…at all.

(Cornelio was shamed off the bench in 2016. Put politely, he declined to face voters after being roundly panned by the Arizona Commission on Judicial Performance Review. Put plainly, he abused the power entrusted to him and, what’s far more extraordinary, was held to account for it.)

When judges violate the Constitution—and other judges affirm the violation despite, for example, contrary arguments by a renowned constitutional scholar—a settlement agreement like that quoted above is the recourse of last resort.

In contrast to my concessions, which were relatively minor, my accuser of over a decade had to consent to this:

Plaintiff agrees not to pursue any criminal charges against Defendant for any conduct by Defendant before the date of this Settlement Agreement.

And:

Plaintiff agrees that her execution of this Settlement Agreement constitutes a release of any and all claims which she may have or claim against the Defendant, whether known or unknown, which in any way arise out of or are connected to Defendant’s actions occurring before the date of this Settlement Agreement.

This doesn’t of course mean her accusations, which exist in at least four different police agencies’ and at least three different courts’ public records, will be shredded; it just means the gag is now on the other face.

My accuser is expressly prohibited from making false or frivolous accusations to law enforcement officials, and any further allegations she wishes to bring at court must pass muster with “a single arbitrator who shall be a practicing attorney, retired judge, or law school professor with at least ten years of total working experience as such and with experience in First Amendment law.”

She’s also obligated to schlep herself from Texas to Tucson where her mendacious accusations began 12 years ago.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*I was granted the services of a public defender in 2016, because my accuser demanded that I be jailed. Otherwise the cost to me of realizing an equitable revision of an injunction grounded on judicial abuse of power would easily have exceeded $50,000. Who footed the actual bill, including expenses incurred by law enforcement and the courts? If you’re an Arizona taxpayer, you did. (Also to thank for that is Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., toxicology director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and Scott Pruitt’s selection for chairman of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. Honeycutt presented misleading testimony to the court in 2013 on my accuser’s behalf.) Good thing Arizona didn’t need those tens of thousands of dollars for education or low-income housing or the legal representation of immigrant children taken from their families and confined in cages. Rock on, #MeToo. You go, “social justice crusaders.”

**What follows is a synopsis of statements Texas state official and EPA adviser Tiffany Bredfeldt gave in evidence to the court or, in one instance, to the police only between the years 2006 and 2017.




Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, Tiffany Bredfeldt, Governor Greg Abbott, Beth West TCEQ, TCEQ Human Resources Director Beth West, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker, Toby Baker TCEQ, TCEQ Deputy Executive Director Stephanie Bergeron Perdue







Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, Tiffany Bredfeldt, Governor Greg Abbott, Beth West TCEQ, TCEQ Human Resources Director Beth West, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker, Toby Baker TCEQ, TCEQ Deputy Executive Director Stephanie Bergeron Perdue


Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, Tiffany Bredfeldt, Governor Greg Abbott, Beth West TCEQ, TCEQ Human Resources Director Beth West, TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker, Toby Baker TCEQ, TCEQ Deputy Executive Director Stephanie Bergeron Perdue


Tiffany Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt Phd

Tiffany Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt Phd

Tiffany Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt Phd

Previously Paddled Attorney Chris Scileppi Tells an Arizona Superior Court Judge That This Blog’s Author Has “Terrorized” and “Demonized” His Clients with Computer Code—and Isn’t Jeered out of the Room

What this post relates is typical of prosecutorial conduct in restraining order cases, besides generally. The imperative, which is both profligate and malicious, is simply to win. Neither merit nor justice has anything to do with it. The post revisits a 2016 hearing whose object was to have the writer jailed. To remind those who need reminding, namely, liberal proponents of wasteful litigation whose advocacy is based on sensationalized abstractions, jailed means locked in an iron-and-concrete kennel.

lizard

“See attached Exhibit A—wherein Defendant, via letter to one of Dr. Bredfeldt’s then supervisors [at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality], explains that the intent of his blog is not to speak on restraining order abuse, as would be implied by its name, but rather to expose ‘Tiffany’s conduct and frauds…the ploys Tiffany used to camouflage her hanky-panky…so long as I’m burdened with Tiffany’s frauds, however, I intend nevertheless to keep lighting candles where I can as my time and energies allow.’”

—Tucson attorney Christopher Scileppi

Quick note: Excepting my bracketed interpolation, the quotation above is unaltered. That’s exactly how it appears, ellipses and all, in a brief to the court. Short addendum: Speech about misconduct that includes the abuse of restraining orders is speech “on restraining order abuse.” Superfluous postscript: Obviously.

This is one of several posts that enlarge on aspects of the writer’s most recent cases, which have concerned citizens’ constitutional right to freedom of expression. Procedures forerunning the July 15, 2016 hearing encapsulated here have been numerous and all of them related to the conduct described in the letter to Roberta Grant, Ph.D., quoted in the epigraph. That conduct is what inspired this blog. To conceal that conduct, I’ve been serially accused and prosecuted for 12 years.

A synopsis of the backstory, with links to corroborating statements given in evidence to the court by my accusers, Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt, can be found in the preface here.

(In short, Tiffany Bredfeldt, a married stranger who hung around my house up to and past midnight for three months in 2005, told various courts over a seven-year period that I had been “nice” to her and a “friend,” that she “would not wear a wedding ring” while she was there, and that she had “never felt the need” to tell me she was married; but that I had made “several physical, romantic advances toward her,” “propositioned her,” and “ask[ed] for” or “offered her sex”; and that I was a “danger” to her husband and shouldn’t be allowed to talk to him. Readers without Ph.D.’s in science, at least, might detect some inconsistencies in these statements and wonder about the reason for them. Such readers might even think the reason is self-evident.)

The syntactic goulash quoted at the top of this post is the work product of the Law Office of Christopher Scileppi, the Tucson-based attorney employed by the Bredfeldts. Mr. Scileppi is distinguished for having been given a little squeeze by the mayor of Nogales in front of jurors at a rape trial, in which he represented one of the alleged assailants of a 15-year-old girl. The mayor who hugged him was later sent to prison for public corruption. Mr. Scileppi represented him, too. In 2014, Mr. Scileppi was suspended for 60 days and placed on six months’ probation for violating various ethical rules (ERs).

Christopher Scileppi, Chris Scileppi, Phil Bredfeldt, Philip Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt

Dr. Roberta Grant—to whom the letter quoted in the epigraph was addressed and from whom I never got a reply—keeps classy company.

I was represented a specialist in constitutional law who has never been embraced by a politician in court—during a rape trial or otherwise.

The epigraph is a statement of Mr. Scileppi’s excerpted from a supplemental briefing to the court on a motion to dissolve a 2013 “prior restraint” that violated my First Amendment rights with shameless gusto (and that was issued by an Arizona Superior Court judge, Carmine Cornelio, who has since been shamed off the bench). It was the reason I’ve previously been circumspect about how I talk about my own case history on this site (pointlessly: The court’s order forbade me from publishing anything, ever, including by “word of mouth”). A prior restraint prohibits publications before they’ve been made; it extorts silence and conformity. The unlawful order of the court was the handicraft of Jeffrey Marks, another unscrupulous Tucson lawyer who represented the Bredfeldts in the most recent action…right up until the judge consented to appoint me counsel, whereupon Mr. Marks discovered he had more pressing concerns to attend to. Noteworthy is that Mr. Scileppi, Mr. Marks’s replacement, is a criminal lawyer (he represents, for example, alleged rapists).

The trial strategy of the plaintiffs has been a study in workarounds: If the law isn’t on your side, find ways to persuade the court otherwise.

In this instance, the plaintiffs alleged that the court shouldn’t consider my words on this site as “speech” but rather as “conduct.” Speech is protected by the First Amendment; conduct may not be.

Relative to this case, there is a clear difference between posting a blog entry to the Internet about the very real debate about whether restraining orders can be abused—which is what the Defendant claims to have been doing—and utilizing one’s blog to terrorize, demonize, harass, and defame another—which is what the Defendant has actually been doing since 2008. While this case involves Defendant’s use of the Internet broadly and tags specifically to make contact with and harass the Plaintiffs and their family, it is not the first time this issue has arisen in the law.

Mr. Scileppi’s argument was that “tags,” the keywords at the bottoms of posts that identify its topics, serve to “contact” anyone whose name appears among them. Tags don’t actually link to anything external to the website, so Mr. Scileppi directed the court’s attention to a case about a woman against whom a restraining order was issued who subsequently tagged comments she made on Facebook with the plaintiff’s name. In the comments, she called the plaintiff “sad” and “stupid.” Mr. Scileppi:

In People v. Gonzalez (New York Supreme Court 15-6081M) the victim had been granted an order of protection against his ex-girlfriend Maria Gonzalez, which ordered the defendant to “refrain from communication or any other contact, directly or indirectly through third parties, by mail, telephone, e-mail, voicemail, or other electronic or any other means.”

The plaintiff, in fact, was a woman, Gonzalez’s former sister-in-law. Either Mr. Scileppi was careless (for which he has previously been spanked), or he just adapted the details of the case to suit his purposes.

Facebook: “Tags in photos and posts from people you aren’t friends with may appear in Timeline review where you can decide if you want to allow them on your Timeline.” The woman who prosecuted her former sister-in-law for calling her and her family “sad” could instead have requested of Facebook that comments tagged by her not be included on her Timeline. One can’t but conclude that she wanted her to be punished by the criminal justice system…for calling her “sad.”

Ignoring the questions of what a miscreant someone has to be to want a woman jailed for calling her “stupid,” and whether such an allegation is worthy of the court’s time—which questions say a lot about both the value of restraining orders and why they’re sought—tagging on Facebook does cause a contact with the person tagged. That’s its purpose.

Tagging in blogs is in no way related (and even tagging on Facebook is defensible as protected speech; the court has held 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,” that is, they cannot be called “contact” and therefore cannot be called “harassment”). Mr. Scileppi, whose law firm is on Facebook, knew that what’s called “tagging” on Facebook is distinct from what’s called “tagging” on a blog. Mr. Scileppi again:

While tags on Facebook may differ from the tags employed by the Defendant—the former are primarily understood to be direct contact while the latter are likely indirect contact—the fact remains that they are contact nonetheless.

You see how Mr. Scileppi’s style of lawyering works: You tell the judge what you want him or her to conclude. You sketch a false correspondence and only let on that the two things you’ve represented as analogous “may differ”…but not significantly.

They differ entirely. A section of my attorney’s competitive briefing to the court was titled, “Plaintiffs Misunderstand the Meaning of the Verb ‘Contact.’” I like this explanation from Chan v. Ellis (2015):

“To ‘contact’ is readily understood by people of ordinary intelligence as meaning ‘to get in touch with; communicate with’” (citation and punctuation omitted)). Although one may “contact” another…by communicating with the other person through any medium, it nevertheless is essential that the communication be directed specifically to that other person, as opposed to a communication that is only directed generally to the public.

Also readily understood by people of ordinary intelligence is that a tag isn’t even a “communication”; tags just identify keywords in a communication to the general public, and a communication to the general public is protected speech.

Mr. Scileppi’s case to the court relied almost entirely on these words and brief phrases at the bottoms of posts that summarize their topics. He even loosely equated the use of HTML metatags with harassing person-to-person telephone calls. The “operator” said to place the calls was Google. The explanation ran something like this: Tags used on this blog were detected by Google, whose algorithm allegedly made posts more prominent among search engine returns for queries that included the terms in their tags. This in turn hijacked the plaintiffs’ public images and “created” a contact…or whatever.

In fact, Google doesn’t use lexical tags at all, whether to determine webpage hierarchies or for any other purpose, nor has it done for almost 10 years.

Based on the foregoing science fiction, given the veneer of credibility by an expert witness and garnished with protestations of terror and trauma, it was argued that I should be incarcerated while my father was dying. (Contrast the robotic feminist refrain, which should be heard in the voice of a sententious child and is summarized thus: False allegations are extremely rare and seldom have serious consequences.)

Horrific is that BS like this can actually snooker trial judges who don’t know better. Almost as horrific is that it’s meant to.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*I was an aspiring author of children’s humor when my seclusion was invaded by my accuser and some equally disturbed girlfriends of hers 12 years ago. My initials, which I had considered using as a pen name, are T. A. G.

Why Are Pro Se Defendants More Suspect in the Eyes of Judges than Lying Accusers?


Showing candor that was as unexpected as it was refreshing, a judge I stood before in August acknowledged that he knew restraining orders were “abused” by litigants who made “blatantly false” statements to the police and the court.

Doing the former is a misdemeanor crime; the latter, a felony.

The judge, Tony Riojas, besides being the presiding magistrate of the Tucson City Court, is a member of the Task Force on Fair Justice for All. Much of what he told me I already knew: Neither false reporting nor perjury is ever prosecuted, there are no “mechanisms” to stop false litigants, and there’s no statutory limit on the number of times they can file fictive complaints with the court.

(For the curious or indignant: This status quo owes to feminist politicking. See also VAWA. No act by government, women’s advocates insist, should be seen to discourage “true victims” from coming forward. It’s a sentiment whose use-by date expired at least 20 years ago.)

After my brief dialogue with the judge, he tossed out allegations brought against me 20 months earlier by a woman I’d only met once in the previous decade and who is reportedly diagnosed with a mental illness (bipolar disorder). I lived with her allegations, made in one of three legal actions she brought back-to-back in 2016, every day for most of two years. All of the actions were frauds, and all have been dismissed. (In 2014, she had initiated or instigated multiple prosecutions against her own husband, from whom she’s now divorced.)

This post formerly featured my accuser, Jennifer Terpstra, in a selfie she published on a website cataloging her professional accomplishments. A generous critic might call her countenance “forbidding.” This person, whom I first encountered hanging around my residence in late 2005 and who insisted I meet with her and give her a hug in 2012 (when she called herself my “avid reader”), told officers in multiple police departments in 2015 and 2016 that I had been stalking her since she invited herself into my house 11 years earlier.

When all of her and a friend’s legal actions began to unravel in 2016, Terpstra, who also uses the names Jenn Oas and Jen Oas-Terpstra, fled the jurisdiction.

(She had been employed for over a decade as a researcher in the University of Arizona College of Medicine. Today she has apparently returned to my home town and possibly to her old job but has assumed a new last name.)

I was a “pro se” defendant in the restraining order case Terpstra initiated, and after 11 years of false accusations, it was the first case I’d won—despite having been denied my lawful right to a hearing and having had my first notice of appeal dismissed by the judge quoted above, possibly because I was a pro se defendant.

Pro se is Latin for “for oneself” or “on one’s own behalf.” It means I was my own lawyer.

In court, where no phrase is used more pejoratively, pro se connotes unqualified, unworthy, or off-the-wall, and lawyers use it to remind judges that they shouldn’t trust anything their unschooled adversaries say. Pro se, in other words, means easily blown off.

It’s yet another excuse to deny the credibility of the accused in restraining order cases, which can be initiated by any scrofulous degenerate entirely for free. (See again VAWA.)

No one, of course, applies the phrase pro se derogatorily to plaintiffs who breeze into courthouses, fill out some forms, and recite narratives that may be arrant lies during a five-minute interview with a judge—which is all procurement of restraining orders demands. Accusers, who are largely pro se, are called “victims.” They don’t have to be competent to represent anything but their “torment.”

To prevail, in contrast, the falsely accused

  1. MUST appear in court to defend themselves already prejudged guilty;
  2. MUST defuse lies that may be incapable of disproof like “I’m afraid”; and
  3. MUST do it within rigid time constraints (usually minutes).

They may what’s more be prohibited from cross-examining the prosecuting witness, who may not even be required to show up. (In the prosecution against me referenced above, in which there were three hearings, the plaintiff never appeared a single time.)

On top of this, defendants may be treated dismissively based on their inability or unwillingness to shell out $5,000 to hire an attorney…to troubleshoot the court’s defective garbage disposal.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*As the reader might have predicted, remedying inequities like those sketched above is not the brief of Arizona’s “Task Force on Fair Justice for All.”

Sexual Solicitation, Assault Alleged by Texas Officials Michael Honeycutt and Tiffany Bredfeldt in Contradictory Testimony to the Arizona Superior Court, Implicating a Tucson Man Who’s Been Falsely Accused for 11 Years: ILLEGAL GAG ORDER GUTTED; “WOMEN’S LAW,” TCEQ DISCREDITED

This post, published on the first day of the year, was updated on July 9, 2018 (reflected in the new title), and content that had been unlawfully censored by the court has been restored. A recent respondent to this blog commented, “I think these injunctions violate the Constitution.” Despite the baggy parameters dictated by the law, it’s certain that many are impeachable as unconstitutional. The saga that follows relates the story of such an injunction. Readers merely interested in learning what unscrupulous plaintiffs can get away with (again and again for years) may skip the preamble and gain a clear picture by contrasting various sworn and unsworn statements by two such plaintiffs, who are quoted verbatim. Other quotations show how a witness, Michael Honeycutt, was induced to give misleading testimony, besides how willing attorneys may be to steer the court amiss…for the right price.


Michael Honeycutt TCEQ, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt EPA, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt EPA, Bredfeldt TG, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Science Advisory Board, SAB, EPA Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee

Texas state toxicologists and newly appointed EPA reps Michael Honeycutt and Tiffany Bredfeldt gave testimony before an Arizona Superior Court judge in 2013 that succeeded in persuading the judge to issue an unconstitutional speech injunction against the writer. The court was told the writer had “propositioned” Bredfeldt (a married woman) in 2005, “wouldn’t take no for an answer,” and “had been harassing her ever since.” Honeycutt, who has never met the writer, recited this secondhand story with the same smug complacency that marks his expression above. Based on the fiction’s effectiveness, four additional legal actions were brought against the writer in 2016, two of which menaced him with the threat of incarceration for exercising his freedom of speech. One of the actions was aborted; two were dismissed. Despite an appeal in 2017, the 2013 gag order, which the writer was alleged in 2016 to have “continuously and contemptuously violated,” remained in effect until July 2018, when it was gutted. All charges brought against the writer in the past decade have been invalidated.

Numerous accounts related on this blog since its launch six years ago have contrasted what he said with what she said in testimony given under penalty of perjury. The account this post relates doesn’t have to. It contrasts what she said here with what she said there—and with what her statured witness said she said. Statements that should harmonize, conflict.

A lesson of what this post unfolds, valuable for anybody to learn who has been wronged by a judge and isn’t sure if s/he’s “allowed” to talk about it, is that when people get away with something in a courtroom, which is a public forum, that in no way immunizes them from being exposed for it in a different public forum (for example, Facebook, Twitter, a personal blog, or one sponsored by The Washington Post). The only legal surety against criticism in this country is square conduct. While a court can lawfully issue a restraining order that prohibits unwanted speech to someone (like phone calls or emails), it cannot lawfully prohibit unwanted speech about anyone. Critical speech directed to the world at large, however objectionable it may be to those it names, whether private individuals, public officials, or judges, is protected speech as long as it isn’t false or threatening (and opinions are sacrosanct); the Constitution doesn’t favor any citizen over another, nor does it distinguish between bloggers, pamphleteers, or picketers and the institutional press. The aegis of the First Amendment doesn’t even require that criticism be deserved. In this instance, however, blamelessness is a nonissue.

Eugene Volokh, First Amendment, freedom of speech, The Volokh ConspiracyThis post discredits a widely championed arena of law, as well as how it’s administered. Linked audio clips of one trial judge will make a seasoned courtroom veteran flinch; those of another, a presiding municipal court magistrate, acknowledge frankly that restraining orders “are abused,” no question, and that “people come in and…say things that are just blatantly false” but are “never…charge[d],” let alone prosecuted.

The post also discredits accusations made by a woman (women, in fact) against a man. To some, this will be its most compelling virtue. Men have traditionally been the butt of abused and abusive procedures, and by far continue to be their most populous feedstock. Assertions that men are “presumed guilty” and unfairly “demonized” are not exaggerations and never have been, contrary to the pajama punditry of demagogues like David Futrelle, Mari Brighe, Amanda Marcotte, and Lindy West, who would smother even the most righteous motives for male contempt beneath the blanket label “misogynist.”

Fixation on gender politics, though, has obscured from view that injustice has been legislated into the law and fortified by decades of accustomed application (albeit that politics is the reason why). Today women—straight, gay, or otherwise—enjoy no greater safety from accusation and arbitrary violations of their civil rights than men do (in drive-thru procedures promoted as “female-empowering”), and women too may be accused by women (including their own mothers, sisters, daughters, and neighbors—which is a predictable consequence when accusation is tolerated as a recreational sport). Law that mocks due process and facilitates and rewards its own abuse is iniquitous, period. What this post reveals, importantly and inescapably, is that how many people choose to understand accusation, court process, and their repercussions is deplorably simplistic. Among these many are most politicians, academics, journalists, and social justice activists.

Eugene Volokh, First Amendment, freedom of speech, The Volokh ConspiracyThe Tucson man in the title of the post is also its author, and there was a time, within his memory, when to allege sexual impropriety without urgent grounds would have stirred outrage, because such an accusation is always damaging. In the climate that has prevailed since the advent of the Violence Against Women Act, however, the female plaintiff who doesn’t allege sexual violation, or at least trespass, squanders invaluable leverage. To a potently shrill sector of the community, this represents social progress. It has made pollution de rigueur.

Inaugurating the task of restoring a site inspired by the tenacity of false accusations like those exposed below, this post breaks a year-and-a-half-long silence coerced from the site’s owner by a series of lawsuits, which included two that demanded that he be jailed for exercising his First Amendment rights. The principal complainant, Tiffany Bredfeldt, an official at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), has repeatedly alleged to the Arizona Superior Court that the writer’s criticisms of her honesty, ethics, and character are untrue. Bredfeldt told the court in 2016 that the “ongoing fear, stress, and associated physical impacts” the writer’s criticisms had caused her “have been a decision factor as to whether or not [she has] children.” She also reported she has “talked to more people at police departments, sheriffs’ departments, and federal and state agencies than [she] can count,” and urged the court to impose “significant consequences” to bring her relief from a “continual rollercoaster of fear.”

Judge Richard Gordon, Pima County Superior Court

I am not going to hold him in contempt for talking about his case,” Pima County Superior Court Judge Richard Gordon pronounced in response to a 2016 complaint that demanded the writer be jailed for doing exactly that. Also commendably, the judge granted the writer a court-appointed attorney without reservation. Disagreeing, however, that the law authorized him to revise or dissolve an illegal prior restraint entered against the writer in 2013, the judge instead delimited its vague and overbroad proscriptions. The writer continued to be (1) forbidden from publishing images of the plaintiffs on this site; (2) forbidden from using “[meta] tags” with their names to label images or contents of posts, supposedly elevating them in Google’s returns for certain search terms thereby; (3) forbidden from “repeating” three “specific statements” that, absent a jury opinion, the 2013 court deemed “defamatory”—only two of which the writer may have made, both concerning honesty; and (4) forbidden from contacting the plaintiffs, Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt, the former’s employers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or “their friends, their acquaintances, or their family.” The writer’s own friends and family are among Tiffany Bredfeldt’s acquaintances, and who else may be is impossible for the writer to know, which underscores the recklessness of the 2013 order Judge Gordon construed rather than vacated. That order’s prohibitions, which were substantially narrowed in July of this year, could have been interpreted very differently by another judge at any time for the rest of the writer’s life.

Bredfeldt sued the writer in 2013, neither for the first time nor the last. Michael Honeycutt, to whom the writer had communicated his criticisms of Bredfeldt’s conduct by letter two years before, served her as a witness—telephonically, from the comfort of his desk chair in Texas. Honeycutt is Bredfeldt’s boss at the TCEQ and an old hand at testifying; his bio [deleted from the Internet since this publication] boasts that he has testified before Congress. His role in accusing the writer, who in 2013 had already grappled with crippling allegations for seven years, was to ensure that he would live with them indefinitely—and it’s unlikely that Honeycutt acted without the full approval and support of the TCEQ’s administration.

The upshot of the 2013 prosecution, in which the writer represented himself, was that Bredfeldt was granted an unconstitutional restraining order that prohibited the writer from publishing anything about her “to anybody, in any way, oral, written or web-based” by the judge whose words appear a few times in the transcript excerpts that follow. That Pima County Superior Court judge, Carmine Cornelio, is a judge no longer. In June of 2016, 84% of an Arizona Commission on Judicial Performance Review panel concluded he did not meet standards. The judge declined to face voters that fall, and his tenure on the bench terminated two months later.

(The no-confidence rating returned against Judge Cornelio in 2016 followed reprimands by the Arizona Supreme Court in 2010 and 2013 for the judge’s saying “fuck you” to an attorney during a settlement conference, causing a 19-year-old girl to cry during a different one, and gesturing accusatorily at a female court employee in public, among other alleged acts of “abusive conduct.” In a guest column in the Arizona Daily Star, Judge Cornelio wrote, “I leave with head held high….” He told the same paper in an interview that he “intends to go into private practice in alternative dispute resolution.” Judges of the Arizona Superior Court are paid $145,000 a year, and a proposal has been tabled to raise their salaries to $160,000.)

The speech injunction Judge Cornelio imposed on this writer in 2013, which the judge made permanent without bothering with a trial, was affirmed in 2016 by a second Pima County Superior Court judge, Richard Gordon, despite Judge Gordon’s having acknowledged in open court that the conduct of the 2013 proceedings was “not legal” and that the prior restraint that issued from them offended the Constitution. “There are obviously some parts that are just too broad and then don’t make a whole lot of sense,” Judge Gordon conceded in court in July. In his subsequent Sept. 2016 ruling, little trace of this acknowledgment survives. The writer’s father died a month after the ruling was returned. More than a year has transpired since (and, as the U.S. Supreme Court has held, “[t]he loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury”).

An appeal of the 2016 ruling to the Arizona Court of Appeals’ Second Division was denied in December (five months after it was filed). The court—consisting of Judge Philip Espinosa, Judge Christopher Staring, and Judge Sean Brearcliffedeclined to address the prior restraint’s unconstitutionality and sidestepped use of the phrase prior restraint entirely:

[T]he issue before us is not whether the injunction is constitutionally permissible, but whether the [2016] trial court properly refused to modify or dissolve it.

The appeals court, whose decision may have been influenced by a case narrative that this post will show is false, did acknowledge that “[a]t least one provision of the [2013] injunction would appear clearly unconstitutional, ordering that ‘[t]he defendant…immediately cease and desist all future publications on his website or otherwise.’” The word publication means any act of public speech. This provision, which was dissolved in July of this year, accordingly prohibited the writer from, for example, finishing a Ph.D., addressing the city council, marketing a book, or defending himself in a courtroom, all of which require publication. Also accordingly, courts have consistently found prior restraints facially invalid, even ones far less vague and overbroad than the one issued against the writer, and such orders have been vacated as much as 30 years later, which the writer’s attorney informed the appellate judges by brief and in oral argument. This was unremarked in their Dec. 18, 2017 ruling.

Eugene Volokh, free speech, First Amendment

UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, addressing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on June 20

Unlike in 2013 (and previously), the writer wasn’t alone in court in 2016 or 2017. His defense was aided by two gifted lawyers representing the Pima County Legal Defender: Kristine Alger, who drafted and orally augmented a faultless appeal, and Kent F. Davis, whose zealous advocacy made an appeal possible in the first place. Their arguments were what’s more reinforced by no lesser light than Eugene Volokh, who’s distinguished as one of the country’s foremost authorities on First Amendment law and who, in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Phoenix attorney Eric M. Fraser, graciously submitted an amicus brief to the court on the writer’s behalf. Alison Boaz of the UCLA School of Law, who assisted Prof. Volokh, is also due credit. A win in the appellate court would have been much more theirs than this writer’s, and they have the writer’s thanks for their Herculean exertions.

(It’s conceivable that a legal critique of the matter may one day appear on The Volokh Conspiracy, which is listed by the ABA Journal in its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame.”)

Exemplifying the importance of the First Amendment, this post will illuminate how trial courts are manipulated into forming bad conclusions by lowering its beam into the crevices to rest on those who do the manipulating.

A byproduct of the writer’s representation in 2016 and 2017 was access to courtroom transcripts, so the post won’t offer much in the way of opinion. Commentary can be denied. Testimony given under oath…cannot be.


Dr. Tiffany Bredfeldt, on cross-examination by the writer in 2013

Dr. Michael Honeycutt, on cross-examination by the writer in 2013

Based on nothing more than the two statements quoted above, a precocious child would wrinkle her nose. Yet such obvious contradictions have inspired no judge to arch an eyebrow nor any Ph.D. to scruple. In over 11 years.

Calling someone a liar risks being sued, and trial judges interpret whatever they want however they want. They’re acutely aware, moreover, of which direction their criteria are supposed to skew when abuse is alleged. This remark cannot be called defamatory: Although this post isn’t about air or water pollution, as would befit one that quotes environmental scientists, it does concern filth.

Cheryl Lyn Walker PhD, Cheryl Walker PhD, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas A&M University Health Science Center, TAMHSC, Institute of Biosciences and Technology

Director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences and Technology Cheryl Lyn Walker, remarks by whom were used in evidence against the writer in 2013 and 2016

It relates sworn testimony to the Arizona Superior Court by two representatives of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), reportedly the second largest agency of its kind after the EPA. Those public sector scientists are Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., the TCEQ’s toxicology director and an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University, who was recently entrusted with a role in forming national health policy, and one of Honeycutt’s protégés, senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt, who’s also a Ph.D. and who had already been entrusted with a role in forming national health policy. On April 4, 2017, the TCEQ tweeted its congratulations to Bredfeldt for her being selected to serve on the Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, which her boss now chairs. The bio of Bredfeldt’s associated with her appointment highlights her experience as an “expert witness.” This merits note, as does Honeycutt’s superior claim to the same distinction.

A second Texas A&M professor, Dr. Cheryl Lyn Walker, Ph.D., who was Bredfeldt’s postdoc adviser at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, has been aware of the conduct of Bredfeldt’s detailed in this post for a decade. Appeals by this writer to Walker’s conscience and integrity only inspired her to tell Bredfeldt in a 2008 email: “I am very concerned about your safety.” Bredfeldt entered Walker’s email in evidence against the writer in 2013 and also quoted it to the court in 2016.

Authorial intrusions in the survey of statements to follow will be terse. Bredfeldt and her witnesses will do the preponderant storytelling.

Tiffany Bredfeldt, romancing the camera in 2005

Some orienting details are required. The writer encountered Bredfeldt, then a doctoral student in the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, at his home in late summer 2005 and met with her there routinely over the ensuing months, mostly after dark. Bredfeldt, otherwise a stranger, declined to mention to the writer that she was married while, for example, taunting him for not inviting her in at midnight: “Where I come from, it’s considered rude not to at least invite a person onto your porch.” Then she disappeared, providing no explanation. A few months after that, when the writer sought one, Bredfeldt variously reported to the police and numerous courts—in statements that remain public in perpetuity and that are not deemed defamatory—that the writer had made unwelcome sexual advances toward her, despite being repeatedly “rebuff[ed]” and “rebuked”; that he posed a violent danger to her and to assorted others she was concerned the writer would talk to about her conduct at his home (among them her mother, who lived 1,200 miles away); that he should be prohibited from possessing firearms; and that he had stalked her, a woman the writer had only ever met hanging around his yard like a stray cat.

Here’s Bredfeldt’s account in her own words to Judge Jack Peyton on April 10, 2006:

Okay, I’ll begin by defining my relationship, um, with Mr. Greene. I met Mr. Greene in about September or October of 2005 when I was boarding a horse that I own at a boarding facility owned by his family. At that time, uh, we were acquaintances, and we spent time talking and — at his family barn. And that’s about the nature of our — our interaction. During that time, I think, um, he developed maybe romantic feelings for me that — that made me uncomfortable, and I generally would rebuff his advances, asking him to stop.

Mrs. Bredfeldt, whom the writer knew for three months and with whom he has had no contact since March 2006, has along with one of two or three girlfriends of hers who were also routinely around the writer’s residence in 2005 sued the writer some six times. Four legal actions were brought against the writer in 2016 alone, two of which sought his incarceration and all of which endeavored to suppress what this post relates. In a “Victim’s Impact Statement” Bredfeldt submitted to the court in 2016, she owned 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”—including the Arizona Dept. of Public Safety and the FBI—and it’s this writer’s belief that only with the blind support of loyalists like Mike Honeycutt would Bredfeldt have been so emboldened.

attorney Beth E. Maultsby, attorney Kathryn Flowers Samler, high-conflict litigants, high-conflict people, high-conflict litigation, false testimony, lying in courtThe legal onslaught has spanned (and consumed) almost 12 years, despite the writer’s appealing to dozens of people to look between the lines, including Honeycutt, who’s notably a husband with two college-aged sons. Honeycutt is besides a distinguished scientist, cited for his rigorous investigative standards, whose testimony quoted immediately below includes the statements, “I didn’t ask for details” and “I didn’t clarify that.” As a departmental director of the TCEQ, Honeycutt is paid $137,000 per. The writer, in contrast, has for the past decade earned a subsistence wage doing manual jobs that allow him to keep an insomniac’s hours and be left alone—formerly in the company of his dog, his dearest friend, who died suddenly in 2015 while the writer was still daily distracted with trying to clear his name and recover time and opportunities that had been stolen from them. (Here is a letter the writer hired an attorney to prepare in 2009. Bredfeldt represented it to the court in 2013 as evidence of harassment, and testified she believed her “psychiatric prognosis” would improve if such speech were restrained. “One of the most difficult parts of dealing with something, since this is profoundly stressful,” she told the court, “is that the stress doesn’t go away.”) The writer had aspired to be a commercial author of humor for kids, as Bredfeldt knew, and had labored toward realizing his ambition for many years before encountering her and her cronies on his doorstep. His manuscripts have since only gathered dust.

(A further counterpoint: The first public official the writer notified of Bredfeldt’s conduct, who also took no heed, was University of Arizona Dean of Pharmacy J. Lyle Bootman, Ph.D. A decade later, Bootman was charged with raping and beating an unconscious woman in his home. For almost two years following his indictment in 2015, while free on his own recognizance, Bootman faced trial—a fundamental due process right this writer was denied in 2013. Despite having been placed on administrative leave, Bootman continued to draw a faculty salary of over $250,000 from the U of A, the writer’s alma mater and former place of employ. As a graduate teaching assistant in the English Dept. in the late ’90s, the writer cleared about $200 a week. While he awaited a ruling in Greene v. Bredfeldt, the appeal of the last of the lawsuits brought against him during the same period of time by Bredfeldt and a cohort of hers, the five felony charges against Bootman were dropped. A tort case based on the same facts continues. Bootman’s attorneys filed for a protective order in December to bar public access to records.)

In an interview that aired in 2017, Tiffany Bredfeldt, the writer’s accuser, reassured the audience of ABC News that it could place its trust in the TCEQ. Bredfeldt made a similar pitch before the National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2013. Bredfeldt, who the court was told in 2013 and 2016 is not a public official, has repeatedly appeared as the face of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Her attorneys have argued that since she isn’t a public official, she isn’t obligated by law to prove her allegation that objectionable statements by this writer are false and therefore unprotected speech. Her boss, Michael Honeycutt, told the court in 2013: “Tiffany is just like the other 14 employees that I have.” If no other assertions by the TCEQ cause Texans concern, that one should.

This post’s presentation is simple: It juxtaposes contradictory statements that span seven years (2006–2013), most of them made under oath and all of them made by state scientists. (Those in small print may be enlarged in a new tab by clicking on them, or magnification of the entire post may be increased by pressing [CTRL] or [COMMAND, the cloverleaf-shaped key on Macs] + [+]. Zoom may be reversed similarly: [CTRL] or [COMMAND] + [-].) Scrutiny of the quotations below may lead the reader to conclude they’re evidence of false reporting, perjury, subornation of perjury, stalking, harassment, mobbing (including attorney-complicit abuse of process and civil conspiracy), defamation, bureaucratic negligence, professional incompetence, mental derangement, and/or general depravity.

The writer will let the facts speak for themselves.

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Honeycutt testifies in 2013 that Bredfeldt told him the writer “propositioned” her in 2005, which to him, he says, “would mean ask[ed] for sex.”

Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, would follow up on Honeycutt’s testimony by beginning his cross-examination of the writer with a jab instead of a question: “She says you propositioned her.” The writer replied, “What does that mean?” Marks chirped, “That you offered her sex.” Bredfeldt, while gazing around the room at her audience, nodded solemnly.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in an email to the writer sent Friday, March 17, 2006, that she entered into evidence three days later (Monday, March 20, 2006) along with her petition for restraining order number one:

Bredfeldt states in this self-contradictory email, which she would submit days later in evidence to the court in the 2006 procedure that began the controversy, that the writer had been “nice” to her and that she had never felt the need” to “explain” to him she was married, because her husband had come to the writer’s place of residence “a number of times,” and she thought the writer already knew and besidesviewed [her] strictly as a social friend.” Contrast Honeycutt’s 2013 testimony: “[S]he said that he propositioned her.

On April 10, 2006, not a month after Bredfeldt sent this email, she would testify before a judge (in her husband’s presence) that she had had to repeatedly “rebuff…advances” by the writer in 2005. The writer was identified to the court not as a considerate “friend” but as an “acquaintance” with whom Bredfeldt had “interact[ed].” Ten years later, the husband the writer was supposed to have known about, a geoscientist today employed by Weston Solutions as a project manager, would be asked in court on direct examination by his lawyer, “Do you know the defendant, Todd Greene?” Philip Bredfeldt’s answer: “I never met him….” Then Mr. Bredfeldt would clarify to the 2016 court that he “first came to know about the [writer] in early 2006,” that is, the same week his wife sent this email, during which the writer was alleged to have sent her a “series of disturbing emails” and “packages,” a fiction that by itself would take another entire post to unweave. Significantly, Phil Bredfeldt had no idea the writer existed until 2006 and, according to his 2016 testimony, was not informed by his wife of any sexual aggression toward her in 2005—nor was anybody else, for example, the writer’s mother, who was daily at the property where the writer lives from morning till dusk, and whom Bredfeldt knew and spoke with routinely. (The writer’s mother was then in treatment for cancer, a fact Bredfeldt exploited to flaunt her knowledge of the disease, which was a subject of her dissertation research.) Where Phil Bredfeldt was while his wife was outside of the writer’s residence at 1 a.m.—and with whom—has never been clarified.

Honeycutt, in a 2013 quotation below, will testify in further contrast to Bredfeldt’s statements in this email that he was told the writer’s behavior in 2005 was “erratic and bizarre” and that he “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in a statement to the University of Arizona Police Dept. given on March 18, 2006 (the next day):

Bredfeldt, in contrast to her emailed statements to the writer 24 hours prior (and in contrast to her subsequent testimony to the court in 2006 and both hers and Honeycutt’s in 2013), reports to the police that the writer had made “a romantic advance” toward her in 2005, inspiring her to admit to him she was married, after which he desisted. Bredfeldt then says the writer seized her cell phone, copied down her number, and contacted her. Bredfeldt’s work and home addresses and telephone numbers were publicly listed, and the writer never spoke with Bredfeldt on the phone. There was no need; she could be found outside of his residence most nights, as often as not in a red tank top.

On the single occasion the writer had handled Bredfeldt’s cell phone, borrowing it because his phone had been destroyed by a power surge, Bredfeldt had insisted on typing the numbers for him before sliding the phone into his palm and caressing his fingers (repeatedly). That was in late Nov. 2005 after she and a friend of hers had invited themselves into the writer’s house. Bredfeldt’s “chaperone,” a stranger then calling herself Jenn Oas, began conversation by telling the writer she had just returned from India where she “mostly” hadn’t worn a bra. Bredfeldt chimed in with a quip about “granny panties” (after having excused herself and returned wearing freshly applied eye makeup, complaining that she had “misplaced” her glasses). A couple of weeks later, Bredfeldt would vanish.

(Flash-forward: The policewoman who instructed Bredfeldt how to obtain a court-ordered injunction, Bethany Wilson, is today a librarian in charge of kid lit—what the writer had aspired in 2006 to make his profession.)

TIFFANY (AND PHIL) BREDFELDT, in a sworn affidavit to Judge Roger Duncan (then a pro tem) filed on March 20, 2006 (two days later):

Bredfeldt urgently petitions a protective order tailored to prohibit the writer (three days earlier called a “friend” who had been “nice” to her) from having any contact with her husband, Phil, a stranger, who is alleged to be in violent “danger.”

Later the same day, the writer would be sent an email, ostensibly by Phil Bredfeldt, that begins, “STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY WIFE, YOU SICK FUCK,” and ends, “THIS IS THE LAST TIME YOU WILL BE TOLD.

(The Bredfeldts simultaneously sent the email to UAPD Officer Bethany Wilson, with whom she later told the writer they had been on the phone at the time. Officer Wilson, who had met both of them, opined during a 2006 interview with the writer that Mrs. Bredfeldt “wore the pants.”)

Judge Jack Peyton, JP, Justice of the Peace, Pima County Justice Court

Judge Jack Peyton

The evidence of harassment Tiffany Bredfeldt presented to the court was five emails she and the writer had exchanged over a weekend (March 16–20): two from her, three from him in reply. The March 17 email of hers shown above was shuffled to the back of the sheaf, out of chronological order, causing the judge who presided over the writer’s April 10, 2006 hearing, Pima County Justice of the Peace Jack Peyton, to remark, “I don’t think I have a copy,” and then to ask, “Am I missing one [of the emails]?” Bredfeldt had to include the contradictory email among her evidence, which was never anyhow scrutinized, because it contained one of the only two requests she had ever made to the writer not to contact her: “I hope that you will respect my request for no further communication.” The other request was in an email she had sent him 20 hours earlier, in which Bredfeldt had represented the writer to himself as a stalker after he had gently tried to learn the motives for her behaviors at his home and her concealment from him that she was married. Judge Peyton confirmed with Bredfeldt that the minimum qualification demanded by the law, namely, two requests for no contact, had been met. The writer need not have been present.

Alleged on March 20 to be in danger of violent assault, Phil Bredfeldt had to be repeatedly reprimanded for displays of temper in open court three weeks later. Judge Peyton finally told him, after ordering his name stricken from his wife’s protective order:

I won’t think twice about asking you to leave the courtroom, because you’re not a party. You are welcome to be here. This is a public forum. But I won’t have you interrupting, and I will not have you making me uncomfortable about what your next action might be.

The judge, reputed to be the go-to JP for women alleging abuse by men, nevertheless cemented the protective order against the writer, explaining: “I do not get the impression that [Mr. Bredfeldt] was placed on that order by design.

(The following year, Judge Peyton was appointed to head a county domestic violence specialty court, which was financed by a $350,000 gubernatorial grant that included no budgetary allowance for defense attorneys. The judge, a onetime Maryland labor lawyer d/b/a J. Craig Peyton, underwent a “five-day domestic violence training session” in preparation. Reportedly operating only two days a week, his court has since processed well upwards of 25,000 cases.)

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013 (seven years later):

In contrast to her statements to the police in 2006, Bredfeldt testifies in 2013 that she never told the writer she was married. What Bredfeldt told the writer in 2005 was that she lived with a dog. The writer asked if it was alone at night while she was with him. Bredfeldt answered, “Yes.” The writer urged her to bring the dog with her so it wasn’t by itself and gave her a toy to take home.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013 (the same afternoon):

Also contradicting her statements to the police in 2006 (besides controverting what her first witness, Honeycutt, told the court in 2013 that she had told him), Bredfeldt testifies (in the presence of her husband) that the writer made “three attempts to kiss [her]” in 2005—which made her “uncomfortable” but not so uncomfortable as to prompt her to tell the writer she was married (or to tell her husband that another man had repeatedly tried to kiss her). Then Bredfeldt denies she has “ever” accused the writer of sexual harassment.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, in a memorandum to Superior Court Judge Charles Harrington filed July 30, 2006:

In a “Statement of Factsto the court, contradicting her statements to the police (besides to the writer himself, which emailed statements she submitted to the court in 2006, 2013, and 2016), Bredfeldt alleges the writer made “several physical, romantic advances toward [her],” despite being “rebuked,” and that she was forced to flee[w]hen such advances continued.”

There were no physical advances. Bredfeldt was invited to have Thanksgiving dinner with the writer’s family in 2005. Instead of telling the writer she had a husband to get home to, she said she was suffering from a migraine. The writer put his hand on her shoulder and said he hoped she felt better. All other physical contacts between Bredfeldt and the writer, clasps and caresses, were initiated by her, typically during conversations in which she pointedly referred to breasts, bras, or panties, her naked body, striptease, or the like. At the conclusion of an earlier meeting in November, Bredfeldt had thrust her face in the writer’s and wagged it back and forth as if to tease a kiss. The writer didn’t respond, because there was nothing romantic about it. That was on the night Bredfeldt returned after attending an out-of-state wedding—her sister-in-law’s (Sara Bredfeldt’s), a detail she omitted mentioning.

A month later, on the evening before Bredfeldt “left the horse boarding facility” (in 2005 not 2006), the writer encountered her loitering in the dark outside of his house—alone. Bredfeldt returned a coffeemaker she had borrowed from him to prepare poultices for her horse’s abscessed leg. During the transfer, Bredfeldt tried to brush the writer’s hands with hers. Bredfeldt and the writer spoke as usual—he remembers talking to her about shooting stars—and the writer’s mother briefly joined them and invited Bredfeldt to a Christmas party. Bredfeldt removed her horse the next day while the writer was at work.

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, during cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Bredfeldt testifies on examination by the judge that she has only ever told police officers and judges that the writer “act[ed] in a way that was sexual toward [her].” She “communicated with him that that was not what [she] wanted in the most respectful way that [she] could,” she says, which did not include either informing the writer she was married or wearing her wedding ring.

JENNIFER (OAS-)TERPSTRA, Bredfeldt’s other witness in 2013, a former colleague of hers from her University of Arizona days who went by Jenn Oas when the writer was introduced to her in 2005, in an email to the writer sent April 2, 2012 (a year earlier):

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

This and the rest of Terpstra’s some two dozen emails to the writer in 2012 have been submitted to the court in multiple cases and are public documents accessible to anyone. Whether the emails have ever been scrutinized by a judge is uncertain. No trial has been conducted since the writer was granted a 20-minute audience before a judge in 2006. The 2013 proceeding from which the focal testimony in this post is drawn was a two-hour “preliminary” hearing. Judge Carmine Cornelio, though he drew the case out for half a year and returned several scalding rulings, found a two-hour hearing to be a sufficient basis for indefinitely depriving the writer of his First Amendment privileges. (When the writer had begun to object in open court to an order that was flagrantly unlawful, the judge threatened to summon security. Among the Arizona Court of Appeals’ stated reasons for denying the writer’s 2017 appeal of the order was that the writer had not “challenged” the judge’s ruling at the time.)

In this email, Terpstra tells the writer she was “stalked [f]or over 8 years [f]rom state to state.” Both Bredfeldt and Terpstra have claimed to be victims of multiple stalkers—including this writer. Bredfeldt, who the writer would be informed four years later has held a black belt in tae kwon do since her teens, came to the writer’s door in 2005 seeking his protection from some “men in a van” who she said had been “stalking” her while she was alone in the dark outside of his residence. Narratives of the “event,” which was unwitnessed and may have had no basis in reality, were circulated by Bredfeldt among other horse boarders on the property where the writer lives. The writer bought a wireless doorbell and installed it by the gate to his yard so that Bredfeldt could summon him quickly in case of a “recurrence.” When he showed it to her, she smiled.

A few months subsequent, when Bredfeldt’s accusations against the writer began, she was reported to have told colleagues that she thought she had seen him around her residence—and at workday’s end would ask to be escorted to her car. In testimony to the court quoted in a postscript to this exposé, Honeycutt, Bredfeldt’s first witness in 2013, says the TCEQ rewarded similar expressions of fear from her by providing her with a private office (“with hard walls and with a door that has a lock on it” in Texas).

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent April 2, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC, Carlotta Groves PhD, Carlotta Groves DVM

In this email, sent a year before Terpstra would join Bredfeldt in testifying against the writer, Terpstra says that she “never thought [Bredfeldt] would lie so seriously to everyone” and that she knew Bredfeldt and the writer had been “close,” which remark alone contradicts everything Bredfeldt has told the court in the past decade. Terpstra also says she feels professionally “vulnerable” confiding in the writer but that he “deserve[s] to know the truth.” She suggests the writer “bring a pen and a notebook” to a meeting she proposed so that he doesn’t forget anything.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 3, 2012 (a month and a half after the two met for coffee):

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Terpstra told the writer over coffee in mid-April 2012 (when his father and his best friend were still alive, and a settlement could have reversed their decline) that Bredfeldt’s spouse, Phil, was known in their circle as “the phantom husband” and that Bredfeldt had urged her friends to go to the writer’s home to “check [him] out”—besides routinely talked about the writer to an audience of “25 or 30 people” at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy.

Terpstra says in this email that Bredfeldt never talked about her husband and that she (Terpstra) wasn’t sure she had ever seen the man in person or only seen what she had described to the writer over coffee as a laminated newspaper clipping with a picture of him that was tacked to Bredfeldt’s refrigerator. Terpstra says that based on Bredfeldt’s behaviors in 2005, she judged she had been “considering an affair” with the writer, which wildly contradicts any account Bredfeldt has ever related to anybody.

In the first of the emails Terpstra sent him in 2012, she explained her six-year delay in confiding this to the writer by saying, “I don’t lie or bend the truth [but] I do avoid conflict.”

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on direct examination by Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, on May 20, 2013 (less than a year later):

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent April 1, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

In this email, Terpstra tells the writer she had asked Bredfeldt “to just have the restraining order removed” in 2006. (Terpstra would tell the writer the same thing over coffee a couple of weeks later, saying Bredfeldt had answered, “‘No.’ Just…‘no.’”) In contrast to Terpstra’s statements in this email and the others she sent him in 2012, besides in contrast to an email she sent him in 2007, Terpstra would report to Officer Nicole Britt of the Tucson Police Dept. in 2015 that “in 2005 she and her friend [Tiffany Bredfeldt] met [Todd Greene]. He then became fixated on the two of them and began stalking them.” (According to the same interview notes, Terpstra said this blog was “set up in honor” of her and “dedicated” to her.) A couple of months later (early 2016), Terpstra would report to TPD Det. Todd Schladweiler, who is assigned to the Tucson Police Mental Health Support Team, that she “now carries a handgun due to her concern that [Greene] is a threat to her safety.” Det. Schladweiler also recorded that Terpstra “said she communicated with [Greene] a few times [in 2012] and then he became very sexual in nature” and that Terpstra denied contacting the writer after they met for coffee in mid-April 2012, following which meeting she had insisted the writer give her a hug and then emailed and phoned him for a quarter of a year.

Then students in the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, Terpstra and Bredfeldt told the writer in 2005, after inviting themselves into his house, that they took “benzos” to relieve stress. The writer asked where they got the drugs. Terpstra (who would marry a former bartender with a cocaine conviction not long afterwards and be charged with DUI in 2011) answered, “From work.” Bredfeldt echoed, “From work.”

Terpstra, who is reportedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, told Det. Schladweiler she believed the writer was mentally ill. Although Det. Schladweiler was provided with Terpstra’s emails when he arrested the writer on Jan. 5, 2016, the subsequent synopsis of their interview gives no indication the detective spared the emails a glance.

Less than four months after her second police report, in which Terpstra alleged she feared for her safety and was carrying a gun, she would have her home address forwarded to the writer by email in the first of a spate of “copyright infringement” claims that represented her third legal action against him in 2016 and that succeeded in having this blog temporarily suspended by its host. The writer contested the claims, alleging perjury and fraud, and Terpstra declined to litigate them in court.

Terpstra, who has coauthored with Dr. Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, is the daughter of feminist painter Joan Bemel Iron Moccasin (Oas) and was employed as a research specialist in the University of Arizona College of Medicine under psychiatrist Francisco Moreno until 2016, when, after making her sundry false allegations, she left the jurisdiction.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Over coffee with the writer in 2012, Terpstra complained of financial problems. She also remarked, “Tiffany’s dad has a lot of money.” Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt’s was a mutually prosperous union of two wealthy, fundamentalist Christian families. Phil Bredfeldt’s father was his best man in 2001; his sister Sara was a bridesmaid; and Tiffany Bredfeldt’s brother, Jon Hargis, was a groomsman. Four years later, Sara Bredfeldt was married to a medical student, Roberto “Bobby” Rojas, who is today an M.D. (Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee).

Ray Bredfeldt MD, Raymond Bredfeldt MD, Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, ABCBSTiffany Bredfeldt’s father, Timothy “Tim” Hargis, is or was a bank vice president (First Security of Arkansas), as was his father before him. Phil Bredfeldt’s father, Raymond “Ray” Bredfeldt, is a family physician who practiced privately and besides rented his credentials to Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield for some dozen years. The starting salary for an ABCBS regional medical director is today around $180,000. Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, M.D., had volunteered to join Terpstra in giving witness testimony in 2016 that was meant to induce the court to jail the writer while the writer’s own father, who didn’t graduate from high school, lay dying—in a home in foreclosure. Ray and Ruth Bredfeldt and Tim and GaLyn Hargis have known of what this post details from the start and have temporized for over a decade rather than acknowledge any liability for their families’ ways. “It’s what people like that do,” Terpstra commented to the writer in 2012. (Testifying in 2016, while his father was nearby, Phil Bredfeldt acknowledged on the stand that he was very aware of Terpstra’s 2012 emails. He quoted a post about them. Construing his statements to the court, the only thing that disturbed him about the emails was their contents’ being public.)

The court was told on Dec. 21, 2016, that Terpstra, who was sued to have her evicted from her house the year before, had moved from Arizona to Texas, where Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt have resided since 2006 (in a house Terpstra told the writer that Tiffany Bredfeldt’s father had bought for them)—and the writer would be surprised if Terpstra’s legal representation in 2016 and 2017 cost her a penny.

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 7, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

JENNIFER TERPSTRA, in an email to the writer sent June 3, 2012:

Jennifer Terpstra, Jen J. Terpstra, Terpstra JJ, Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, Jenn Oas, South Texas College, STC

Jennifer Oas-Terpstra, whom the writer has met three times in his life and only once in the past decade (and with whom he has had no contact since 2012), brought three legal actions against him in 2016 that each sought to suppress the emails quoted above—emails that today implicate both Bredfeldt and her (and criminal statutes of limitation, like those for false reporting and forswearing, stop running when perpetrators are outside of the state’s boundaries). Terpstra’s actions included a criminal prosecution, dismissed seven months later, in which Bredfeldt was also named a plaintiff, and a restraining order identical to the one Bredfeldt petitioned in 2006, which had inspired this blog and inspired Terpstra to tell the writer in 2012: “I can’t even begin to imagine what the past years have been like for you.” Terpstra’s restraining order was dismissed 20 months later.

Here are the allegations Terpstra made in her affidavit. These ex parte allegations remain a public record indefinitely. Here, in contrast, is how “vindication” from them appears. The writer was told that this handwritten dismissal, which required eight months of appeals to obtain, exists as a piece of paper only and won’t be reflected in the digitized record. Judge Antonio Riojas, who granted the Aug. 25, 2017 dismissal, accordingly recommended that the writer “carry [it] with [him].” His clerk provided the writer with the yellow copy of the triplicate form, the one meant for the plaintiff, who never appeared in court and will never be criminally accountable for her false allegations to the police in 2015 and 2016.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Judge Riojas told the writer, “and I’ve never known a police [officer] or a prosecutor to charge someone for…false reports, no matter how blatant….” He added: “I wish they would, because I think people come in, and they say things that are just blatantly false—and lying.” A false or vexatious complainant “can keep filing as much as [s/he] wants,” Judge Riojas said (costing an attorney-represented defendant thousands of dollars a pop and his or her accuser nothing; application is free to all comers). “There is no mechanism to stop someone from filing these orders.” What may be worse, even a dismissed order, the judge explained, “can’t be expunged” (and anything may be alleged on a fill-in-the-blank civil injunction form, for example, rape, conspiracy to commit murder, or cross-dressing; whether heinous or merely humiliating, allegations that may be irrelevant to the approval of a keep-away order and/or that may never be litigated in court, let alone substantiated, will still be preserved indefinitely in the public record above a judge’s signature). Significantly, Judge Riojas, who is the presiding magistrate of the Tucson municipal court (and a member of the Arizona Judicial Council and the Task Force on Fair Justice for All), agreed that restraining orders were “abused”. Of that, he said, “[t]here’s no doubt.”

(In a given year, there are reportedly 5,000 active restraining orders in Tucson City Court, which recently added an annex dedicated to their administration exclusively—and the municipal court is just one of three courts in Tucson that issue such orders.)

Judge Wendy Million, Tucson City Court

Judge Wendy Million

The reason Judge Riojas had to dismiss the order against the writer, nine months after he requested his day in court, was that the writer had been denied his statutory right to a hearing by Judge Wendy Million, necessitating a lengthy appeal and her admonishment by Superior Court Judge Catherine Woods for abuse of discretion. (Among approximately 15 judges to have been exposed to some aspect of this matter, Judge Woods was the first to return a ruling clearly untainted by political motives, for which she has this defendant’s highest respect.) Judge Million, who twice continued the writer’s hearing until the injunction expired and then nominated the case a “dead file,” notably coordinates Tucson’s domestic violence court and is acknowledged as an editor of Arizona’s Domestic Violence and Protective Order Bench Book. Dismissal of the case was further delayed by Judge Cynthia Kuhn, who was first assigned to the writer’s superior court appeal. Judge Kuhn sua sponte (that is, without being asked) granted Terpstra’s attorney additional time to respond to the writer’s appellate memorandum—and then abruptly recused herself, citing an unspecified “conflict of interest” as the reason.

Terpstra, in the first of the 22 emails she sent him in 2012, had told the writer: “I have this deeply engrained distrust of the law and the courts and avoid them at all cost.” Besides witnessing against him in May 2013, accusing him to the police in Nov. 2015, petitioning a civil injunction and instigating a criminal prosecution a month after that, filing a second police report in Jan. 2016, and threatening to sue him in federal court for copyright infringement 14 weeks later, Terpstra was poised to witness against the writer all over again that summer in the lawsuit brought by Bredfeldt and her husband that demanded the writer be jailed for contempt of the 2013 prior restraint. In between, in 2014, Terpstra prosecuted her husband, alleging domestic violence. A relative of his, who afterwards wept, told the writer in 2016 that she believed the man was relentlessly provoked, which the writer finds more than credible. In a voicemail Terpstra left him in 2012 (in which she tacitly identifies Bredfeldt as a “crazy person” from the writer’s “life book”), Terpstra told the writer someone had “threatened to call the police on [her].” Later, by phone, she clarified that this was another man she had been corresponding with that year—who blamed her for a woman’s suicide.

Tucson attorney Chris Scileppi, attorney Christopher Scileppi

Attorney Christopher Scileppi

Bredfeldt and Terpstra, (carrion) birds of a feather, were represented by the same (criminal) attorney in 2016 and 2017, Christopher “Chris” Scileppi, whose plumage is no different from theirs. Scileppi attained minor notoriety in 2008 for having been given a hug by his “very close friend” the mayor in front of jurors at a rape trial in which Scileppi represented one of the alleged rapists of a 15-year-old girl. Scileppi remarked to the outraged judge: “Courtrooms are open to the public, and I don’t think it is inappropriate when high-profile people come in and show support for somebody who is on trial.” Scileppi’s client was cut free, but the mayor later did a stint in prison for public corruption despite Scileppi’s representation.

Showing the same unscrupulousness during hearings in the 2016 civil case, Bredfeldt v. Greene, Scileppi threatened in open court to prosecute the writer for purported felony crimes (“extortion” and “aggravated harassment,” specifically) to intimidate him into capitulating to Bredfeldt’s censorship demands, then offered to drop the lawsuit if the writer agreed to leave this site invisible to the public and accessible by request only (apparently because his clients’ fear would be eased if they didn’t know what was on the writer’s mind), and finally, as a Parthian shot, directed the judge to jail the writer for the nonpayment of a $350 sanction from 2013 (explained below): “Put him in contempt,” Scileppi said, “and somebody can post a bond and pay that and then he will be released as soon as that bond is posted….

Tucson attorney Chris Scileppi, attorney Christopher ScileppiScileppi, who was suspended for 60 days and placed on six months’ probation in 2014 for violating various ethical rules (ERs), endeavored to convince the 2016 court that the writer had “terrorize[d], demonize[d], harass[ed], and defame[d]” the Bredfeldts, in particular through the use of “[meta] tags” on this blog, that is, keywords that describe its contents. These terms, which haven’t been used by any major search engine in eight years, were alleged to have hijacked the Bredfeldts’ public images on Google and to have “contact[ed]” anyone whose name appeared among them. Because a Google Alert Phil Bredfeldt had “set up” had allegedly been triggered by tags on the blog (in publications to the world at large), that was said to represent illicit “communication [and] contactby the writer with Mr. Bredfeldt and his wife. Scileppi enlisted an information technology expert, “part-time professor” and (criminal) attorney Brian Chase, to loosely substantiate this theory on the stand. Lamely objecting to an eminent constitutional scholar’s weighing in as an amicus curiae (Latin for “friend of the court”), Scileppi also defended the 2013 prior restraint last year before the Arizona Court of Appeals. He told the court that the writer was the liar.

Jeffrey “25% OFF ALL MONTH LONG” Marks, the low-rent opportunist who represented Tiffany Bredfeldt in 2010 and 2013, and is quoted below, represented her in 2016, also, but was hastily replaced after the writer was granted a court-appointed lawyer of his own. Marks, like his replacement, Scileppi, attempted to induce the court to stifle even third-party criticism of Bredfeldt, for example, that of Georgia entrepreneur Matthew Chan, who (aided by Prof. Eugene Volokh) successfully appealed a prior restraint in 2015 in his state’s supreme court and who introduced the writer to the finer points of First Amendment law.

To explain away Terpstra’s emails to the writer in 2012 and the contradictory testimony she gave a year later, Scileppi told Judge Catherine Woods in 2017 that “[i]n the midst of Greene’s harassment of Dr. Bredfeldt, [Terpstra] reached out to Greene and met with him. Through meeting with Greene, Terpstra became privy to his harassment of Dr. Bredfeldt.” In contrast to Scileppi’s claims, which Judge Woods shrewdly disregarded, Terpstra had offered to help the writer settle the conflict with Bredfeldt in 2012 (three months after Terpstra “reached out to [the writer] and met with him”). In an email Terpstra sent the writer on July 18 of that year (the first of four she sent that day), she wrote: “Maybe I can be a go between if the pastor [Jeremy Cheezum, a brother-in-law of Phil Bredfeldt’s] will not. I told Tiffany we met for coffee.” The email ended, “Hoping for the best.” That was the last day the writer heard from Terpstra, who is notably the mother of two college-aged daughters. Desperate to raise money to secure a surgery for his dog to enable her to run and jump again—something else Terpstra had said she was eager to help him accomplish—the writer scarcely gave Terpstra another thought until she appeared as a surprise witness 10 months later and deceived the court for Bredfeldt.

The other friend of Bredfeldt’s the writer met at his home in 2005, Dr. Carlotta Groves, a reported recipient of $740,000 in scientific research grants who uses the alias “Jahchannah” and identifies herself as a “Black Hebrew Israelite” and “servant of Yah,” lives in Arizona but apparently couldn’t be persuaded to give witness testimony for Bredfeldt in either 2013 or 2016. Like Terpstra did in the first of her emails to the writer in 2012, Groves told him in a blog comment around the same time that her own brother had been falsely accused. Terpstra said her brother had been falsely accused of rape and that it had “truly ruined his life.” For 12 years, Groves has done what Terpstra did for six: spectate. Groves, a DVM and a Ph.D. (who “love[s] to read and support aspiring authors!”), works at a low-cost veterinary clinic in Tucson.


Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt EPA, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee


TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

TIFFANY BREDFELDT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

JEFFREY MARKS, Bredfeldt’s attorney, speaking for her in a memorandum to the court filed July 10, 2013:

The difference between Bredfeldt’s attorney’s offhand estimation, “2005 or 2006,” was a year of this writer’s life (and his friends’ and his family’s). The year after the “genesis of this case” was one the writer spent every waking moment conscious he could be arrested without a warrant based on a further contrived allegation by Bredfeldt (in which case the writer’s dog, who was part Rottweiler and vigorously barked at any approaching stranger, could easily have been shot and killed).

Contrary to Marks’s claim, Bredfeldt employed others to tend to her horse’s daily hygiene in 2005. Within six or seven weeks of her installing her horse 30′ from the writer’s residence, it became lame and could not even be ridden, after which Bredfeldt increased the frequency of her nighttime visits.

Karin Huffer PhD, Legal Abuse Syndrome, legal abuse, LASMarks, who boasts of having served as a superior court judge himself, also tells the court in this memorandum, which was captioned, “Plaintiffs’ Response to Defendant’s ‘Chronology of Tiffany Bredfeldt’s 2006 Frauds,’” that “[e]ven assuming arguendo that Plaintiff Tiffany Bredfeldt is a chronic liar, her veracity is totally irrelevant to the necessity to restrain Defendant’s [speech] conduct.” Marks moved the 2013 court to strike the writer’s “scandalous” chronology from the record so that it couldn’t be accessed by the public. The judge, Carmine Cornelio, complied, rebuked the writer, and sanctioned him $350 for filing the brief, despite having invited him to: “Mr. Greene,” the judge had said in open court, “you can file anything you want.” Then the judge permanently prohibited the writer from telling anyone else what that chronology related—including by word of mouth. Bredfeldt’s handmaidens, Honeycutt and Terpstra, said exactly what they knew they should to inspire the illegal injunction. The judge permanently prohibited the writer from talking about them, also, including by reporting the testimony they gave in a public proceeding in the United States of America.

(Last year, two days before the writer’s attorney would file an appeal reminding an American court that citizens of this country enjoy freedom of speech, The New York Times published an editorial on censorship in China adapted from an essay by iconic artist and agitator Ai Weiwei. In it, Ai argues that censorship, an essential tool of oppression, does the opposite of pacify: It stimulates “behavior [that] can become wild, abnormal and violent.” Having to live with lies, as Ai told NPR in an interview in 2013, “is suffocating. It’s like bad air all the time.”)

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on cross-examination by the writer on May 20, 2013:

MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, on direct examination by Bredfeldt’s attorney, Jeffrey Marks, on May 20, 2013:

The testimony of “Where’s my mike?” Honeycutt exemplifies how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality responds to “pretty significant allegations” of ethical misconduct by its scientists: It ignores the allegations…and abets the misconduct.

Under Arizona law, a “false sworn statement in regard to a material issue” is perjury, a felony crime. Honeycutt influentially testified in 2013 that the writer had called Bredfeldt a “fraudulent scientist.” Here, in contrast, is what the writer told Honeycutt in 2011, in a letter that is today a public document.

L'Oreal Stepney, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, censorshipIn the Texas Observer the summer before last, Naveena Sadasivam reported that “Honeycutt sent at least 100 emails to state air pollution regulators, university professors and industry representatives and lawyers asking them to send the EPA a letter supporting his nomination to the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee….” Probably none of them sought to have him silenced on pain of imprisonment for requesting support. In a further instance of incandescent hypocrisy, Honeycutt is quoted in the story as pronouncing: “Ideology is different from science and data.” The reader is invited to consider which master Honeycutt was serving when he testified against this writer four and a half years ago.

After a hearing held on July 15, 2016, during which her husband had testified he was “frighten[ed],” Tiffany Bredfeldt swore in court, “God damn it,” because instead of ordering that the writer be jailed, the judge had stayed the proceedings pending further briefings from the attorneys on the First Amendment. Then, less than a year after the writer had buried his best friend and a few months before the writer’s father would succumb to cancer by starving to death, Bredfeldt laughed. She said Honeycutt had joked that her prosecution of the writer was “good experience” for when she gave expert witness testimony. “That’s something we have to do,” Bredfeldt explained to her entourage.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

DR. MICHAEL HONEYCUTT, PH.D.:

DR. TIFFANY BREDFELDT, PH.D.:

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


“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.

Copyright © 2017 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*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.

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

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.


Phil Bredfeldt, Philip Bredfeldt

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?

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*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?

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


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.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Why the Restraining Order Is the Perfect White Trash Instrument of Malice

People who exploit restraining orders are not necessarily victims, and they’re not necessarily the “good guys.”

This post will be brief. Its only ambition is to show why restraining orders present trashy people with the chance to commit malicious acts with far-reaching and permanent consequences—and to do it hands-free using our justice system as their bully agent.

  1. Restraining orders are cheap or totally free of charge (as the Office on Violence Against Women requires).
  2. They’re available to anyone and require no bona fides at all. Felons can obtain restraining orders just like anyone else. It has been reported on this site that restraining orders can even be procured under assumed names. No i.d. is necessarily required, because accusers are automatically “victims,” and the pretense is that victims never lie.
  3. Restraining orders are issued ex parte, which means “respondents” (defendants) don’t actually get to be “respondents” until after they’ve been judged and found guilty.
  4. Restraining orders can be petitioned from other counties or even other states…against total strangers.
  5. They’re often issued more or less automatically: Ask and you shall receive.
  6. Lies that aren’t successfully exposed in what may be a 10-minute follow-up hearing cannot be attacked in a collateral action. In other words, if lies work once, they work forever. Defendants cannot sue for perjury, and they cannot base an appeal to a higher court on allegations of perjury or fraud.
  7. Restraining orders, even if dismissed, remain public records, and the mere title of a restraining order is prejudicial if not damning. They blacken citizens’ names and cost them relationships, jobs, and even employability in some fields (which of course affects them psychologically and physically).
  8. Restraining orders, because they represent civil not criminal trespasses, can rarely be expunged. Their traces linger even if judges determined they were unfounded or petitioned fraudulently.
  9. People who lie to obtain restraining orders, including egregiously, are never prosecuted.

Now appreciate that on top of all of this, even if a defendant successfully has a fraudulent order that was petitioned by some lowlife dismissed, that lowlife is likely to be judgment-proof. That means even if the defendant sues him or her for malicious prosecution/abuse of process—a stressful six-month ordeal all by itself—s/he has no chance of realizing any compensation, because the lowlife has no money.

The restraining order is the ideal white trash tool of malice.

Copyright © 2016 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The author of this post attended a criminal arraignment this week. That’s where people who have been accused of crimes plead guilty or not guilty. The city prosecutor, in every instance, referred to accusers as “victims.”

How Restraining Order Fraud is Motivated and Concealed by VAWA and Its Advocates

The previous post, which highlights how fraudulent abuse of process is promoted and disguised, contains a link to a PDF prepared by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) called “Comparison of VAWA 1994, VAWA 2000 and VAWA 2005 Reauthorization Bill.”

The acronym VAWA stands for the federal Violence Against Women Act, which was ratified over 20 years ago (and has been repeatedly renewed). State police and judicial bias toward allegations of abuse has accordingly been conditioned with billions of dollars over decades and is today well-cemented.

Even a non-cynical critic would call the “justice system” owned.

Parsing the entirety of the NCADV’s PDF would be overkill. This post will examine a few quotations that illustrate how police, judicial, and prosecutorial conduct have been bought with inducements that are called “grants.

Grants from the Office on Violence Against Women for “Court Training and Improvements” (i.e., “training” or “educating” judges and court staff) have been discontinued under current legislation, possibly because it occurred to someone that “instructing” the court how it should rule sounds very like coercing verdicts. Procedural bias, however, has already been firmly rooted, and money to influence court process has merely been relabeled Grants to Support Families in the Justice System.

High school civics teachers tell us our government was set up so that its administrative, legislative, and judicial branches act independently to ensure that “checks and balances” prevent any one branch from acting tyrannically, and that state governments enjoy autonomy from the central government. What the quotations below show is how checks and balances can be worked around with cash.

 (VAWA 2000): “Amends Pro-arrest grants to expressly include enforcement of protection orders, and is designed to help state and tribal courts improve interstate enforcement of protection orders.”

This quotation means that money from the federal government is issued to state police departments to urge them to arrest people, including anyone who has purportedly violated a restraining order. If the petitioner of a restraining order reports a violation (real or not)—including a violation s/he has “arranged” (“Susie, I’ve reconsidered. Please come over so we can talk about this!”)—officers have been “incentivized” to haul the defendant in (according to their “judgment,” which has been influenced and can hardly be called fair and objective).

 (VAWA 2000): “Clarifies that as a condition of funding, recipients of STOP and Pro-Arrest grants must ensure filing and service of protection orders at no extra cost to the victim.”

This quotation “clarifies” that unless states allow restraining order petitioners to accuse people for free, they won’t get any money.

(VAWA 2005): “Requires law enforcement agencies and courts to enforce these orders.”

(VAWA 2005): “Prevents courts from publishing survivor information on the internet.”

These quotations explicitly say that state police and court policy has been dictated (i.e., cops and courts have been told how they’re “required” to act). Either they comply, or the money tap gets shut off. This may reasonably be called extortion or coercion.

(VAWA 2005): “Encourages protocols and training to avoid dual arrest.”

This quotation means if there are two complainants in a domestic spat, for example, only one should be arrested (and since this stipulation is eagerly reported by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, guess which member of a hetero couple the police are supposed to arrest).

(VAWA 2005): “Criminalizes stalking by surveillance.”

(VAWA 2005): “Expands the accountable harm to include substantial emotional harm to the victim.”

(VAWA 2005): “Expands minimum penalties of stalking if it occurs in violation of a protection order.”

These quotations mean that pretty much any alleged misconduct is punishable and dictates how it should be punished (at a minimum) if it reportedly occurs while a restraining order is in effect.

(VAWA 2005): “Permits LAV-funded attorneys to support victims’ dealings with the criminal justice system; but, does not permit funding to pay for prosecutorial or defense functions.”

This quotation says accusers (“victims”) may be provided with free legal services but that the accused must not be.

The themes in these few quotations indicate the pattern of the web:

  • Punishable conduct has been broadened to include almost anything that can be described as offensive by a plaintiff and/or a judge. In practice, this means any alleged conduct that allegedly causes a complainant to feel afraid.
  • Police and judges have been urged to act and to act without deliberation and bigotedly.
  • Accusers’ accountability has been minimized (and accusers are nominated “victims” or even “survivors” on no more ascertainable grounds than that they accused someone of violating them), while the accused’s accountability has been maximized to include permanent registration in public/police databases, ones that may specifically label them “stalkers” or “violent abusers.”
  • Free attorney services are granted to accusers but must be denied to the accused.

This web has been constructed methodically with billions of taxpayer dollars, and this money has gone not only to the police and the courts but to law schools and nonprofits (like the NCADV), and the latter may reciprocate by producing research papers; websites; and pamphlets, brochures, and posters that further bias the system as well as the public and their representatives, for example, journalists. (Grants from the National Institute of Justice may also be awarded to generate feminist “social science that’s used to “train” judges.) The federal government’s investment in favored nonprofits furthermore legitimates and empowers those nonprofits and thereby increases the donations they receive from the public. The Kayden Jayce Foundation (KJF), a nonprofit that acknowledged false accusation and focused on providing legal aid to low-income (non-white) families, applied for grant monies, was denied, and has since had to shutter its windows. So, too, have nonprofits that defend men’s rights—i.e., equal rights—been spurned. They’re on their own. Consequently, they can’t pay for teams of professional writers and web designers, etc., and receive little or no public assistance. They don’t have the cachet that only money can buy.

If all of this weren’t enough, rulings that nominate people “stalkers,” “batterers,” “child abusers,” or even “rapists” can legally be formed in 10 minutes or even by “default” (i.e., without ever having heard from a defendant at all). In some states (Arizona and Indiana are examples), three-minute ex parte rulings are final unless defendants apply to the court for the opportunity to be heard. Men and women may be accused from another state and never afforded a practicable chance to defend themselves against allegations that may be arrant lies and exercise dire effects on their lives (including loss of employment).

When complainants of procedural abuses speak of “conspiracy,” this is what they’re talking about…and they’re not wrong.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*For further insight, see “‘You have bullsh*t; we have research’: The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence v. Daddy Justice (Or, Why False Allegations Are a Serious Problem).”

Litigation Privilege: Why Restraining Order Fraud Is Pandered to and Why the Falsely Accused Are Denied Recourse to the Law for Vindication, Relief, and Recovery of Damages

“Fraud is deliberately deceiving someone else [including a judge] with the intent of causing damage.”

Cornell Legal Information Institute

“Generally, lying during trial (or any other part of litigation) is expected to come out at the time of trial. This means an action against someone for lying during a prior proceeding would fail because even lies are protected by the litigation privilege. You have to catch them at the time; you cannot attack them collaterally (in a different proceeding).”

Attorney Catherine Elizabeth Bennett

Here are examples of restraining order fraud and repeated abuse of process (others are here and here, and comments and posts on this site are replete with them).

Here is the obstacle to obtaining relief from fraud committed by restraining order petitioners that the falsely accused face no matter how high up the judicial chain they muster the fortitude to climb:

  1. So-called protective orders were designed to allow battered women to apply directly to a judge for relief from household violence and intimidation. Their origin harks back to the late ’70s/early ’80s. When these orders were conceived 30 or 40 years ago, domestic violence was hush-hush, and (actual) victims faced alienation from their families for airing dirty laundry in public and rocking the boat. They faced, as well, the possibility of their claims’ being discounted by police or even ridiculed (compounding their misery and humiliation). So the middlemen (i.e., cops and prosecutors) were cut out of the process. Thus could allegations be made and ruled upon in the absence of any investigation. It seemed a reasonable stopgap at the time. Over the decades since, despite radical changes in how claims of domestic violence are received by the public and law enforcement (due in no small part to the investment of billions of federal tax dollars), the standards for substantiating an assertion of victimhood remain lenient, while what qualifies as grounds for a court injunction has steadily broadened. People now get orders against their friends, lovers, neighbors, moms, dads, kids, etc., and violence need not even be alleged; some claim of apprehension usually suffices. The process has morphed from a life-preserver for battered women with no other way out of a hellish situation to a sop to satisfy any complainant who fills out an application. Court policy pretends that anybody who walks into a courthouse with a beef (real or not) deserves a private audience with a judge to shield him or her from the terrors of public scorn or disapproval from the cops. Anyone with an ax to grind, that is, is treated like a battered woman circa 1979. So institutionalized has the process become, and so profitable to so many (both financially and politically), that no one questions whether this is ethical. So the restraining order process has become a game, a game played according to anachronistic rules. Maximum latitude is given to anyone (no fee or i.d. required) to litigate any claims s/he wants in a backroom conference with a judge, and rulings are issued ex parte, which means the person who’s accused is prejudged sight unseen. The due process rights of the accused are scotched. Grants under the Violence Against Women Act will explicitly forbid the use of lie detectors. The dictate is purely rhetorical; it’s meant to stress that what a complainant alleges shouldn’t be doubted. This expectation extends to any petitioner. Hence judicial scrutiny is minimal, and judges may actually bristle when the falsely accused allege that petitioners are lying. This is called fair and just.
  2. The idea behind “litigation privilege,” which basically ensures that whatever a litigant or his or her attorney alleges is protected from liability (from charges of defamation, for example), is the same: Accusers need to feel secure to air “the facts” without fear of prosecution.

The protections sketched above were not put in place to defend the right of any fraudster to falsely allege anything off the top of his or her head against a target of malice in a court of law. Perjury, after all, is a statutory crime. Lying isn’t condoned by the law, but it is swallowed by cops and defended by judges.

They’ve had their priorities impressed upon them in no uncertain terms.

So emphatic is the priority to give accusers the benefit of the doubt that people who’ve been wrongly accused have little or no credibility with judges and absolutely no recourse to sue for damages caused by false allegations (to reputation, employment, enjoyment of life, and health). The court doesn’t recognize there are any damages to being falsely accused of stalking, for instance, or violent threat, sexual harassment, assault, or even rape. False accusations that are dismissed as baseless are harmful enough (the stresses they cause are beyond quantification). When false allegations stick, the guilt of the accused is presumed, and subsequent legal actions they may venture to undertake (lawsuits and appeals) may be summarily tossed for lacking merit. In contrast, the merit of rulings that are typically the products of procedures lasting mere minutes isn’t questioned. Some judges will even hold that accusations litigated in court can’t constitute perjury because of the “litigation privilege” (i.e., because they were uttered in court instead of on, say, Facebook or the radio, they can’t be lies).

Accusers (all of them identified with battered women of 1979) must be free to claim whatever they want without fear of risk or blame—that’s the overriding precept. Translated, this means the court’s position is that people must be allowed to lie and snooker the court as they choose…and anyone who’s lied about be damned.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*From “‘Out of Left Field’: The Litigation Privilege Defense to Adverse Party Suits” by attorney Keith A. Call (emphases added):

Despite some authority characterizing the litigation privilege as “absolute,” it is certainly not without limits. There are some claims for which the litigation privilege is usually not a defense. Such claims may include malicious prosecution, fraud, criminal perjury, suborning perjury, and professional discipline. See, e.g., Hagberg v. Cal. Fed. Bank FSB, 81 P.3d 244, 259 (Cal. 2004) (the litigation privilege “operates to bar civil liability for any tort claim based upon a privileged communication, with the exception of malicious prosecution”); Bushell v. Caterpillar, Inc., 683 N.E.2d 1286, 1289 (Ill. Ct. App. 1997) (litigation privilege does not provide immunity from criminal perjury); Hawkins v. Harris, 661 A.2d 284, 288 (N.J. 1995) (litigation privilege is not bar to professional discipline or criminal perjury); Dello Russo v. Nagel, 817 A.2d 426, 433 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2003) (litigation privilege does not insulate against malicious prosecution or professional discipline); N.Y. Cooling Towers, Inc. v. Goidel, 805 N.Y.S.2d 779, 783 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2005) (refusing to dismiss claims against adverse party’s attorney based on fraud and collusion); Clark v. Druckman, 624 S.E.2d 864, 870-72 (W. Va. Ct. App. 2005) (litigation privilege does not immunize attorney from claims of fraud or malicious conduct).

Low and Outside: An Umpire’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse (by an Underhand Screwball)

As the story in this post shows, the phrase “America’s Game” has taken on a new meaning.

The common assumption—one that’s been vigorously enforced by advocates of the “abuse industry”—is that restraining orders are used to protect “victims” from “abusers.” So-called abusers are represented as violent husbands or boyfriends, or as stalkers, representations that account for the ubiquity of restraining orders and the ease of their procurement.

The man whose story of restraining order abuse appears below reports that restraining orders can be obtained by drive-thru in his state (California), like milkshakes and onion rings.

The restraining order against this father and family man was petitioned by his sister-in-law on behalf of her son, his nephew. The man affronted his sister-in-law by umpiring two of her son’s games (his job), contrary to her wishes. That’s the basis of her complaint to the court.

Fighting that complaint has now cost the man and his family some $15,000 (besides money he would have earned as an umpire), and his life’s on hold while he awaits an appellate court ruling that won’t emerge for six to 24 months.

Here’s his story, as he tells it:

I am a victim of restraining order abuse.

At the age of 37, I married the love of my life. It wasn’t until after we were engaged that I found out that most of my wife’s family didn’t like me. This is the foundation of my story.

I am a little league, travel ball, and high school umpire. I umpire because I love the game and to make some additional money on the side. I have been umpiring baseball for close to 25 years without any incident whatsoever, and most reviews of my performance have been complimentary.

When my wife and I were married, we resided in Orange County, California. Our residence was far from the rest of her family, which limited our exposure to her parents and her sisters. My wife has two sisters, one older and one younger. Her elder sister is a lawyer, and her younger sister is a stay-at-home mom.

The eldest sister and her family and I have a great relationship. The problem is with the youngest sister, who is a control freak. She likes to control everything, including how many cups of coffee her husband has a day, and if she’s denied control, she will go to whatever lengths she has to to get it.

Two years or so ago, my wife was offered a job that would move us nearer to the younger sister. This was something that excited my wife, because she loves her family very much and wanted to be closer to her nieces and nephews. When she decided to take the job, she contacted her sister and told her the good news. Her sister was excited and worked with my wife to find a house that was near hers, and she found us a great one.

After moving in, we were visited quite frequently by my wife’s little sister and her family. Every time she visited, however, she pointedly let my wife know about her displeasure with the way we parented our eight-year-old little girl. As a stay-at-home mom whose entire existence revolves around her four kids, she has read every book on parenting and considers herself an expert in child-rearing. I had even caught her entering my house and administering medication to my daughter without our consent, which I firmly put a stop to.

Back to baseball.

After we moved, I enlisted with the local little league to umpire. I worked for a local umpire company that was very pleased with the service I provided to them. It considered me one of its better umpires. One day, I was assigned to umpire one of my wife’s younger sister’s kids’ games. I checked with the league to see if there was an issue and was told no and that it had people umpiring their relatives’ games all the time. Just be neutral, I was told, which I always am.

My wife’s younger sister found out that I was going to be umpiring her son’s game and called my wife to tell her to have me remove myself from the game. When asked why, she stated she just wanted to keep things separate. My wife didn’t understand why and told her to not worry, that I would not show any bias toward her kids and everything would be great. He sister repeated that she just wanted to keep things separate. My wife still didn’t understand why, because her son and I had a great relationship, with no problems at all. At this point, the woman became hysterical and said, “Keep your husband away from my son.” My wife got very upset and hung up on her. After that, we found out that the younger sister called the older sister and asked what she should do to repair things with my wife because she had upset her.

Well, because there was no good reason for my sister-in-law to be upset, and because the umpire company needed me to cover the game, I did. There was no issue with the game, and I received many compliments afterwards. I ended up working another one of my nephew’s games a couple of weeks later, again with no issues. The next week, I got a call from my umpire assignor reporting that my sister-in-law filed a complaint with the league saying her son was “uncomfortable” with my working behind the plate.

At that point, I banned her and her son from visiting my house. This really angered her and inspired her to get back at me.

Meanwhile, my assignor and I got together and agreed I should no longer work any of her kids’ games because she was clearly sick. So I was assigned to other games at the park that didn’t involve her kids.

This wasn’t acceptable to her. She didn’t want me at the fields at all. So she took pictures of me there on the days I was scheduled to work and created a story that involved my hunting and stalking her kids, and affecting their mental well-being.

She went to court and was granted an ex parte restraining order.

When I was served the restraining order, the deputy sheriff told me that he had read it and thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He said he had no idea why it was issued and told me to just stay away from my sister-in-law.

When the time came for me to appear in court to fight the order, I had an attorney and she did not. The judge clearly stated that he would not give her preferential treatment, even so.

This turned out to be completely false.

My attorney laid out a solid case to have the order dismissed, presenting facts that showed there was no proof of any stalking or harassment, and that up until the time of my sister-in-law’s going crazy, her kids and I had had a great relationship.

After about a two-hour hearing, the judge ruled against me. He stated that because my wife informed me that her younger sister had told her to keep me away from her kid that I was put on notice…yet persisted in showing up at the fields to work. Never mind that I was told two months after their conversation (my wife didn’t tell me right away because she thought it was just her sister acting crazy). The judge then went on to say that a mother had the right to determine who got to be around her kids and didn’t need a good reason.

Now since the restraining order was made permanent, my sister-in-law has been using it to harass me and my family.

She went to the elementary school and instructed staff there that I was only to be allowed to pick up and drop off my daughter, and she warned them that if I dared to attend any of my child’s awards ceremonies, school performances, science fairs, or other school functions, she would call the police and have me arrested. She has also been sending letters with false claims about police reports and bullying to the little league administration that regulates all of the local little leagues, and has effectively had me removed from umpiring any games at any of the area little leagues, even ones in which her kids don’t participate.

Her family has been following me and my daughter to public parks and then approaching me to tell me I am in violation of the restraining order. Also, they have changed their walking routes to school so they walk by me and my daughter, or by me as I walk home after taking my daughter to school, to accuse me of “pushing the envelope.” They constantly photograph me when I am waiting at school, and make up stories about me doing things to harass them or their kids.

We have filed a motion for a new trial with compelling evidence. It was denied by the same judge. We have also filed a motion to modify the order to allow me to attend my daughter’s school events since I am her primary caregiver while my wife is at work (I own my own business), and this too was denied, because the judge thought it would be too hard for the school and the police to enforce.

We have filed an appeal, and briefs have been submitted. We are currently waiting for the appellate court to consider the briefs and issue a ruling. We were informed that it can take anywhere from six months to two years for this to happen. Now we are investigating whether we have proper grounds to file a motion asking for expedition to move our case closer to the front of the queue.

To show you just how crazy this restraining order is, the local police department asked, when we dropped off our guns, what clown would sign such a stupid restraining order? They said they would hold our guns for as long as needed to get this thing appealed.

This is my story, which has been my life for a year…and counting.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*From “High Conflict Family Law Matters and Personality Disorders” by attorneys Beth E. Maultsby and Kathryn Flowers Samler:

high_conflict_indicators

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here: The Hell of Legal Abuse Syndrome

This is the third sequential post on this blog about Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition proposed by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer “that develops in individuals assaulted by ethical violations, legal abuses, betrayals, and fraud” and that’s exacerbated by “abuse of power and authority and a profound lack of accountability in our courts.” This post surveys accounts of affliction (and its sources) drawn from various websites.

abandon all hope
Editorial intrusions and commentary in this post have been kept to a minimum, but some grammatical polishing is acknowledged.

You May Be Suffering from Legal Abuse Syndrome if You Have Been a Victim of DCF”:

I have been doing some reading on LAS (Legal Abuse Syndrome) and PTSD since I have begun to fear my own shadow. I hate the doorbell to ring. I run to the window to try to see who it might be, and rarely answer. If someone knocks on the door with any force, I am paralyzed. I do not like to answer the phone and thank God for caller ID. When I go out of the house, heaven help me if I see a child who reminds me of what we have lost. I cannot tell you the number of times I have vomited in public toilets. A police car in the rearview mirror leads to deep breathing and panic attacks. The thought of walking into a courtroom is enough to reduce me to a shaking mess. Certain names…can cause me to feel a sense of violation like no other. Sleep rarely happens and is often interrupted by nightmares, or even worse, waking and screaming for my child. No one cares; all of those I thought would protect us have not only failed us but willingly allowed misconduct and lies. Those I held in high regard due to their positions of trust and power I have found to have let their power corrupt their values and morals. Do I think I am ill? Yes, I know I am. I have a good doctor who is trying to help, a church to support me, and my husband and children who have stood by me, but I also know I will never be the same person I was. I will never trust in the “system” and have been totally disillusioned by what I always thought were my constitutional rights as an American citizen not only being disregarded but willfully being trampled on by those sworn to protect them.

Sufferer Legal Abuse Syndrome” (MyPTSD.com):

I was just diagnosed with PTSD from a prolonged and nasty legal battle (10 years). It was my understanding that PTSD was only for vets coming back from war. I guess there are other ways to fight wars. Mine was in the courtroom trying to fight off the onslaught of unethical attorneys and judges. I believe I fought for a good cause, but it has taken its toll on me. My nerves are shot; I have anxiety from the minute I wake up until I go to bed. Thoughts of what they did and the power they had over me and my children are with me always. I want to have a life, but I still deal with the consequences every day. I feel guilty for feeling this way as there are so many other people who have been through much worse. I think the feeling of being powerless and abused by a system I had faith in has shaken my foundation. My feelings about people and the world have changed forever, and my trust level is very low. A psychologist involved in the battle betrayed me and my family with lies, along with two other professionals in this field, all my attorneys, and the judges. You might discount my viewpoint as overboard. It took a long time to see it myself, but my investigations proved correct.

Legal Abuse Syndrome” (Caught.net):

I became depressed, physically ill, and seriously suicidal after experiencing the insanity of litigation. I lost my home and was sent to the street with nothing but the clothes on my back. Literally everything I owned was gone for several years. I fought my fight to points of exhaustion where all I could do was stare into space. Friends had left; I was emotionally isolated, and normal living activities were no longer normal. Rage doesn’t come close to describing the feelings I lived with for years. Even this is not the full story of how bad it got.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Legal Abuse Syndrome”:

I was diagnosed about two years ago with LAS [Legal Abuse Syndrome]. Protracted litigation and corrupt court decisions not only exacerbated my fibromyalgia but caused me to begin a whole new set of debilitating symptoms which have rendered me unable to sleep properly, hold a job, succeed in relationships, enjoy life, maintain goals, dreams, and hope. I suffer from what I call “spinal cord attacks,” which feel like rushes of adrenaline or cortisol permeating my spine, making me feel paralyzed, causing severe pain, lasting for 30 seconds to two minutes, and resulting in complete exhaustion and distress.

My once beautiful life as a drama and music teacher, writer and producer of children’s musicals, and fledgling writer has all but vanished. I am so debilitated from extensive legal research, useless and destructive attorneys and judges, horrendous living conditions imposed upon me by corrupt judges who denied me due process, the loss of my beautiful family home to my ex (which I had been paying for but couldn’t qualify for), the purging of all my earthly belongings, a now transient lifestyle, and increasing medical problems like high blood pressure, anxiety attacks, and hopelessness.

Massachusetts Mother Calling for Family Court Justice in Domestic Abuse Cases”:

I have missed all of my three daughters’ birthdays, first days of school, first dances, holidays, vacations, and school volunteering since 2007. My youngest daughter, Kelly, is nine. That means I have already missed out on half her life. I am not a drug addict. I am not an alcoholic.  I was and still am an upstanding citizen in the community despite Attorney Arabasz and his clients’ attempts to cause deliberate and malicious harm to me. I do my best to volunteer in the community, including hospice and domestic abuse, and have won numerous awards for my volunteerism over the years, which tends to bring me a renewed sense of healing from my own traumas. My children and I cannot get back those formative years we have missed. They are gone forever, never to return.  I am speechless in my ability to describe the pain and anguish I feel over this injustice alone.

Over that time, as documented through the courts, I have endured numerous, repeated, serious abuses that I have come to the court pleading for help with to no avail.  I am a human being who can take being abused only for so long.  I have suffered serious, repeated, unrelenting, undue stresses, many of which are criminal in nature, that have caused health issues. When the trial arrived, I prayed and hoped for justice to finally prevail for the sake of my children.

I have been severed from my children’s lives with little to no contact since August 3, 2011, and even longer since September 2007. The verdict of August 2012 from the trial was devastating to me and I worried about the long-term negative impact it would have on my children….

As a result, I am currently being treated for ADHD, Legal Abuse Syndrome, and trauma-related stress, and my treatment since trial has increased. Symptoms of trauma-related stress include gastrointestinal issues; anxiety and fear, especially when exposed to situations reminding me of the many repeated traumatic events; trouble sleeping; trouble eating; low energy; memory problems, including difficulty remembering aspects of the trauma; a “scattered” feeling and inability to focus on work or daily activities;  emotional “numbness,” which causes me to feel withdrawn, disconnected, or different from others; and protectiveness of loved ones or fear for their safety.

I did not suffer any of these symptoms until after I married an abusive partner and endured years of abuse. I was a victim that the system failed to protect, and now I suffer greatly. I was a fantastic mother, and even the father never questioned my ability to care for or mother these children until he got what he wanted and stole financially through the divorce.  However, the system has stripped away all my ability to love, nurture, and parent my three daughters who need me greatly.

The foregoing first-person accounts are hardly comprehensive; they were culled because they’re evocative. Notably, they echo numerous comments submitted by visitors to this blog, who have reported everything from homelessness and hopelessness to living “like a hamster” to contemplating suicide. Many respondents to the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence” have reported the same.

The third-person account below, though it leaves the victim’s torment to the reader’s imagination, is certainly no less sympathetic than those above. It speaks, particularly, to how blind or indifferent others may be to the effects of legal abuse.

How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz”:

As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

This was a touching tribute: a collective effort to complete the task Swartz had tried—and many people felt died trying—to accomplish himself. But it is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

This survey concludes with an impersonal commentary from a woman who’s still embroiled in legal strife and fears the consequences of speaking about it too candidly in a public medium. She has removed herself to another state to escape a malicious accuser’s clutches but remains in the crosshairs, despite having been deprived of everything she once took for granted—including her sense of self.

‘White Collar’ Domestic Violence Sanctioned by the State”:

The fraudulently obtained protective order is the new tool of abuse for abusers to obtain total power and control over their victims. The protective order is obtained using false allegations of domestic violence and abuse against the victim in an open court of law without due process or an evidentiary hearing. The protective order is then used as a state-sanctioned license to stalk, harass, intimidate, and continue to abuse the victim. The victim lives in constant fear that s/he will be arrested and incarcerated any time the abuser chooses to place him or her in jail. The accuser plays the victim of his or her own crime [cf. Dr. Tara Palmatier’s “Presto, Change-o, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”].

This is the new “white collar” form of domestic violence and abuse. It is a tactic used by both men and women to gain the upper hand in a divorce or custody battle, or to have a domestic partner simply removed from a lease and ejected from his or her own home. In the case of a victim’s terrible misfortune of coupling with a psychopath or sociopath suffering from a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, the protective order is fraudulently obtained by means of false accusations of domestic abuse simply to gain total power and control over him or her while simultaneously inflicting emotional distress to hurt and humiliate him or her and publicly harm his or her reputation. This in and of itself allows the abuser to compromise the integrity of his or her victim with a permanent public record, thereby impugning the victim’s character. This not only serves to satisfy the malicious intent of the abuser; it also renders the victim helpless in any and all attempts to plead innocence and defend him- or herself to law enforcement and the courts.

Acts of malicious intent by way of falsifying police reports, manufacturing evidence, and committing perjury in a court of law—all crimes at a felony offense level—go criminally unprosecuted because restraining order courts are of a civil nature, held by low level officials with no due process. Any attempts by the victim to file complaints or police reports of his or her own are useless and futile attempts at self-protection, because probable cause cannot be proven; a victim simply cannot prove with tangible evidence the intent or motive of the abuser. All attempts by the victim to file complaints or police reports to protect him- or herself do is embolden and provoke the abuser to escalate the abusive behavior toward the victim to the point that the victim cannot attend school, go to work, or even leave his or her own home out of living in a constant state of fear that the abuser will have him or her arrested on a whim.

Without due process and without protection, the victim is ultimately under the total power and control of the abuser. Law enforcement and the legal system (the courts, the judges, the attorneys) are all simply pawns in the sociopath’s sick game of abuse of process. A carefully constructed web of lies is in itself so complex that the victim is powerless to prove s/he is the victim of abuse, not its perpetrator. Over time, after the victim is professionally and academically destroyed, publicly humiliated, and ultimately alienated and completely isolated from his or her community, from friends, and even from family, s/he begins to doubt him- or herself and eventually loses all sense of human identity. Many victims commit suicide as a result of the abuse.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*See also this post about the death of Christopher Mackney, which contains links to his suicide note: “First Amendment Rights from Beyond the Grave: Defense of a Suicide’s Publication of His Final Words by the Randazza Legal Group.” The circumstances that conduced to Mr. Mackney’s taking his life are chronicled in a forthcoming book by investigative journalist Michael Volpe, which is titled, Bullied to Death: The Chris Mackney Story.

Kangaroo Court: The Australian Government Acknowledges “Abuse of Process,” so Why Doesn’t Ours?

The previous post introduced Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS), a condition posited by marriage and family therapist Karin P. Huffer and defined as a form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “It is a personal injury that develops in individuals assaulted by ethical violations, legal abuses, betrayals, and fraud,” Dr. Huffer explains. “Abuse of power and authority and a profound lack of accountability in our courts have become rampant, compounding an already stressful experience.” This post catalogs types of legal abuse that exemplify the “ethical violations…betrayals, and fraud” to which Dr. Huffer refers.


Australians aren’t distinguished for their refinement. I like them, though.

Plenty have plainly spent too much time with the sheep—I think we have an Aussie to thank for the Creation Museum, which features dinosaurs cavorting in the Garden of Eden—but Australians tend to tell it straighter than Americans do; they’re frank.

Maybe it comes of living in an equatorial zone that forbids the Puritan dress code.

I learned last week that they have a “Law Reform Commission.” The Australian government, like governments everywhere else, may be slow to acknowledge abusive laws, but at least it acknowledges laws are abused.

In America, feminism (not the equity-for-all kind but the men-suck kind) holds sway. There’s no shortage of conscientious objectors who feel abuses of statutory processes that were conceived to curb violence against women are out of control, but their voices are effectively subdued. To express a quibble is to be immediately beset by frenzied piranha.

So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Australian Law Reform Commission openly acknowledges “false or misleading evidence about family violence” and “vexatious applications in protection order proceedings”—which it wouldn’t do if these violations weren’t a lot more common than Americans like to pretend they are.

(Vexatious, incidentally, means “intended to harass.” It’s a warm-and-fuzzy euphemism for intended to destroy.)

The commission predictably wimps out and concludes that “existing measures [in Australia] to sanction persons who give false evidence of family violence are sufficient,” but it does indicate that it finds “merit in allowing courts to order that a person who has brought several vexatious applications or cross applications for protection orders against the same person without reasonable grounds may not make further applications except with the leave of the court.”

This absurdly says that even if a person is repeatedly found to abuse process, the worst consequence s/he should face is having to ask special permission before doing it again. What makes the commission’s comments significant, however, is that they actually own that there are people who exploit court process to hurt others and that they may do it over and over.

In America, you’re not allowed to acknowledge this—or even to allege process is abused to any degree worthy of note. To criticize legal processes instituted to protect women means you think women are “disposable.” The indictment is a non sequitur, but it works. It shuts most politicians up. It shuts most professors and journalists up, too. Never mind that each of “several vexatious applications” for restraining orders or assertions of “false or misleading evidence about family violence” may (permanently) associate the accused with “stalking,” “violent threat,” “assault,” “child abuse,” “molestation,” or even “rape.” Remarkably, there are influential people who briskly opine in venerable media that being accused of these acts, including rape, is no big deal.

(What do you wanna bet it hasn’t happened to them?)

It’s a big enough deal that some people never recover, and some kill themselves (or others). Most survive and persist, but this isn’t the same thing as recovering; they may never be “whole” again. One false accusation that sticks can unravel a life…and the accusation doesn’t even have to stick.

Victims of legal abuse are said to be negligible by the political powers that be, however, because there are women who are battered or raped who never receive justice. Victims of legal abuse are called a “drop in the bucket” in contrast. This argument—ye olde non sequitur again—ignores (among a great many other considerations) that there are women who are battered and/or raped who are also then falsely accused by their batterers or rapists to compound the violation and conceal their crimes. In some cases, at least, feminists who deny legal abuse and its horrors abet batterers and rapists of women.

Completely lost on flatulent opinion-mongers, besides, is that falsely accusing someone of violence or one or more “violence-related” acts is an acutely personal attack that’s often committed by a trusted intimate or former intimate (a friend, for example, or a spouse, family member, or lover), and that judicial process is punishing even when no punishment is meted out. It’s dehumanizing. People’s dignity is violated, their credibility is compromised, their names are tarnished, and their trust is savaged. The scrutiny alone is traumatic—just the anticipation of it is. Regardless of the court’s judgment, an entire network of relationships may be trashed. Members become invested in one side or the other, and no one backs down. Even if the truth emerges and frauds are exposed, apologies and reconciliations may be rare and grudging.

It’s not called “adversarial process” for nothing.

Legal gamesmanship, what’s more, runs the gamut, and this, too, is significant among the Australian Law Reform Commission’s observations. It includes false or misleading accusations of violence, false petitions for state protection, false cross-petitions for protection, false claims made to have restraining orders changed or revoked, etc. (fraud here, fraud there, fraud everywhere). What no one in authority wants to concede is that if the laws make it easy and attractive to lie impulsively and hurtfully, people will lie impulsively and hurtfully.

One of my favorite phrases in the English language is shit for brains when it’s pronounced in an Australian accent. It never fails to make me smile.

What the Australian Law Reform Commission’s remarks make clear is that any shit for brains should recognize that a whole lot of fraud is committed in these volatile yet superficial court procedures that are often started and finished in minutes but whose consequences, irrespective of rulings, are nevertheless extensive, lasting, and crushing.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Even when They’re Right, They’re Wrong: A Female Author Agrees Domestic Violence Laws Are Exploited to “Set Up” Partners but Puts the Blame Squarely on Men

Since the publication of this post, the website it quotes has been deleted.


“Victims of these increasingly common set-ups face criminal charges alongside their emotionally depleting divorce and custody cases, which are, of course, by now stacked against them.”

—Former crime reporter Janie McQueen

The quotation above comes from the author of the book, Hanging on by My Fingernails: Surviving the New Divorce Gamesmanship, and How a Scratch Can Land You in Jail.

Perhaps you’re thinking: I can so identify with that—and perhaps you can identify with it. If you’re not a woman, though, you’re not supposed to. So stop it.

Yep, a female author (and journalist) acknowledges that lying to the court to gain the upper hand in divorce and custody cases occurs. In fact, she says it’s “increasingly common.” According to her, though, the culprits are violent men.

Ms. McQueen apparently aspires to upset the dogma while still keeping the faith: The system is abused, she emphasizes, but women are the victims, and men are the victimizers.

Evident without benefit of having read her book is that because Ms. McQueen alleges she was framed (and probably quotes other women who allege they were framed), “set-ups” of this sort are asserted to be “increasingly common.” They probably are—they’re reported here routinely—but never mind, apparently, that Ms. McQueen’s contention is exactly what men have been saying for, um, decades. Whether frame-ups are “increasingly” common or not, they are common, and they have been for a long time (and thanks to rhetoric that insists women are incapable of lying maliciously, the likelihood of their becoming increasingly “increasingly common” is strong).

Since I haven’t read Ms. McQueen’s book, fairness requires that I acknowledge her position may not be as chauvinistic as it sounds. Also, the book has apparently been in print for three years, and I just heard about it Monday, so I’d venture to guess that it hasn’t exerted a great deal of populist influence. For an audience sympathetic to feminism to concede that false allegations from men are rampant would be to invite speculation on how rampant false allegations from women are.

That, as they say, ain’t gonna happen.

I learned of Ms. McQueen’s book in an online column in Forbes by Jeff Landers, a “certified divorce financial analyst” and the founder of Bedrock Divorce Advisors, LLC, a “divorce financial advisory firm that works exclusively with women.” Mr. Landers is also the author of multiple books directed to a strictly female audience.

His representation of Ms. McQueen’s book, then, may be skewed to his marketing demographic. I can’t say. This, however, is a passage from Ms. McQueen’s book quoted in Mr. Landers’s column “How Some Men Are Upending Domestic Violence Laws to Scam an Advantage in Divorce” (the passage is from the book’s forward, which is penned by Chicago criminal defense attorney Tamara N. Holder):

Unfortunately, many abusive men have learned to reshape domestic violence laws into another weapon of abuse. They are turning police and court protections upside down: The abusers themselves call 9-1-1; they have the women arrested for domestic violence; and then they do everything they can to try to have the women prosecuted and sentenced. In this way, the true victim is painted as the abuser.

There is a deeper motivation in using this ploy; to show a pattern of “violent conduct” on the woman’s part so that the abuser can use it as evidence against her in a divorce or child custody battle. And this form of abuse is permanent. A bruise heals after a few days, but a conviction for a violent crime mars her record forever.

The set-up: A couple has a fight. Either the wife calls 9-1-1 in a desperate plea for police intervention, or the husband makes the call first in a preemptive attack. When the police arrive, the woman is visibly upset. The man, on the other hand, is extremely calm as he switches off his anger. The husband tells the police that his wife is delusional, crazy, and violent. Depending on how convincing the man’s story is to the police officer, and the state’s law on domestic violence, either both people are arrested or the woman is arrested.

In the case of a dual arrest, which some states discourage, the woman often tells prosecutors she doesn’t want to testify against her husband, so the case is dismissed. Meanwhile, the husband is determined that she be prosecuted. Instead of the prosecutors looking into the history of the relationship before proceeding with the criminal case, they move full speed ahead. The wife is usually cut off from her husband’s financial support so she cannot pay for defense against him. As a result, she is forced to take a plea to the charges because she cannot afford to defend herself. She fears taking the case to trial, losing, and going to jail.

Conclusory remarks will be brief. First, bravo to Ms. Holder (and Ms. McQueen) for a detailed articulation of a serious problem, one that founders lives. What’s described above certainly happens; don’t doubt it for a moment. Second, though, what impassioned subdual of the imagination is required for an intelligent person to believe this only happens to women? C’mon. (Not only does the same thing happen to men, but the presence of children in the relationship isn’t a necessary motivation.) Finally, mark this statement well: “And this form of abuse is permanent. A bruise heals after a few days, but a conviction for a violent crime mars [a] record forever.”

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Not All Feminists Are Women, but All Feminists Are Responsible for Why False Accusations Are Rampant and Why They Work

Feminist lobbying is to blame for the injustice of restraining order and related laws and policies. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

False accusations shouldn’t work, but they do—commonly, and not uncommonly to devastating effect.

That’s thanks to feminist crusaders, who may or may not represent Women, and who may or may not be women. This clarification isn’t intended for men who’ve been abused by court process; they don’t have any problem criticizing feminists, whatever form they come in.

Women, however, do—even women who’ve been abused by court process themselves. The clarification is for them.

Consider:

(1994) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence. May I forward our research findings to your office?”

(1998) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. I’m calling to share some more startling statistics about violence, violence, and more violence—also to tell you about the exciting progress we’ve made toward alerting the public to  the horrors of domestic abuse. Of course, nothing is ever enough when the stakes are this high!”

(2005) “Hi, Senator. This is Polly Wannacracker of COMA, the Consortium Opposing Male Aggression. How are you? How’s your wife? Oh, Bob, you kidder! We’ve so appreciated the support you’ve shown our cause over the years. Ha, you know me too well! Yes, I was of course calling to share some further startling statistics about violence, which, as you know, is epidemic, epidemic, epidemic….”

The allegory may be corny, but you get the point. This is how legislation is prompted, and support for it solidified and maintained. Names change; the message doesn’t.

Money has steadily aggregated to representatives of feminist causes over the decades, and this money has been used to secure public opinion through “information campaigns.” Too, it has inspired grant allocations to agencies of the justice system amounting to billions under the feminist motivated Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Federal grants are also issued to promote and fund social science that validates these expenditures and laws related to violence against women, including restraining order laws. Both money and this tailored research are used to influence police policy and condition judicial priorities.

Women, defensively, may deny that members of their sex instigate malicious prosecutions more often than men or to greater effect. Who lies and why doesn’t matter, though. Judges should be vigilant against false claims, which should be detected, dismissed, and punished. Judges aren’t vigilant, false claims aren’t detected, and their claimants aren’t sanctioned. Why?

Thanks to dogged and vehement feminist politicking for the past 30 years or more, standards for substantiating claims of abuse made by restraining order petitioners are none, and penalties for lying are none. That’s because (women, please note) if the law made the standards too demanding or it threatened penalties for iffy testimony—so the dated argument runs—abused women might be afraid to come forward. They would just “suffer in silence” instead.

To ensure abused women aren’t afraid to come forward—again, so the dated argument runs—allegations must be taken on faith, and judges must have complete latitude to rule as they “think best” to protect the interests of people who can’t protect themselves.

If all this wiggle room means some people (or a lot of people) get falsely implicated…so what?

Law follows politics, and the political fix has been in for a long time. It stays in, because the architecture of laws has been concrete-reinforced. Feminist advocates continue to “monitor public policy” and to maintain their painstakingly erected social webwork. They have the money to do it. Oppositional voices are neither bankrolled nor have any political cachet. They’re not just the underdogs; they’re the usual suspects.

The above makes the below possible (comment submitted to this blog a few days ago by “Rhonda Lynn”):

I’m going to court in a few hours. I haven’t slept or eaten, and I’m a wreck. My life is over. Today.

I fled a [domestic violence] situation in another state and moved back to Washington. I bounced around a bit and finally ended up renting a room. (I’m disabled, on Social Security.) Yes, Craigslist.

I felt I asked all the right questions: Are you married? Do you live on the property? Do you own the home? Who else lives there? Both [man and woman] were surprised to learn [I was disabled, because] the other tenants renting the room across from me were disabled, as well. The man of the [tenant] couple was deaf, and I know American Sign Language.

Upon moving in, I began noticing the lies being told. The disabled couple was made to turn over their food cards. They tried with me when I signed the month-to-month agreement. I, of course, declined.

I helped with the deaf man and his developmentally disabled woman, because the female “owner” (also a lie) was overwhelmed and claimed she was sick. I cooked and cleaned (28 loads of laundry, using the washer and dryer I brought from my previous residence). I paid for Thanksgiving dinner.

Then Hell came. A friend of the female claimed the “husband” had been coming on to her…long story. The next day, it was me! […] First she tells me to move out; then she’s my friend.

The exploitation of the couple continues. The sister of the deaf man calls me [and] then calls Adult Protective Services. I make a call as well. There is an active investigation.

Ready?

sign-languageThe police knock on my bedroom door and give me 10 minutes to get some clothes. The “husband-owner” filed a restraining order on me!

I had a couple stay overnight for a movie marathon the night before, so I had a bit of help. The female officer verified I had a lock for my room. She advised the petitioner no one was to enter my room. She had me turn over the house key. I was in shock, crying.

As we pull away, the “husband” sends me a voice recording…saying, “See…who got [who] out of whose house? I got you out of my house! Neener Neener.”

I called the police. No good. I am not the victim. I’m the perpetrator. While on the phone…two more [messages] telling me I’m not getting any more of my stuff back, can’t come back to the house…even with an officer. “You’re burnt bitch! If the police ask where’s your stuff, I’m gonna say I don’t know.”

Then, there’s the “order.” A Domestic Violence Protection Order!

The allegations, all false…and very damning: stealing his mail, opening it and not giving it to him, going in his wallet, taking his [Social Security] card and old i.d., shoving him into a wall, causing a bruise on his back, yelling at all hours of the day and night, causing such stress on the disabled couple that they can’t eat or sleep and have PTSD episodes, calling members of the house vulgar names, texting and calling everyone while they sleep, [threatening] to burn the house down, [warning] him not to sleep, because I’d kill him. [He alleges] he is in fear of his life, afraid to take a shower or come home.

Then, lastly, the night before (when I had company), [he says] I came at him with a kitchen knife as he was getting ready for work [and that] he tried to call the cops, and I took his cell phone away. Then gave it back that morning.

Oh, my lord!

They both went on my Facebook [page]. He called me a hooker, said I would sleep with any man, and called me a horrible name. I didn’t respond, of course. Then he said I do meth, [which] he knows because I lived with him and he cleaned my room and found pipes and bags. Then she responds and says…and rigs and baggies. Now we know [they say] why she cleaned, and it explains her treatment of us. He [wrote] in another post: “I just want everyone to know she does methamphetamines.” (He is in outpatient treatment.)

[…]

I call the police…to get my stuff. I left my daughter’s ashes and pictures.

They say, “How can you prove you live there? If he doesn’t say you live there, we won’t bust down the door.”

I’M GOING TO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE.
(BUT DON’T DRIVE AND NO BUS FARE)
PLEASE. HELP ME.
RHONDA

The reader may choose to indict the male accuser in Rhonda’s story instead of the apparatus he exploited because he could, or the reader may choose to indict the apparatus itself and those who inspired it, defend it, keep it well lubricated, profit from it, and convincingly deny it’s abused.

Neither position will help Rhonda, who may be broken forever (or until she finds a bridge), but one of them may eventually make it illegal for a life to be so viciously demeaned as hers has been.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Blinded by Science: Examining the Australian Government’s Sexual Assault Statistics to Expose How Such Science Is Derived, How It’s Applied, and Why It’s Not Really as Scientific as It’s Represented to Be

Here is the Australian government’s Institute of Family Studies’ sexual assault “Facts & Figures” page.

And here is the first thing it says: “Statistics carry significant power and persuasion.”

That’s putting it mildly. That power and that persuasion influence lives on a magnitude that no numbers could quantify. Appreciate that figures concerning sexual assault and how these figures are popularly exploited influence court rulings in all cases that touch on violence or the purported fear of it, including in civil and family court, cases based on allegations of harassment, stalking, child abuse, and/or domestic violence, among others.

You’ll encounter these statistics bruited ubiquitously on the Internet.

“Sexual assault statistics are based on two main types of data,” according to the Australian government website:

  • victimisation survey data—data collated from surveys conducted with individuals, asking them about their experiences of sexual assault victimisation, regardless of whether they have reported to police; and
  • administrative data—data extracted through the various systems that respond to sexual assault (e.g., police, courts, corrections or support services).

Important to note at the outset of this discussion is that statistics often quoted by advocates and commentators of one stripe or another (including journalists) may originate from survey responses, that is, from “intelligence” that may be unqualified by any corroborating investigation. Though this post looks at Australian statistics, figures cited as originating from the United States, for example, are derived the same way. When a statistic is phrased “[x number] of [men or women] report being the victim of [x],” that figure was derived from survey responses.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies draws its statistics from six national surveys. This number suggests scrupulous science, but no ascertainable accuracy can be ascribed to the raw data, which is anecdotal.

The 2012-13 Crime Victimisation Survey (CVS), for example, which is one of the six surveys from which the Australian government draws its statistics, is based on interview responses from one member (“selected at random”) of 30,749 “fully responding households,” that is, on the personal interpretations and alleged experiences of fewer than 31,000 people, a study sample that represents about a tenth of 1% of the Australian population. What percentage of this sample is male and what percentage female isn’t reported on the CVS webpage (though other surveys, like the Personal Safety Survey, do report gender-specific conclusions).

Survey-based statistics are among the sorts you’ll encounter broadly promulgated in feminist “fact sheets” and brochures—and consequently everywhere else.

Important to consider, furthermore, is that “administrative data” (police and court statistics), the second data set from which government figures are derived, may itself be influenced by the former sort of data. Survey responses, much touted, may exert either a direct influence on how officers of the law and courts are trained to respond to or interpret allegations, or they may exert a proximal influence by having inspired the direction of social science research that’s used for training. The former data, survey responses, may in other words determine the conclusions and actions of agents of the justice system to some degree, and possibly to a very considerable one.

“Statistics carry significant power and persuasion,” and neither police officers nor judges are any less susceptible to that power and persuasion than anyone else. In fact, they more than almost anyone else are required to absorb these statistics.

Granted, survey statistics are probably as comprehensive as it’s practical for them to be, and contrary statistics that these figures are rejoined with by advocates for disenfranchised groups like battered men may themselves be based on surveys of even smaller groups of people. All such studies are subject to sampling error, because there’s no practicable means to interview an entire population, and sampling error is hardly the only error inherent to such studies, which are based on reported facts that may be impossible to substantiate.

What must be appreciated in all of this is that what’s called “science” is far from certain and is no more verifiable or creditworthy than are responses to online petitions like this one: “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence.” Both types of data, that is, are anecdotal.

The significant difference is that respondents to petitions aren’t “randomly selected” or interviewed by trained questioners. There are no “controls.”

So-called controls, however, may themselves influence findings.

Government surveys are inherently biased insofar as their aim is to collect information according to specific questions. The questions determine the nature and bounds of the responses to them and are determined by designated topics of interest.

Petitions in contrast place no constraints on respondents’ comments—and indirectly garner uninhibited answers to questions like, “Have you or someone you know been the victim of fraudulent abuse of court or state process?”

They garner answers to questions, that is, that the government doesn’t care to ask.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Restraining Orders as “Revenge Porn”

In the second season of HBO’s The Newsroom, a lead character is exposed on a website called Revenge Porn by a man with whom she’d had a brief fling.

After sitting huddled in a corner and pronouncing, “I want to die,” she rallies and confronts her former lover while he’s conducting a business meeting. Without much prelude, she kicks him in the testicles and bloodies his nose.

It makes for engaging TV.

If only an ex-intimate’s exploitation of the legal equivalent of Revenge Porn could be so briskly requited and resolved.

What I’m referring to, of course, is treacherously defamatory representations to the court on a civil restraining order, representations intended to publicly humiliate and satisfy a scorned lover’s urge to wound. The restraining order is an invitation for the system to poke its nose into the crevices, one it’s glad to accept.

The TV show character wasn’t able to sue the man who betrayed her, because she posed for the pictures. She even bought the camera for him.

Had the man surreptitiously shot the photos and aired them without her consent, she could have taken him to the cleaners. The courts do more than frown upon that kind of thing, especially when the photos are nudies.

Non-photographic representations that use the justice system as their porn site, though, are embraced as compelling causes of action.

Stalking, indecent exposure, assault, child molestation, bestiality, rape—no pubic allegation, however scandalous, is off the table, and there are no consequences for falsely portraying someone as a lewd and lascivious beast. It’s not defamation; it’s testimony. This distinction sublimates obscene slanders and libels into protected speech, and denies defendants any recourse for realizing compensation for the damage they inflict, psychological, physical, financial, and material.

The court hosts the site, and judges, the site’s administrators, are only answerable to the law, which licenses the site.

This revenge porn is legal—and has the feminist stamp of approval.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Chicken Sh*t from Rotten Eggs: Rosemary’s Story of Restraining Order Abuse

The account below, by Rosemary Anderson of Australia, was submitted to the e-petition End Restraining Order Abuses (since terminated by its host) and is highlighted here to show (1) that restraining orders are abused not only by intimates but by neighbors and strangers, (2) that the ease with which they’re applied for entices vexatious litigants (especially once their appetite has been whetted), and (3) that restraining orders are abused in countries other than the United States.

Assuredly due to language barriers, most visitors to this blog are from predominately English-speaking countries (England, Canada, and Australia, in particular, among nations abroad), and for whatever reason, over 90% of visitors are American.

Foreign complainants of restraining order abuse, however, shouldn’t hesitate to report their stories and share their criticisms on blogs like this one or on petitions like the one Rosemary used, because the value of those stories and criticisms, ultimately, is to expose injustice. The civil restraining order is common to countries across the globe, as are its abuses.

Rosemary’s story (with minor editorial tweaks):

We have had several restraining order summons served upon us by our neighbours, and on one occasion a worker whom I had reported to police for exposing himself to me (evidenced in photos) tried to take a VRO out against my husband (VRO = violence restraining order). To date they haven’t gone the distance thanks to our lawyer, but we know they will never stop trying.

The allegations are false, though we admit to giving them the finger from time to time in retaliation for being abused or watched.

The matter began when we opposed the expansion of their egg farm. We did so through the appropriate channels and in the appropriate manner. They have a CCW on their property and for reasons unknown were allowed to build the egg farm far too close to our boundary and house.

Their settlement to buy their property went through in January (2011). Ours was delayed and went through in February. They keep telling people they were there and had already built and were running their egg farm before we bought our property. The egg farm did not end up how it was supposed to and has been poorly managed, creating unpleasant issues for us. To expand any farther, they need our property and have indicated they would like to purchase but are not willing to pay what it is worth.

Every time they are overstocked or doing something wrong, they will make some sort of false allegation against us, cost us thousands of dollars, and generally make our lives unpleasant. On one occasion, we had the police come out and accuse us of stealing their dog after we had to catch it to stop it from chasing our horses. On another occasion, they rang the ranger and accused us of shooting their dog after it had gone missing. It turned up two days later alive and well in the dog pound.

The woman is about the same age as me, in her 50s and supposedly religious. She married a disabled man, and she uses these things to gain sympathy. She will lie and first turn on the tears, and if that doesn’t work she will become aggressive and threaten, and get others to threaten.

She once threatened my employer to get me sacked. I had luckily recorded several previous incidents that proved to my boss the lies they tell. They once took us to court over the boundary fence even though we had evidence in the form of letters and photos. Miraculously they won as they brought the non-professional fencing person with them as a witness. We weren’t given the appropriate notice by the court of their witness and could have selected several witnesses of our own to prove the fencing contractor assisted our neighbours to make a false insurance claim. The summons for this also came 18 months after we had given them what we had considered an appropriate payment. They had cashed the cheque and never contacted us in between to dispute it.

I found the behaviour of the local magistrate and the local court registrar very suspicious, and seriously wonder if they are members of their church. I wish I had more time to explain. I have had people ring us on our silent phone number and abuse us as well as had threatening letters sent to our PO box and which also contained our pet names.

Rosemary’s accuser fits the profile of many others characterized by visitors who’ve left comments on this blog and is prototypical of the serial-accuser-cum-neighbor. Almost without exception, people like this are triggered by some petty grievance.

Restraining orders, because they’re issued on one party’s word alone, are addictive gateway drugs for vexatious litigants, who are induced to abuse process continuously once they see how conveniently it’s accomplished. There are no consequences for filing false or frivolous complaints. Not only do the courts never motivate serial accusers to stop; they often reward sniping and treachery.

It’s good for business.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Living in the Crosshairs: Crackpot Neighbors, False Reports, and Restraining Order Abuse

I bonded with a client recently while wrestling a tough job to conclusion. I’ll call him “Joe.” Joe and I were talking in his backyard, and he confided to me that his next-door neighbor was “crazy.” She’d reported him to the police “about a 100 times,” he said, including for listening to music after dark on his porch.

His neighbor had never been punished for her mischief, only indulged and rewarded. This is behavior the police and court have been conditioned to treat as urgent. The woman’s husband refused to participate in her sniping—but didn’t interfere with it, either. He had to live with her. Others in the vicinity just tried to stay off her radar.

The neighboring house was dim and still as Joe related the woman’s pranks, which spanned a period of years. “She’s probably listening to us now,” he remarked.

I commiserated but didn’t share with Joe that I wrote about such things and heard about them monthly from people whose lives were sometimes crippled by hyped allegations of fear and danger.

Joe told me, unsurprisingly, that his neighbor had twice sworn out restraining orders against him. The first was laughed out of court on appeal; the second he didn’t bother to contest. He gestured as if to say, “What would’ve been the point?” Maybe Joe intuited that high-conflict people like his neighbor live for strife and attention, and decided to deny her the satisfaction of a fight.

(Many respondents to this blog report they’ve had multiple false restraining orders petitioned against them. One e-petition respondent recently reported being the recipient of seven fraudulent restraining orders obtained by a “diagnosed narcissist.”)

Joe informed me, with a hint of sarcasm, that his neighbor was a professional psychic. Surveillance cameras nevertheless hung from the corners of her home’s roofline. I guess she couldn’t see everything coming.

(Among people who report being stalked or serially accused by neighbors through the courts, the presence of security cameras is commonly mentioned. The neighbors also tend to be of middle or advanced age and female—as are their victims, sometimes. One 60-year-old woman, chronically accused by a female neighbor, has reported having to abandon her house and flee to forestall further allegations. Men who are spies, peepers, and cranks are more likely to be the recipients of restraining orders than the petitioners of them: women accuse sooner than men do—and they do it more effectively.)

Joe didn’t get too explicit, but he told me he’d been photographed fooling around with his wife in the hot tub, which he’d since removed. In Arizona, at least, it’s apparently legal to monitor your neighbor over a bordering fence.

Joe said after he and his wife divorced, his neighbor told his ex-wife he was having an affair. He took in a male roommate. His neighbor photographed him, too—through the window adjacent to her backyard.

Joe shifted an arbor from one side of his patio to the other after getting approval (but no compensation) from the homeowners’ association. Two massive Tombstone rosebushes interwove to form a decent privacy screen.

I asked Joe whether he’d ever tried to get the woman off his back. He told me, unrepentant, that he’d once shot her with the garden hose while she was peeping. To this day, he says, she circulates it that he “assaulted her with a high-pressure hose.” He may have said this was the grounds for one of the restraining orders.

His neighbor has reported her other neighbors, too. The neighbor across the street knew of her particular “sensitivities” and informed her in advance that she was having a birthday party for her little girl at 2 in the afternoon on a weekend. The neighbor from hell reported it, anyway—on principle, I guess. The kids’ party was disrupted by cops.

Joe says his neighbor’s record is seven calls to the sheriff’s department in a single day (just on him). Deputies finally told her that if she called again, they’d cite her.

Joe works as a chef and didn’t appear to have any kids. With a few beers in him, he seemed to take the whole thing in stride.

I wonder if a feminist would be as tolerant.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

A Story of Female Sterilization That Should Stress to Those Who’ve Been Violated by Fraudulent Abuse of Legal Process Why Reporting Judicial Tyranny and False Accusers Is by Itself Pointless (You Must Demand Change)

The point of sharing the explication below is to emphasize how forlorn prospective recourses for redressing rights violations stemming from false restraining order and similar prosecutions are. Accountability is zero, across the board.

If you’ve ever wondered why a judge may be censured for rude conduct but not for ignoring lies or misrepresenting evidence, here’s why.

Quoted from “The Plumb Line: So What Else is New?” (Murray N. Rothbard, Libertarian Review, 1978), reprinted on LewRockwell.com as “The Tyranny of the Bench”:

The United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1872, that judges were immune from any damage suits for any “judicial acts” that they had performed—regardless of how wrong, evil, or unconstitutional those acts may have been. When clothed in judicial authority, judges can do no wrong. Period. Recently a case of an errant judge has come up again—because his action as a judge was considered generally to be monstrous and illegal. In 1971, Mrs. Ora Spitler McFarlin petitioned Judge Harold D. Stump of the DeKalb County, Indiana, Circuit Court to engage in a covert, compulsory sterilization of her 15-year-old daughter, Linda Kay Spitler. Although Linda was promoted each year with her class, Mrs. McFarlin opined that she was “somewhat retarded” and had begun to stay out overnight with older youths. And we all know what that can lead to.

Judge Stump quickly signed the order, and the judge and mamma hustled Linda into a hospital, telling her it was for an appendicitis operation. Linda was then sterilized without her knowledge. Two years later, Linda married a Leo Sparkman and discovered that she had been sterilized without her knowledge. The Sparkmans proceeded to sue mamma, mamma’s attorney, the doctors, the hospital, and Judge Stump, alleging a half-dozen constitutional violations.

All of these people, in truth, had grossly violated Linda’s rights and aggressed against her. All should have been made to pay, and pay dearly, for their monstrous offense. But the federal district court ruled otherwise. First, it ruled that mamma, her lawyer, and the various members of the “healing professions” were all immune because everything they did had received the sanction of a certified judge. And second, Judge Stump was also absolutely immune, because he had acted in his capacity as a judge, even though, the district court acknowledged, he had had “an erroneous view of the law.” So, not only is a judge immune, but he can confer his immunity in a king-like fashion even onto lowly civilians who surround him.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, unaccountably didn’t understand the program, and so it reversed the district court, claiming that Judge Stump had forfeited his immunity “because of his failure to comply with elementary principles of due process,” and had therefore in a sense “not acted within his jurisdiction.” To allow Stump’s action to stand, said the appeals court, would be to sanction “tyranny from the bench.”

Now this was pretty flimsy stuff, and besides it opened an entertaining wedge toward holding judges accountable to the law and to the protection of rights like everyone else. But this would have shaken the foundations of our monopoly archist legal system. And so the U.S. Supreme Court, on March 28, set the matter straight. In a 5–3 decision in this illuminating case of Stump v. Sparkman, Justice Byron R. (“Whizzer”) White, speaking for the majority, sternly reminded the appellate court of the meaning of the 1872 ruling:

A judge will not be deprived of immunity because the action he took was in error, was done maliciously, or was in excess of his authority. Rather, he will be subject to liability only when he has acted in the “clear absence of all jurisdiction.”

Justice White conceded that no state law or court ruling anywhere could be said to have authorized Judge Stump’s action; but the important point, he went on, is that there was no statute or ruling which prohibited such an action by the judge.

Those interested in reading more are urged to click the link to Mr. Rothbard’s article at the top of the post.

What all of this should make clear is that for redress of rights violations stemming from false allegations made in restraining order and related prosecutions to be possible, the laws themselves must be rectified—and legislative reform will only be urged when more people loudly demand it.

For rights abuses to be capable of remedy by process of law, they must be illegal, which means the processes that authorize those abuses must be revamped or repealed by lawmakers (your state representatives). So long as the standard applied to restraining orders is merely a discretionary one, judges can rule however they want (that’s the statutory latitude they’ve been given), and they’re accountable for those rulings to no one.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

“Predator” v. “Porn Star”: Restraining Order Fraud, False Allegations, and Suing for Defamation

destroyPeople falsely alleged to be abusers on restraining order petitions, particularly men, are treated like brutes, sex offenders, and scum by officers of the court and its staff, besides by authorities and any number of others. Some report their own relatives remain suspicious—often based merely on finger-pointing that’s validated by some judge in a few-minute procedure (and that’s when relatives aren’t the ones making the false allegations).

The social alienation and emotional distress felt by the falsely accused may be both extreme and persistent.

The urge to credit accusations of abuse has been sharpened to a reflex in recent decades by feminist propaganda and its ill begot progeny, the Violence Against Women Act. No one thinks twice about it.

Using four-letter words in court is strictly policed. Even judges can’t do it without risking censure. Falsely implicating someone, however, as a stalker, for example, or a child molester—that isn’t policed at all. Commerce in lies, whether by accusers, their representatives, or even judges themselves is unregulated. No one is answerable for sh* s/he makes up.

Accordingly, false allegations and fraud are rewarding and therefore commonplace.

It should be noted that false allegations and fraud can be distinctly different. For example, David Letterman famously had a restraining order petitioned against him by a woman who was seemingly convinced he was communicating to her through her TV, and her interpretations of his “coded messages” probably were genuinely oppressive to her. David Letterman lived in another state, had never met her, and assuredly had no idea who she was. Her allegations of misconduct weren’t true, but they weren’t intended to mislead (and the fact that they did mislead a judge into signing off on her petition only underscores the complete absence of judicial responsibility in this legal arena).

Fraud, in contrast, is manipulative and deceptive by design. It occurs when an accuser intentionally lies (or spins the facts) to give a false impression and steer a judge toward a wrong conclusion that serves the interests of the fraudster.

Regardless, though, of whether false allegations are made knowingly or unknowingly, they’re rarely discerned as false by the court, are seldom acknowledged as false even if recognized as such, and are always destructive when treated as real, urgent, and true, which they commonly are.

The falsely accused (often private citizens who’ve never had a prior brush with the law) are publicly humiliated and shamed, which by itself is predictably traumatizing. They are besides invariably (and indefinitely) entered into police databases, both local and national, and may be entered into one or more domestic violence registries, too (also indefinitely). These facts pop up on background checks, and defendants in some states may even appear in registries accessible by anyone (including friends, neighbors, family members, boy- and girlfriends, employers, colleagues, students, patients, and/or clients).

This costs the falsely accused leases, loans, and jobs (being turned down for which, of course, aggravates the gnawing indignity and outrage they already feel). Those falsely accused of domestic violence may further be prohibited from attending school functions or working with or around children (permanently). Defendants of false restraining orders may besides be barred from their homes, children, assets, and possessions. Some (including salaried, professional men and women) are left ostracized and destitute. Retirees report having to live out of their cars.

This, remember, is the result of someone’s lodging a superficial complaint against them in a procedure that only requires that the accuser fill out some paperwork and briefly talk to a judge. A successful fraud may be based on nothing more substantive, in fact, than five “magic” words: “I’m afraid for my life” (which can be directed against anyone: a friend, a neighbor, an intimate, a spouse, a relative, a coworker—even a TV celebrity their speaker has never met).

This incantation takes a little over a second to utter (and its speaker, who can be a criminal or a mental case, need not even live in the same state as the accused).

Accordingly, people’s names and lives are trashed—and no surprise if they become unhinged. (Those five “magic” words, what’s more, may be uttered by the actual abusers in relationships to conceal their own misconduct and redirect blame. That includes, for example, stalkers. Those “magic” words may also be used to cover up any nature of other misbehavior, including criminal. They instantly discredit anything the accused might say about their speakers.)

The prescribed course of action to redress slanders and libels is a defamation suit, but allegations of defamation brought by those falsely accused on restraining orders or in related prosecutions are typically discounted by the court. Perjury (lying to the court) can’t be prosecuted by a private litigant (only by the district attorney’s office, which never does), and those who allege defamation are typically told the court has already ruled on the factualness of the restraining order petitioner’s testimony and that it can’t be reviewed (the facts may not even be reviewed by appellate judges, who may only consider whether the conduct of the previous judge demonstrated “clear abuse of discretion”). The plaintiff’s testimony, they’re told, is a res judicata—an already “decided thing.” (Never mind that docket time dedicated to the formation of that “decision” may literally have been a couple of minutes.)

So…slanders and libels made by abuse of court process aren’t actionable, slanders and libels that completely sunder the lives of the wrongly accused, who can’t even get them expunged from their records to simply reset their fractured lives to zero.

Such slanders and libels may include false allegations of stalking, physical or sexual aggression, assault, child abuse, or even rape. In the eyes of the court, someone’s being falsely implicated as a monster, publicly and for life, is no biggie.

In contrast, it was reported last month that the court awarded a Kansas woman $1,000,000 in a defamation suit brought against a radio station that falsely called her a “porn star.”

When violated people speak of legal inequities, this exemplifies what they’re talking about: Falsely and publicly implicating someone as a sex offender is fine and no grounds for complaint in the eyes of the justice system, but for the act of falsely and publicly calling someone a mere sex performer, someone may be fined a million bucks.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

How It Serves Political Interests to Issue Restraining Orders Falsely

Under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), some $10 billion has been invested over the past 20 years in procedures meant to redress violence against women, and restraining orders are the centerpiece of a host of related legislative measures.

The truth is restraining orders can’t prevent violence; they’re just pieces of paper. Their only value is rhetorical (they influence). They put defendants on notice, and they make it look like the government is protecting people.

When defendants are falsely blamed, their (isolated) protests are seldom registered or credited by others. Because their complaints are discounted or disregarded, they don’t tarnish the court’s image or inspire the press to investigate.

At the same time, it serves the court’s interests when defendants are falsely blamed. The greatest likelihood that an order of the court will appear to have averted violence is realized when that order is issued to someone who was never a threat at all.

Put another way, if the court only issued restraining orders to volatile people, it’s a fair bet that a discomforting percentage of orders would be violated, and the negative statistics would urgently disclose their ineffectiveness as deterrents.

Issuing a majority of restraining orders to people who pose little or no violent threat, contrariwise, ensures violations will be fewer and less consequential by and large. Negative figures, like murders, are thereby minimized, and the process appears to live up to its promise of insulation.

All of this is to say that if you issue 60 restraining orders against nonviolent people to every one issued against a violent aggressor, violations of restraining orders resulting in injuries or death will be comparatively few respective to the total number of people “restrained.” It skews the odds in favor of positive perception.

It’s good PR.

More restraining orders, besides, guarantees greater job security for those who administer them. It means there’s more “work” to get (handsomely) paid for doing.

More restraining orders also means greater substantiation of claims of “epidemic” this and that, which keeps dominant political interests happy and thriving (cha-ching!)…and justifies ramping up the process even further.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Larry’s Story, Part 2: Suing a False Accuser and the Judge She Rode in On

Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Larry Smith has for three years been harried by relentless false allegations from a disturbed neighbor, is the source of the word bunkum.

Bunkum (or bunk) is more familiarly called BS, which is what Larry’s been daily forced to tolerate for three years. He’s 70, and the time he’s had stolen from him was precious.

Larry filed a lawsuit in federal district court this week (pro se) against the State of North Carolina, his neighbor-cum-accuser, the judge who encouraged her reign of terror, and a number of other public officials to be named later in an amendment to his complaint.

Larry, a grandfather living on Social Security who practiced law in his salad days, is an object lesson about why it’s ill-advised to poke a sleeping bear.

Despite suffering from agonizing scoliosis (a degenerative spinal disorder), Larry’s been summoned to court over 30 times since 2011, locked in a cell, and had a gun pointed at him consequent to crank allegations from a vengeful neighbor who’s publicly accused him of being a disbarred attorney, an embezzler, and a psychopath (including on Facebook).

She says he’s “barked like a dog” at her, recruited “mentally challenged adults” to harass her while shopping, and mooned her friends. She says he’s cyberstalked her, too, besides hacking into her phone and computer.

Larry, who’s in pain even when he’s sitting down, has been reported to the police a dozen times or more while out walking his toy poodles or just puttering around his house. His accuser has also twice filed restraining orders against him since he took exception to her cat’s killing the local songbirds that have always been a source of joy to him to watch. The first time she petitioned a restraining order, she reported that he violated it later the same day.

Larry hadn’t even seen the woman.

Larry’s accuser’s is an extreme version of the mischief that’s widely reported by targets of restraining orders. Notable (and telling) is that even the outrageous degree of flagrant procedural abuse Larry’s been subjected to is winked at by authorities and judges.

There’s liable to be more blinking than winking this time around: Mr. Smith is going to Washington—and circumventing the local old boy’s network.

Larry’s lawsuit alleges deception; fraud; judicial dereliction; frivolous and malicious prosecution; fundamental constitutional rights violations; false imprisonment; unjust stigmatization; judicial politicking; collusion, conspiracy, and tyrannical oppression by representatives of regional government; and felonious forgery of a criminal complaint.

It also requests a jury.

One man’s debunking procedures this country and many others have invested faith and a fortune in is probably a forlorn hope, but the endeavor is nothing shy of heroic (and may at least restore to a sorely hectored man his peace of mind).

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Battering Women to Protect Battered Women: Using Massachusetts’s Policies to Examine Restraining Order Publicity and Its Damages

“In the event a Restraining Order is issued for any period of time (initial 10 days or subsequent extension/dismissal), you will be listed in the statewide Domestic Violence Registry system. This could impact your ability to obtain or maintain employment in government, law enforcement, certain medical fields, or social services, or to work with/coach children. Impoundment of the restraining order does not expunge your listing on the statewide domestic violence registry, as certain government agencies and private companies with significant government contracts still have access to the registry system.”

—“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications

I’ve just been corresponding with a Florida woman named Ally who had a domestic violence (209A) protection order petitioned against her in Massachusetts alleging she was a danger to a former boyfriend (these kinds of instruments can be obtained by plaintiffs who don’t even live in the same state or country as their defendants).

Ally contends the allegations against her are false and has been living in hell for over a year.

She’s surviving day to day and can’t afford to procure the services of an attorney. Ally’s trying to defend herself and clear her name with no money and from another time zone. She’s preparing a motion on her own (very possibly ill-fated) to request that the order against her be expunged, because it has ruined her employability.

Note: As the epigraph explains, even were Ally to succeed in having the order simply dismissed (which is itself unlikely), she would still remain registered as a domestic abuser.

From a draft of Ally’s “Motion to Expunge”:

Defendant was refused jobs, [is] not allowed to attend [or] volunteer [at] her daughter’s school events, [and has had] numerous other rights taken away due to Plaintiff’s Abuse of Process and Fraudulent Allegations and written Affidavit to the Court. This continues today.

Note: To successfully combat prosecutions like this requires money…which prosecutions like this prevent their defendants from earning.

A recent post on this blog observed the court’s schizophrenic regard toward restraining orders. On the one hand, they’re viewed by judges as urgent, potentially life-or-death matters; on the other hand, they’re viewed as inconsequential as long as defendants mind their prohibitions for the prescribed period of time.

Ignored is that adjudications both initiated and finalized in minutes yield rulings that are entered into state and national law enforcement databases indefinitely. Orders become “inactive” once they expire, but they don’t disappear. A woman like Ally remains for the rest of her life marked as a perpetrator of domestic violence.

In contrast—and the contrast is a telling one—consider this excerpt from a “Memoradum” issued by the Massachusetts Supreme Court last year on “Internet Dissemination of Personal Protection Order Information.”

As transparency and improved access remain court goals, it is important that we not unknowingly or unintentionally release victims’ personally identifiable information through the Internet, recognizing that this information is easily accessed and that access to such information could be dangerous to victims. Additionally, it has been brought to our attention that current federal law prohibits providing information over the Internet about personal protection orders (PPOs) that would be likely to reveal the identity or location of the petitioner (“PPO Information”).

18 USC 2265(d)(3) states:

A State, Indian tribe, or territory shall not make available publicly on the Internet any information regarding the registration, filing of a petition for, or issuance of a protection order, restraining order, or injunction in either the issuing or enforcing State, tribal or territorial jurisdiction, if such publication would be likely to publicly reveal the identity or location of the party protected under such order. A State, Indian tribe, or territory may share court-generated and law enforcement-generated information contained in secure, governmental registries for protection order enforcement purposes.

The privacy of restraining order plaintiffs (who are nominated “victims”) is to be tightly guarded.

Note: Based on “determinations” formed in minutes and possibly based on nothing more substantial than accusation, a plaintiff is deemed a “victim” whose identity and privacy must be protected, and the defendant is deemed a “violent threat” whose privacy is accordingly due no consideration. After the term of the restraining order has flown, the “danger” to the accuser is assumed to have been resolved, but the accuser continues to enjoy anonymity while the accused must go on bearing the implications of the restraining order for the rest of his or her life, exactly as if those implications were a criminal sentence.

Only in the recent past, in fact, did it even become possible to remove a Massachusetts restraining order defendant’s name from the domestic violence registry if it were found that allegations against him or her were substantially or totally false. (Remember that such allegations are made ex parte in the time it takes to place an order at McDonald’s.)

Until recently, it was almost impossible to expunge a person’s record with the domestic violence registry once the initial entry was made. In the 2006 case of Commissioner of Probation v. Adams, it was recognized that a judge has the inherent authority to expunge a record of an abuse [from the] violence registry system in the rare and limited circumstance that the judge finds the order was obtained through fraud on the court.

Note: The phrase rare…circumstance (of fraud) is emphasized in the original document quoted above (“Massachusetts Restraining Orders Procedure and Ramifications”), which was authored by an all-female law firm (Mavrides Law of Boston). Allegations of rampant restraining order misuse in Massachusetts have actually been the subject of press coverage and at least one law review monograph, and one of the most outspoken critics of restraining orders, attorney Gregory Hession, practices in Massachusetts and has for many years reported that restraining orders are “out of control.”

The previous two posts on this blog were responses to allegations that those who criticize restraining orders and domestic violence laws are “opposed to the battered women’s movement.” Defenders of these laws are urged to ask themselves how Ally’s wanting to be able to provide for her daughter and one day attend her daughter’s graduation has anything to do with battered women at all.

They’re also urged to ask themselves how denying Ally these opportunities isn’t itself an act of brutality.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com