Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ Tox Director, Lies under Oath

September 12, 2020July 28, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., whom this post tersely exposes, is the director of toxicology of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). He is also the current chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Boards but, amid some controversy concerning his ethics, reportedly will not be seeking reappointment when his term ends next month.

Readers may consult “What TCEQ Exec L’Oreal Stepney Would Ask Michael Honeycutt if She Cared Whether the Directors Her Agency Employed Were Unscrupulous Stooges” and its attendant links for specifics concerning this post.

Note: The writer’s publication of satirical images like the one below is not meant to suggest to the reader who has been victimized by court process that people who lie in court or abet liars in court deserve to be lampooned merely. It is the writer’s conviction, rather, that they deserve to be harshly censured in court, like those who are lied about, threatened in court, like those who are lied about, and sent to jail, like those who are lied about too often are. The deplorable fact is that liars like Honeycutt are almost always rewarded for their misconduct with the court’s thanks. Criticism and satiric commentary are thus victims’ only lawful recourse.

Michael Honeycutt, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt TCEQ, Michael Honeycutt EPA, false testimony, L'Oreal Stepney, L'Oreal Stepney TCEQ, Toby Baker, Greg Abbott, Tiffany Bredfeldt, Tiffany Bredfeldt PhD, Tiffany Bredfeldt TCEQ, Bredfeldt TG

Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., director of toxicology of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), represented as an even fatter big fat liar

WHAT MICHAEL HONEYCUTT DID:

Lied under oath in a lawsuit in which he phoned in an appearance to help a colleague who had lied under oath deprive the writer of his First Amendment liberty to report their lies.

WHAT MICHAEL HONEYCUTT COUNTED ON:

That his and his colleague’s testimony could never be published.

HOW MICHAEL HONEYCUTT DID IT:

By testifying that I had called his colleague a “fraudulent scientist” because I told him she was a liar.

Honeycutt also reported secondhand fictive tales of sexual harassment/aggression that he acknowledged under oath he had made no attempt to clarify let alone verify.

WHY MICHAEL HONEYCUTT DID IT:

Because he had an inappropriate relationship with his colleague, who was and continues to be his employee. Whether that inappropriate relationship went beyond willing service to her as an agent in an enterprise that was later deemed unlawful, the writer can’t say. (Honeycutt did, however, testify that he had provided his colleague with a private office with a door that locked, and the woman was nominated to a post at the EPA coincident with Honeycutt’s nomination.)

WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES WERE:

An unconstitutional censorship order prohibiting the writer from reporting years of false testimony by Honeycutt’s colleague, a married woman who had indulged an infatuation at the writer’s home in 2005. The writer lived under the order for five years, sustaining himself by manual labor, before it was dissolved in 2018, when the woman’s accusations were dismissed, and a mutual order was entered by the court prohibiting her from ever revisiting them publicly (though the writer is certain they continue to circulate privately). While the writer lived hand-to-mouth, Honeycutt was paid a generous six-figure salary for performing in an air-conditioned facility what is reportedly held by many to be suspect science for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

The illegal order Honeycutt was instrumental in coercing from a since disgraced judge was only dissolved after a protracted two-year contest following his colleague’s seeking to have the writer imprisoned, which Honeycutt apparently supported, and her false allegations continue to be preserved as public documents that can only serve to impede the writer and that have galled and gnawed at him, to the diminishment of his and others’ lives, for nearly 15 years.

WHAT MICHAEL HONEYCUTT HAS DONE SINCE 2018:

Relished his moment in the spotlight as the EPA’s chief science advisor by all appearances.

What TCEQ Exec L’Oreal Stepney Would Ask Michael Honeycutt if She Cared Whether the Directors Her Agency Employed Were Unscrupulous Stooges

August 16, 2020July 28, 2023Moderator 4 Comments

The author of this post, Todd Greene, was baselessly sued in 2013 (not for the first time) by a scientist in the employ of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) named Tiffany Bredfeldt, who called upon her boss, Michael Honeycutt, TCEQ director of toxicology and today head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Boards, to witness on her behalf.

Both of them are Ph.D.’s, which is the sort of fact judges are more apt to find compelling than, say, the truth.

Bredfeldt, a married woman, had targeted Greene at his home in 2005, indulged an infatuation, and then hoaxed the police and the courts to whitewash her conduct by claiming she was afraid and had been sexually accosted or assaulted (the details of her narrative and their specificity varied broadly with each retelling).

Greene would be in and out of court with Bredfeldt, based largely on allegations of hers stemming from their three-month acquaintance in 2005, for no less than a dozen years.

The upshot of Bredfeldt and Honeycutt’s tag-team effort was an unlawful injunction imposed upon Greene that forbid him from speaking about Bredfeldt’s conduct or his own travails in the “justice system,” even “by word of mouth.”

The illegal injunction, which violated Greene’s First Amendment rights (and concealed lies), was dissolved in 2018 (five years later) after Bredfeldt sued to have Greene wrongly imprisoned for allegedly violating the censorship order.

Recent posts on this blog have criticized administrators at the TCEQ for their claims and conduct and provided a brief series of statements culled from the hours and reams of “evidence” that show so plainly that Bredfeldt is a liar that even a bureaucrat or a judge couldn’t fail to discern the fact.

Following in the tracks of the most recent post of this kind, “What L’Oreal Stepney, Newly Named TCEQ Exec, Would Ask Tiffany Bredfeldt if She Cared Whether the Scientists Her Agency Employed Were Fucking Liars,” this post imagines questions that TCEQ executive administrators might pose to Dr. Honeycutt to clarify conclusively whether he carelessly involved their agency in a vicious hoax that would lead to a wronged man’s nearly being imprisoned.

Michael Honeycutt TCEQ, Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt, Michael Honeycutt EPA, L'Oreal Stepney, L'Oreal Stepney TCEQ, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Environmental Protection Agency, Toby Baker TCEQ, TCEQ executive director, false testimony, lying, liar

Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., the EPA’s “top scientist” and toxicology director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)

In a letter sent to you at the TCEQ in 2011, Mr. Greene informed you that one of your married employees, Tiffany Bredfeldt, had falsely testified against him and continued to make defamatory claims about his character and behavior despite, apparently, having been offered a chance to simply and quietly recant years before.

Discounting any ethical obligation a government scientist who’s called upon to give expert witness testimony might have to represent facts accurately, one would expect you to feel some burden to ascertain the truth of these allegations prior to participating in a lawsuit in another state that you must have known was intended to have Mr. Greene judicially censored on pain of incarceration.

When asked by Mr. Greene what your familiarity was with the underlying matter that led you to witness for Dr. Bredfeldt, you testified that you “didn’t ask for details” or “clarify” them because as her employer “it would not be appropriate.”

QUESTION: How do you justify your involvement in a matter that by your own admission you hadn’t made any effort to fathom?

You testified that Dr. Bredfeldt had told you Mr. Greene “propositioned her,” and opined that this meant Mr. Greene had sought to have sex with her. This obviously contrasted with what Mr. Greene had told you.

QUESTIONS: What was the basis for your giving preferential treatment to Dr. Bredfeldt’s account, one that you admitted you had accepted at face value and made no attempt to clarify? Do you consider this choice ethically conscionable?

You also testified that Mr. Greene accused her of being a “fraudulent scientist.”

QUESTION: Was this what Mr. Greene said to you, or were you urged to make a false statement to satisfy the expectation of your employee’s attorney?

You said that Mr. Greene told you Dr. Bredfeldt was a liar who lacked “good morals,” and you acknowledged under oath that these were “pretty significant allegations,” the implication being that they were allegations that diminished her trustworthiness and value as a scientist.

You also said that Dr. Bredfeldt told you Mr. Greene “wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Yet she told the police that Mr. Greene had taken no for an answer, and she told Mr. Greene himself that he had been “nice” to her and that she had “never felt the need” to tell him she was married.

Dr. Bredfeldt’s account to you is plainly contradicted by her own statements, ones she entered into evidence voluntarily.

QUESTION: If you considered the allegation of lying significant, what if any actions have you taken since Dr. Bredfeldt’s allegations were dismissed in 2018?

Not long prior to the 2013 lawsuit, TCEQ Director L’Oreal Stepney had answered charges of censorship leveled at this agency by declaring that it is “wrong” and not representative of TCEQ policy.

QUESTION: Did this public repudiation of censorship cause you any misgivings about assisting Dr. Bredfeldt to obtain a censorship order against Mr. Greene, one that was notably thrown out five years later for being wrong?

Finally, Mr. Greene has alleged that in 2016 Dr. Bredfeldt said in court that you considered her latest lawsuit “good experience” for occasions when she might be called upon to give expert witness testimony as a TCEQ scientist.

QUESTION: Did you wish Dr. Bredfeldt success at having Mr. Greene jailed?

*Readers may wonder why questions like those in this post and the post “What L’Oreal Stepney, Newly Named TCEQ Exec, Would Ask Tiffany Bredfeldt if She Cared Whether the Scientists Her Agency Employed Were Fucking Liars” couldn’t have been raised in court. The simple answer is that judges will flatly deny defendants the opportunity to ask questions whose answers aren’t likely to support the conclusions the judges have already formed.

**TCEQ administrators have seemed to respond to this writer’s posts by using search engine manipulation to suppress the posts and images associated with them in Google’s returns. Readers who are curious to see verification of this need only Google the name Michael Honeycutt, for example. He’s a prominent political figure these days. Yet Google’s image strip for him will rarely appear on the first page of its returns for his name, and when it does, it’s at the bottom.

What TCEQ Exec L’Oreal Stepney Would Ask Tiffany Bredfeldt if She Cared Whether the Scientists Her Agency Employed Were Fucking Liars

June 29, 2020July 28, 2023Moderator 8 Comments

The author of this post, Todd Greene, was targeted at his home in 2005 by a disturbed married woman named Tiffany Bredfeldt who was then a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona and has since 2006 been a Ph.D. She indulged an infatuation and then lied to whitewash her conduct.

For the next 12 years, Greene would be in and out of court with Bredfeldt, based largely on allegations of hers stemming from their three-month acquaintance in 2005. Those allegations, by her own admission (in 2016), would be made “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.

In 2010, Bredfeldt joined the staff of Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Three years later, she prosecuted Greene with the help of her boss, TCEQ Toxicology Director Michael Honeycutt, to prevent Greene from talking about his experiences in court. The upshot of their tag-team effort was an unlawful injunction imposed upon Greene that forbid him from speaking about Bredfeldt’s conduct or his own travails in the “justice system,” even “by word of mouth.”

The illegal injunction, which violated Greene’s First Amendment rights (and concealed lies), was dissolved in 2018 (five years later) after Bredfeldt sued to have Greene wrongfully imprisoned for allegedly violating the censorship order.

What follow are questions that TCEQ administrators who probably rankle at my criticisms might pose to Dr. Bredfeldt to clarify conclusively whether they have supported and continue to employ a person who is most succinctly called a fucking liar.

In sworn testimony given in evidence against Mr. Greene in 2013, Dr. Honeycutt informed the court that you had told him Mr. Greene had “propositioned” you in 2005, and he opined that “propositioned” meant Mr. Greene had sought to have sex with you.

QUESTIONS: How did Mr. Greene “proposition” you? What specifically did he say? Did he touch you?

In a document you submitted in evidence to the court in 2006, an email from you to him, you tell Mr. Greene that you “never felt the need” to inform him you were married because you thought he viewed you “strictly as a social friend.” In the same email, you say he had been “nice” to you.

QUESTION: How does this align with the account you later related to Dr. Honeycutt prior to the 2013 lawsuit?

A few months after you provided evidence to the court that you had “never felt the need” to tell Mr. Greene that you were married, you alleged to the court that Mr. Greene had made “several physical, romantic advances” toward you despite being rebuked and that he continued to engage in this conduct and forced you to respond by removing yourself from the premises where he lived.

QUESTION: How is the statement that you “never felt the need” to tell Mr. Greene you were married consistent with your statement that he made repeated “physical…advances” toward you?

QUESTIONS: What form did these “physical, romantic advances” take? Did he grasp you?

Immediately before providing these seemingly contradictory statements to the court, you informed the police Mr. Greene had made a single advance toward you, that you “calmly explained” your marital status, and that he acknowledged your wish to be friends only.

QUESTION: Why did you later tell the court that he made repeated advances toward you?

In your statement to the police, you said you had told him you were married.

QUESTION: Why then during the later action Dr. Honeycutt supported you in, in 2013, did you testify that you had never told Mr. Greene you were married?

*One of the TCEQ’s administrators the author of this post has (obliquely) criticized, Stephanie Perdue, its (former) deputy executive officer, has a law degree. The others, Michael Honeycutt and L’Oreal Stepney, who was recently promoted to deputy executive director, have advanced degrees in science and engineering, respectively. Honeycutt is today the EPA’s top scientist. Bredfeldt apparently separated from her husband at or about the time their final lawsuit against the writer was dismissed.

Michael Honeycutt, Hack Ph.D., Grooms Chronic Liar to Give Expert Witness Testimony as TCEQ Rep; Both Named to Trump EPA

January 9, 2020July 28, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Michael Honeycutt, Dr. Michael Honeycutt PhD, Michael Honeycutt PhD, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Gov Greg Abbott, TCEQ, L'Oreal Stepney, Loreal Stepney
“Almost every time there’s a public concern about pollution, [Michael Honeycutt] says there’s nothing to worry about. Almost every time industry takes a position against stronger health protections, he takes their side and contorts the science to advocate for doing nothing. He just doesn’t have any credibility anymore.”

—Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas

The subject of this post, Michael Honeycutt, Ph.D., is the toxicology director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Pruitt-appointed chairman of the EPA’s Science Advisory Boards.

I can corroborate that he has a knack for pollution, a knack, that is, for producing it.

Here is a bio possibly written by Michael Honeycutt about himself, in which either he or one of his TCEQ subordinates identifies Dr. Michael E. Honeycutt as a “dedicated, distinguished scientist.” That alone would be a sufficient commentary on the man’s ethics, besides a testament to his vanity, arrogance, and professional ridiculousness. But I have more.

Michael Honeycutt indiscriminately helped further tatter my life at a time when I might still have been able to patch the rents, and he did that by supporting a hoax, which is something that apparently comes naturally to him.

Greg Abbott, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, TCEQ, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality

Governor Greg Abbott, who says he supports “faith, family, and freedom,” but whose agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has been repeatedly implicated in censorship, including censorship of the author of this post to cover up public mischief

A guy I had never met and still haven’t, Honeycutt “witnessed” against me in 2013 before the Arizona Superior Court—by phone from the comfort of his office in Texas, where I can’t help but imagine he was talking around a jelly donut and taking care not to dribble its contents on his shirt.

Some of his testimony appears below, along with that of the person on whose behalf he testified, a liar in his employ. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and TCEQ directors Toby Baker, Stephanie Bergeron Perdue, L’Oreal Stepney, and Beth West should be ashamed. Both my best friend and my father died while this mischief was ongoing. And its residue doesn’t simply evaporate as the TCEQ seems to believe chemical pollutants do. The only one who can undo lies is the liar.

Thanks in no small part, I’m certain, to Honeycutt’s flash credentials and suave delivery, which I have no doubt was coached, I would be denied my constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment freedoms for the next five years by an unlawful speech injunction that was imposed without a trial (which is, of course, also illegal). The TCEQ has been repeatedly implicated in censorship and information suppression, so in that regard there’s nothing exceptional about this instance.

During the five years I was silenced, I might have racked up a couple of Ph.D.’s of my own or published a book or two, as I had intended, had a case initiated by a protégée of Honeycutt’s at the TCEQ, senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt, been settled instead of unlawfully hushed.

Tiffany Bredfeldt, who represented the TCEQ on the news while seeking the writer’s imprisonment, was apparently dumped by her husband around the time the case concluded against her. That case stemmed from a 2013 censorship order validated by Michael Honeycutt, who might have averted manifold damages to all parties concerned had he demonstrated a molecule of discernment.

Tiffany Bredfeldt is a developmentally arrested, chronic, documented liar. She’s also a liar who has ridden her mentor’s coattails straight into the federal government—which, I grant, is where many of society’s least scrupulous succeed in turning their ethical disinhibition to profit.

I imagine Mike and Tiffany are flourishing there. I’d be surprised, really, if they weren’t already conspiring to occupy the office of EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

Eugene Volokh, UCLA School of Law, UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh, First Amendment

Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, who blogs on Reason.com, among other things about faith, family, and freedom, addressing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee

I was first in court with Bredfeldt in 2006, when I was granted a 20-minute self-defense against cooked allegations, and I was last in court with her in 2016, accused of having violated the illegal speech injunction Honeycutt had helped her illegally secure three years prior. Discounting many pretrial conferences, the entire 2016 “trial” again amounted to a single hearing, during which the proceedings were indefinitely suspended. Then they were dismissed…two years later. That’s 12 years of lying and legal abuse, including lawbreaking. What made the difference in 2016 was that I had public defenders and the support of UCLA professor of law and eminent First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh; it wasn’t just a backroom lynching as it had been in 2013 when Honeycutt glibly voiced an appearance.

At the end of the 2016 hearing, after the mics had been turned off, Honeycutt’s apprentice could be heard exclaiming, “God damn it!” She then remarked for her courtroom entourage that Honeycutt had joked that her prosecution would be “good experience” for when she gave expert witness testimony as a TCEQ rep. That was Honeycutt’s alleged commentary on a prosecution meant to have a man wrongfully imprisoned. And Honeycutt’s a guy who identifies himself as a stalwart Christian and a devotee of the Boy Scouts.

Here’s 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. The story they tell isn’t the half of it, but it’s succinct, and its contradictions are palpable. The statements provide all the background the reader will require. Honeycutt’s contribution to this list is the third from the top. His apprentice, a stranger who had routinely hung around outside of my house at night, alone, has lied impulsively and randomly to whitewash what might be called an extramarital infatuation, and she has lied without qualm and to anyone who would listen. Like her mentor Honeycutt, she’s fond of attention.

The crackpot who made the preceding statements was, the last I knew, entrusted with a role in determining U.S. public health policy besides that of Texas.

And she’s a virtual phantom. Anyone with a grievance toward the TCEQ who’s curious to learn if a Tiffany Bredfeldt is employed there will be disappointed. Thanks to Mike Honeycutt, she hasn’t appeared on its employee roster since 2011 or 12, though she represented the TCEQ on the TV news less than three years ago (see the image above) and still draws an agency paycheck (annual salary: $73,608).

Here’s Mike’s 2013 explanation to the court:

Even the reader with no courtroom experience can appreciate how steered testimony like that could drive some coffin nails home.

I encountered Honeycutt’s protégée in 2005, a few feet from my house, which is the only place I’ve ever seen her outside of a courtroom, and I’ve never been to Texas.

A woman who was scheduled to testify in the 2016 lawsuit that was meant to have me jailed had characterized Bredfeldt’s behavior toward me this way:

The email containing the woman’s remarks has been online for two years and is presumably known to Honeycutt, who, as far I can tell, has only sought to keep the matter from interfering with his moment in the limelight and his activities in church and with the Boy Scouts.

The exclusive basis for Michael Honeycutt’s involvement in the case at all was that I had contacted him in 2011 to tell him he was employing a scientist who had no compunction about lying.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me then that a willingness to lie, including under oath, might be a qualification the TCEQ prized.

*Michael Honeycutt told the court in 2013 that I had accused his apprentice Bredfeldt of engaging in scientific fraud, which is something I’ve never done. In fact I was careful to clarify that I knew nothing about her professional conduct. Honeycutt’s testimony, given under oath, was false. It was, however, effective, and I’m convinced that effectiveness was his priority, not accuracy. Misrepresenting a material fact in a sworn court proceeding, that is, stating a fact under oath that is likely to influence the judge but is untrue, is called perjury, and it’s a felony crime.

**Liberal detractors of Michael Honeycutt’s favor PC characterizations like this one by Honeycutt’s peer Elena Craft, Ph.D., senior health scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas: “[Honeycutt’s] positions generally are totally inconsistent with mainstream thinking.” To someone who distrusts conventional perspectives, as I do, this sounds like a compliment. Moreover, the conduct this post criticizes accords with mainstream thinking, which is something people like Ms. Craft might broaden themselves by considering. Archly feminist views, I’ve noted, are endemic in the hard sciences (and in a good many of the soft ones). A scientist is someone who confronts the truth in whatever unsettling form it comes. Otherwise, s/he’s misappropriating the title.

Emails by PCA Pastors Kevin Hale, Daren Dietmeier, and Jeremy Cheezum Used to Support Lies, Lawbreaking, and Abuse

September 22, 2019March 5, 2025Moderator 3 Comments

Kevin Hale, Jeremy Cheezum, DietmeierDaren, USAF, Daren Dietmeier, Rev. Kevin Hale, revkevinhale, ozarkdogmatics, Christ Church, Christ Church Conway, ozarkdogmatics.com, Ozark Dogmatics, Conway Arkansas, Pastor Kevin Hale, Jeremy Cheezum, Rev. Jeremy Cheezum, Pastor Jeremy Cheezum, Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church, Montrose Colorado, Rev. Daren Dietmeier, Pastor Daren Dietmeier, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Aledo Illinois

From left to right, Rev. Kevin Hale of Christ Church in Conway, Arkansas; Rev. Jeremy Cheezum of Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church in Montrose, Colorado; and Rev. Daren Dietmeier of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Aledo, Illinois

Emails authored by pastors Kevin Hale and Daren Dietmeier of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and displayed in this post were submitted in evidence to the Arizona Superior Court in 2013 to procure what has since been recognized as an illegal speech injunction—the intention of which was to conceal false testimony to the court and false reporting to law enforcement officials—and the pastors’ emails are accordingly public documents.

The unlawful injunction they were used to obtain, which was imposed without a trial and which deprived the writer of his constitutionally protected freedom of speech for five years, was dissolved in 2018, and a family that had endeavored to have the writer imprisoned based on filthy and/or frivolous allegations spanning 12 years is today prohibited by mandate of the court from harassing him further.

Note to the reader: When the writer appealed to the ministers named in this post for help in gaining relief from persistent false accusations by church insiders, he had already existed in the shadow cast by those lies for six years.

Probably the Presbyterian ministers pictured above wouldn’t be grinning so broadly if members of their congregations had accused them, for example, of inappropriately touching their children. Whispered nicknames like Creepy Kevin, Germy Jeremy, and Dirty Dietmeier are punishing, especially on the job security of men in professions like theirs. The tolls are far worse when the innuendo and gossip are the products of lies.

Many who’ve been lied about to the courts feel the acid burn of such labels even if they’re never put into words. I’ve been lied about a lot and for a long time, and I have felt the actual words.

This message was communicated to me by email on the first day of what would become 12 years of legal abuse by a woman named Tiffany Bredfeldt and her husband, Phil Bredfeldt, sister- and brother-in-law of Rev. Jeremy Cheezum.

To relate the background as briefly as possible, Tiffany Bredfeldt had nightly lingered outside of my house for months in 2005 and taunted me with references to her body and underwear, apparently relishing the attention. Then she lied to the police and the court to conceal her misconduct when I learned she was married and demanded an explanation—and she has lied over and over since, as the testimony I’ve included below shows plainly.

Tiffany Bredfeldt in 2005

The message above was sent after Tiffany and Phil Bredfeldt had obtained a court injunction forbidding me from responding to it. Sort of like a four-letter nyah-nyah. The couple thought it would be cute to send a copy of the message to the police, apparently to reinforce the idea that they were afraid for their lives (because why wouldn’t you provoke someone you were afraid of?). The restraining order, which was petitioned by Tiffany Bredfeldt, particularly emphasized that I was a danger to her husband, a guy I had never met, and shouldn’t be allowed to talk to him.

I was an aspirant kids’ writer with a puppy and a parent in chemotherapy. Maybe the spoiled brats, both of whom were reared in the church, thought that was funny also.

Certainly evident is that everyone I appealed to for relief from lies that would continue for 11 years (and may be repeated and embellished upon today) couldn’t have cared less.

Here’s a synopsis of statements Tiffany Bredfeldt gave in evidence to the court or, in one instance, to the police only between the years 2006 and 2017. The story they tell isn’t the half of it, but it’s succinct, and its contradictions are palpable. The woman has lied impulsively, randomly, and wickedly and then lied to conceal the lying—and gotten by with a little help from her friends. Her husband, Phil, after whom one of Rev. Cheezum’s kids may be named, was incidentally privy to all of these statements and has supported them fully, including under oath.

People of moral character might call the woman psycho, or they might call her evil.

Here are a couple of alternative interpretations by men I appealed to for help seven years ago whose profession it is to conscientiously listen.

Rev. Kevin Hale, Pastor Kevin Hale, Christ Church, Christ Church Conway, Conway AR, Presbyterian Church in America, PCA

In the email above, Rev. Kevin Hale offhandedly dismisses an appeal for help I sent him (unread) as “porn spam,” and the person he says he pities is the woman whose lies are glossed above. Rev. Hale’s addressee in the email is Rev. Jeremy Cheezum, to whom I had also appealed. Rev. Cheezum played middleman during this interlude, snatching up my appeals for help, which he also disregarded, and funneling them to my accuser’s husband, Phil Bredfeldt, his brother-in-law. Phil Bredfeldt would then use the appeals to coerce an illegal speech injunction in 2013 (putting me at risk of incarceration for exposing his wife’s lies even by “word of mouth”) and later (2016) to accuse me of felony extortion. The extortion ploy was ditched when it failed to scare me into abandoning my defense and agreeing to shut up, and the unconstitutional court order was eventually dissolved. Had it not been, this publication would have been grounds for my imprisonment.

Daren Dietmeier, Rev. Daren Dietmeier, Pastor Daren Dietmeier, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Aledo IL, Presbyterian Church in America, PCA, Trinity Aledo

In response to the appeal I sent him, Rev. Daren Dietmeier concluded I should invest in a book of sudoku puzzles, perhaps, or take up crochet.

A woman who was scheduled to testify when I was most recently prosecuted (2016) had characterized Tiffany Bredfeldt’s behavior toward me this way:

The email containing the woman’s remarks has been online since the beginning of last year and is presumably known to Rev. Cheezum, though I suppose it’s unlikely he has brought it to the attention of his fraternity brothers Kevin and Daren, whose denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, asserts, “Godliness is founded on truth.” (Besides Pastors Hale, Cheezum, and Dietmeier, I had apparently appealed to a Pastor Paul Sagan of Covenant Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and an L. Roy Taylor, whose title is stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in America and who’s seemingly the church’s top administrator. Needless to say, they also turned a blind eye.)

Rev. Hale, who is married, expressed his sympathies for a liar who had violated the bounds of the marriage covenant, a subject he probably has occasion to speak of often.

Rev. Dietmeier, a married former serviceman who would unwittingly be made an accomplice to a violation of the liberties this country’s flag stands for, simply scoffs. Worthy of note is that that flag is the banner image on his Facebook page and that that page is plastered with those pithy digital posters, one of which quotes Mark Twain on the importance of reading and another of which claims something like, “Everyone sins. Christians repent.” If Rev. Dietmeier is sincere about that, there’s a comment section below.

God sees everything; we grieve Him when we claim His name in Christ, and act as if we’ve never had a saving experience with Him at all. Our actions, public and private, must meet the words we utter [Rev. Daren Dietmeier, “The Fear of the LORD,” Aug. 4, 2019].

My father starved to death in 2016, alone in a cramped room in a cut-rate nursing home, while the latest series of prosecutions brought or motivated by the family this post concerns was raging. I spent the last night of my dad’s life preoccupied with another family’s sins, sins that have now been allowed to fester for almost 14 years. One of that family’s members who was slated to testify against me, moreover, was Dr. Ray Bredfeldt, M.D., a Presbyterian deacon.

In the early hours of the Sunday morning when my father stopped breathing, while I was poring over legal jabberwocky, the pastors mentioned in this post were probably dreaming of the inspirational sermons they would deliver on the importance of truth, love, and charity.

*For those who might wonder what I could have said in my appeals that would have urged seasoned clergymen to dismiss them as the ramblings of a stalker, here are a couple of examples.

Jeremy Cheezum, Pastor Jeremy Cheezum, Rev. Jeremy Cheezum

I wish I could say I haven’t had cause to revise my impressions.

Jeremy Cheezum, Pastor Jeremy Cheezum, Rev Jeremy Cheezum, Daren Dietmeier, Rev Daren Dietmeier, Pastor Daren Dietmeier, Rev Kevin Hale, Pastor Kevin Hale, Presbyterian Church in America, Presbyterian Church in America PCA, PCA

Facts and Fairness: Using Arizona’s Policies to Expose Restraining Order Iniquity

September 13, 2014June 24, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

I live in Arizona where I was issued a restraining order in 2006 petitioned by a woman I nightly encountered hanging around outside of my house. The restraining order said I was a danger to her husband and shouldn’t be permitted to approach or talk to him.

If you receive a restraining order in my home state, here’s the first thing that greets your eye:

On the basis of the form this warning captions—which looks like it was drafted by someone using a pizza crust as a straightedge—citizens are recorded in state and national police databases as stalkers and violent abusers.

Consider that the immediate impression this warning is meant to give is beware. It naturally excites fear—and if you’ve been falsely accused, a host of other emotions, besides, none of which conduces to calm and lucid thinking.

Something you wouldn’t guess from this “Warning to Defendant” is that if a defendant “disagrees” with an order issued in Arizona, s/he has the statutory right to apply for an appeals hearing at any time during the order’s effectiveness. For example, if the duration of the order is one calendar year, the defendant can take 11 months to assemble his or her appeal and save up, if necessary, to have an attorney represent that appeal.

Here’s the law:

At any time during the period during which the injunction is in effect, the defendant is entitled to one hearing on written request. No fee may be charged for requesting a hearing. A hearing that is requested by a defendant shall be held within ten days from the date requested unless the court finds compelling reasons to continue the hearing. The hearing shall be held at the earliest possible time. An ex parte injunction that is issued under this section shall state on its face that the defendant is entitled to a hearing on written request and shall include the name and address of the judicial office where the request may be filed. After the hearing, the court may modify, quash or continue the injunction.

The statute says the court’s order must inform the defendant that s/he’s entitled to a hearing, but it doesn’t require that the order inform the defendant that s/he has a year (or possibly years) in which to prep and apply for that hearing, that the hearing is free, or that the defendant may be represented by an attorney.

Restraining orders are rhetorical psych-outs. Their language is overtly menacing, and neither the law nor the issuing courthouse gives any consideration to apprising defendants of their rights.

The stress is on apprising defendants, who are presumed to suck (sight unseen), of what rights they’re no longer deemed worthy of.

Appreciate that the court’s basis for issuing the document capped with the “Warning” pictured above is nothing more than some allegations from the order’s plaintiff, allegations scrawled on a form and typically made orally to a judge in four or five minutes.

In the courthouse where the order issued against me was obtained, restraining order petitioners file into a room like a small bus station terminal, submit their applications, wait for an audience with a judge, chat with him or her for a few minutes, and leave.

That’s it.

Consequences of receiving an order of the court whose merits are determined on this basis include registration in state and national law enforcement databases, and may also include loss of entitlement to home, children, and possessions, and loss of employment.

In contravention of due process, orders are issued against defendants that may deny them liberties and property without the court’s hearing from them at all.

Ever.

In Arizona, unless a defendant requests a hearing before a judge, that’s an end on the process. No judge will even have learned what s/he looks like, and the truth of the plaintiff’s claims will never have been controverted—claims, to reiterate, that were made in a few minutes and could include anything from annoyance to physical or sexual violence.

Such claims often amount to nothing more certain than finger-pointing.

(Docket time afforded by the court to the testimony of defendants who go to the trouble of appealing rulings based on such claims, incidentally, is about 15 minutes. The cost of attorney representation at an appeals hearing may be $2,000 to $5,000.)

The only provision the law or the court makes for discouraging false testimony (some motives for which are here) is this one, which predictably appears at the very end of the application form:

The plaintiff signs below.

Applicants aren’t of course told what “perjury” is, and they’re certainly not told it’s a felony crime that carries a prison term (as it is and does in Arizona and many other states). Lying to the court is never sanctioned or prosecuted, anyway.

Recent posts on this blog were answers to dismissal by a doctor of laws of criticisms that the restraining order process is unfair. The process would have to be far more deliberative than it is, in fact, to be merely “unfair.”

The process is automated.

J’accuse: On Wikipedia and Restraining Order Abuse

January 26, 2014July 6, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“Testilying is a portmanteau of testify and lying. Defendants who embellish their own testimony, particularly when no evidence contradicts them, can…be said to be testilying.”

—Wikipedia

I’ve highlighted this coinage because it’s a clever and colorful one. What it’s drawn my attention to is that while Wikipedia, the universal go-to source for information or corroboration, has entries on “Perjury,” “Abuse of process,” “Malicious prosecution,” “False accusation,” “False allegation of child sexual abuse,” “False accusation of rape,” “False evidence,” “Scapegoating,” “Miscarriage of justice,” “Legal abuse,” and “Restraining order,” an entry on restraining order abuse or false allegations on restraining orders is conspicuously absent.

And bump-bump-bum there used to be one.

I’ve resisted joining the conspiracy crowd, because I haven’t frankly detected any intelligence in the administration of restraining orders that would suggest the existence of some sinister, overarching plot. Glad-handing, cronyism, money motives, power mania, and rote automation, yes. Evil ingenuity, no (except in the trenches).

When you perceive a conspicuous absence like this, though, you have to wonder just how nonpartisan and free-ranging Wikipedia really is.

The page that used to be up was discounted as lacking a meritorious basis and not representing a topic of broad social interest (“No indication that this article…covers a notable and/or neutral topic”). It was brief, to be sure, but certainly could have been developed, and my understanding of how Wikipedia works is that pages are fleshed out and refined by the cooperative efforts of various contributors. Since e-How recognizes that restraining order allegations are falsified and offers tutorials on how to combat false restraining orders, move for their vacation and expungement, etc., Wikipedia’s recusancy is curious.

Certainly there are any number of Wikipedia pages devoted to topics of interest to a highly select few. I’m sure I could learn all about the author of some obscure cookbook if I wished. Or a B-movie actress, manga villain, or obsolete gadget.

No topic defies neutral qualification, and since Wikipedia’s own “Restraining order” page recognizes that restraining orders are widely claimed to be misused, and since restraining orders are furthermore issued against millions of people every year across the globe, restraining order abuse can hardly be dismissed as a trivial topic or one unworthy of attention and elucidation. That’s its being disregarded owes to avoidance of a sensitive subject is a more credible explanation.

If Wikipedia has a page on cannibalism—and I’m sure it does—a page devoted to restraining order abuse is palpably overdue.

“a restraining order ruined my life”: A Partial Catalog of Search Engine Queries Leading to This Blog on a Single Day

March 5, 2013July 13, 2023Moderator 48 Comments

The 148 search engine terms that appear below—at least one to two dozen of which concern false allegations—are ones that brought readers to this blog between the hours of 12 a.m. and 7:21 p.m. yesterday (and don’t include an additional 49 “unknown search terms”).

Were it the case that only 12 of the thousands of restraining orders issued on a given day were based on false allegations, the number of fraudulent restraining orders generated by our courts in a single year would be 4,380 (the recipients of which may have to live, for example, with false allegations of stalking or domestic violence on their public records, and may besides have been forcibly evicted from their homes, possibly at gunpoint). This absurdly conservative casualty toll of restraining order abuse ignores lives peripherally affected by it, including those of spouses, boy- and girlfriends, and children and other family members.

It’s in fact estimated by extrapolation from government studies that a majority of the two to three million restraining orders issued each year are either “unnecessary” (that is, frivolous) or grounded on trumped-up allegations. Statistics concerning restraining orders (for example, the number of them that are thrown out on appeal, often at a cost of thousands of dollars to their defendants) either aren’t compiled or aren’t made readily available to the public by our judicial system—nor is there any way of determining the incident rates of depression, stress-related injury and disease, alcoholism and drug abuse, job and income loss, suicide or premature death, etc. linked to restraining order abuse.

The number of plaintiffs prosecuted for committing felony perjury to obtain restraining orders is zero.

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Knotty, Knotty: False Allegations and Restraining Orders

February 21, 2013June 19, 2023Moderator 20 Comments

Whoever came up with restraining orders must have been a marvel at Twister.

Though they’re billed as civil instruments, restraining orders threaten their recipients with criminal consequences and may be based on allegations of a criminal nature, for example, stalking, sexual harassment, the threat of violence, or assault.

The standard of substantiation applied to criminal allegations is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Since restraining orders are “civil” instruments, however, their issuance doesn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt of anything at all. Approval of restraining orders is based instead on a “preponderance of evidence.” Because restraining orders are issued ex parte, the only evidence the court vets is that provided by the applicant. This evidence may be scant or none, and the applicant may be a sociopath. The “vetting process” his or her evidence is subjected to by a judge, moreover, may very literally comprise all of five minutes.

Based on allegations leveled in this hiccup of time by a person with an obvious interest in seeing you suffer, you are now officially recognized as a stalker, batterer, and/or violent crank and will be served at your home with a restraining order (and possibly evicted from that home) by an agent of the nanny state: “Sign here, please” (“and don’t let the door hit you on your way out”).

The application of a standard of proof to restraining order allegations is circumvented entirely: what a plaintiff claims you are becomes the truth of you. The loophole is neatly conceived (and it’s exploited thousands of times a day). Your record may be corrupted by criminal allegations like those enumerated above based on crocodile tears and arrant lies spilled on a boilerplate bureaucratic form. And these allegations may tear your life apart.

Abuse of restraining orders for malicious ends is a court-catered cakewalk.

How easily it’s exploited for foul purposes, in fact, is the restraining order process’s claim to distinction from other judicial procedures. Even by veteran officers of the court, false allegations made in restraining order petitions are routinely accepted at face value. The reasons for this are manifold:

Judges are trained to regard women’s plaints as legitimate and may never question this prejudice, because it’s shared by the society at large. And to appear to be fair, a judge may apply the same prejudice to allegations brought by men against women.
No judge wants to be the one who refused a restraining order to someone who later comes to harm, because (a) he will have failed a constituent in need and be perceived as having had a hand in her (or his) injury; and (b) because he will be publicly vilified, likely fired or forced to resign, and possibly sued.
Innocent defendants never succeed in making a stink that would put a judge’s career in jeopardy: erring on the side of a plaintiff poses no threat to a judge’s job security, while erring on the side of a defendant may cost him not only his job but considerably more.
It’s in the financial interests of local jurisdictions and their judges to appear to be “cracking down” on society’s bad eggs.

Lying to obtain a restraining order, therefore, is a cinch. Any lowlife can do it.

Disinterest (a.k.a. objectivity, fairness, impartiality, yadda-yadda-yadda) is the essential canon of judicial ethics. Since it’s one that clearly doesn’t obtain in the restraining order process, this judicial procedure is also distinguished from others by its inherent corruptness.

This corruptness is obscured from public awareness by yet another knot. Innocent defendants, in endeavoring to extricate themselves from false allegations—for example, as this author has by clamoring in a blog—cannot help but appear to be the fixated “deviants” that those false allegations represent them to be. The more they resist the allegations, the more they seem to corroborate them.

Appearances are not only the predominant grounds for restraining orders; appearances are what motivated their sketchy conception in the first place (“We’ve got to show we care”), and appearances are what preserve the corrupt process from which they issue from being recognized for the disgrace that it is.

“Take That!”: On Restraining Orders’ Catering to Hurtful Impulses

November 30, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Someone asks: “Can I be charged for talking to someone I put a protective order against?”

Someone else asks: “What to do when [the] petitioner contacts you under a restraining order to tell you she loves you?”

Search engine queries like these regularly lead readers to this blog. Along similar lines, one reader reports his girlfriend moved back in with him after filing a restraining order to forbid him from coming near her. Another reports his girlfriend’s subsequently moving in up the street from him after doing the same. Yet another reports his girlfriend’s stalking him after successfully petitioning for a restraining order against him. Such questions and reports prompt an unavoidable conclusion: restraining orders are obtained impulsively.

Which leads to a further obvious conclusion, namely, that they’re urged too readily by authorities and gotten too easily.

This is the scenario as I’ve seen it play out in the restraining order cases I’ve personally been privy to: party goes to the police to register a complaint, police solicitously “suggest” a restraining order, party—feeling righteously supported by the system and possibly obligated to it—immediately goes to the courthouse and obtains one (which in my state is free and takes less than an hour to acquire).

I’m sure that restraining orders are sometimes taken out by people with very real concerns for their safety and that some of these probably accomplish what they’re meant to (which is to provide their plaintiffs with a sense of security).

I’m unconvinced, however, that this recommendation validates the restraining order process’s annual $4-billion-dollar-plus price tag (and that’s just its cost to the United States). Or the untold costs to defendants of frivolous and fraudulent restraining orders.

After a year of monitoring queries to this blog by restraining order plaintiffs and defendants, this is what I am convinced of: that restraining orders are commonly petitioned in hot blood by plaintiffs who are ushered (or goaded) through the procedure and who neither weigh the consequences of their actions on defendants or ever have the gravity or expense of this action impressed upon them. I’m further convinced that danger is only rarely a legitimate factor in restraining order cases and that motives for petitioning restraining orders are commonly ulterior to those stated—typically boiling down to “Take that!”

Worse, I’m convinced that officers of the court—lawyers and judges—know this very well and are by and large content to play along and profit on the discord and misery they abet.

Oh, and to the man who writes, “Does she still love me if she got a restraining order on me?” the answer, disturbingly, may be yes.

Mind the Gender Gap: On Coming Together against Restraining Orders

November 25, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

This blog was “liked” this week by a blogger whose collegiate disciplines are criminology and sociology. In her own blogs, she tracks news of interest to students of these fields that relates especially to social justice and gender-based violence and oppression (phrases that are often mistaken as exclusively concerning the same thing).

Contrasting her blogs’ contents with those of sites that monitor and editorialize on issues of concern to this blog highlights a divide that must be spanned if progress is to be made toward achieving genuine social justice (the word social being inclusive of both sexes). Informed and objectively critical minds like hers—sensitive both to the needs for civil equality and recognition and redress of violence toward women—are out there, and cultivating their advocacy is vital to reforming the defective restraining order process.

I’m a day laborer and would-be children’s humorist who doesn’t even have Internet service at home. The time I’m able and willing to devote to keeping tabs on movements in the blogosphere is scant. But I have perforce become familiar with many of the sites that focus on restraining order injustice, and the preponderance of respondents to most if not all of them are men whose views on this injustice and the issues that orbit it typically derive from one ideological bias or another: post-70’s misandry, the political favoritism shown to women in the West, the courts’ attack on the family, etc.

I don’t challenge the merits of their beefs, which far from lacking legitimacy are very defensible; but these forums leave little room for unification of awareness and purpose among activists and socially conscientious members of the community at large.

The advocacy rift is often crudely genital: boys siding with boys and girls either seeing the boys as villainous, uncompromising, or exclusionary. Men, reared as and genetically engineered to be rule-oriented beings, equate unfair with wrong (plain and simple). Women, pragmatic and historically the holders of the short end of the stick, aren’t immune to the difference between fair and unfair but know the impetus behind the advent of restraining orders to be an urgent and well-grounded one: men are violent.

Men aren’t going to quit being violent if the restraining order process is dissolved, and the process isn’t going to trend toward fairness if it isn’t. Herein lies the rub.

Both sides of this divide are naturally reactionary, and the mediated space—that occupied by those sensitive to both truth-born positions—is narrow and sparsely populated.

It’s a manifest and uncontestable fact that the restraining order process is biased, unconstitutional, and injurious to both men and women who find themselves on its receiving end. It caters to and rewards fraud, and liars come in both sexes. The process’s flaws will only become clear to the mainstream when proponents of one team or the other stop being opponents.

The split in perspective is as much Cartesian as sexual: body vs. mind. Violence can in fact be of either sort, physical or psycho-emotional. Even rape isn’t strictly a physical act. Many violations, equally traumatic and enduringly oppressive, are perpetrated by men and women who never touch their victims. A false allegation of rape, for example, is a rape. The notion that physical violence is necessarily worse is facile and unexamined. Physical violence is loud and dramatic; psychological violence is invisible and insidiously corrosive. Both can be catastrophic. Calumnious lies are just as likely to drive victims to despair or even conceivably suicide, and the pain of these violations is magnified manyfold in the case of false allegations made in restraining order cases, because victims (men, especially) can’t expect social sympathy, as victims of violence may, but quite the opposite: condemnation. (This was the horror that kept a lid on abuses by Catholic priests for so long. Adults molested as boys were constrained from coming forward by fear of further shame, humiliation, and social indictment. Damages finally awarded to these victims weren’t for their being manhandled so much as their being scarred to the extent that they failed to thrive.)

Mob mentality is what sustains the crooked restraining order process; it won’t be what leads to its revision. A problem is that those who speak against it have never been a direct party to it (except in the case of activist attorneys), and those who have been victimized aren’t talking at all, because they’ve been intimidated into silence. Advocates tend to subscribe to one dogma or the other: good/bad, pro/con. Good or bad, useful or not—these are natural but misleading inquiries. The restraining order process is flawed and destructively pernicious, being both subject to and permissive of wanton abuse. To bring this fact and its poignancy across to a political consensus, the partisan gap must be closed. Finger-pointing is fruitless and even erroneous, because the real culprit is a faceless bureaucratic machine that has no oversight.

And it’s going to take a plurality of arms to pull the lever that stills its gears.

Don’t Let a False Restraining Order Crush Your Spirit: Reach Out and Talk Back

November 14, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 10 Comments

Someone writes (in reply to an earlier commenter): “I too am a victim of a false order of protection and have the same judge. My story is an unbelievable loss of rights with no possible outcome of justice. As I am fearful that publicly telling my story would result in retribution from the judge, I must stay quiet until after I can get out of the court system.”

In the year or so that I’ve maintained this blog, it has received thousands of queries from people abused by restraining orders but considerably fewer actual comments from victims. Most of these comments are anonymous, and many victims seeking answers or consolation have instead emailed me to avoid subjecting themselves to further public scrutiny—understandably. They’re wounded, humiliated, and intimidated and have had it impressed upon them by the state that they if they don’t shut up they’ll be locked up (or suffer more permanent privations).

The restraining order process is sustained on shame and fear and perpetuated because of its political value not its social value, which is dubious at best. The agents of its perpetuation, the courts, are very effective at subduing resistance. Defendants are publicly condemned and threatened with police interference and further forfeitures of rights, and are saddled with allegations that make them afraid besides of social recrimination and rejection—even if those allegations are fraudulent. Avenues of relief are narrow and by and large only available to defendants of means, who, if they prevail, are glad to put the ordeal behind them and move on. The rest are put to flight. And so it goes…on.

First Amendment. Amendment to U.S. Constitution guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. The various freedoms and rights protected by the First Amendment have been held applicable to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Black’s Law Dictionary, sixth ed.).

Due process clause. Two such clauses are found in the U.S. Constitution, one in the [Fifth] Amendment pertaining to the federal government, the other in the [Fourteenth] Amendment which protects persons from state actions. There are two aspects: procedural, in which a person is guaranteed fair procedures and substantive which protects a person’s property from unfair governmental interference or taking. Similar clauses are in most state constitutions. See Due process of law (Black’s Law Dictionary, sixth ed.).

Glaring to anyone who peruses these entries in Black’s Law Dictionary and who’s been put through the restraining order wringer is that the process flouts the very principles on which our legal system was established (when I recall one of the judges in my own case referring to his courtroom as “the last bastion of civilization,” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry). It mocks the guarantee of fair procedures and the protection of a person’s property from unfair governmental interference or seizure—and it does a pretty decent job of convincing defendants that if they complain about it they’ll go from the frying pan into the fire. (For those who don’t have an intimate familiarity with the process, a restraining order case may receive no more than 10 minutes of deliberation from a judge—without ever meeting or hearing from the defendant—and even if appealed, no more than 20 or 30 minutes. That’s minutes. On allegations that often include stalking, battery, or violent threat; that may result in a defendant’s being denied access to home, property, family, and assets, and/or forfeiting his or her job and/or freedom; and that are publicly accessible and may be indefinitely stamped on a defendant’s record. It takes a judge many times longer to digest a meal than a restraining order case.)

If you’re a restraining order defendant, recognize these facts: (1) no matter what truth there is to allegations made against you in a restraining order, your civil rights have been violated by the state (all restraining order defendants are blindsided if not railroaded); (2) the restraining order process’s being constitutionally unsupportable makes it unworthy of respect; and (3) impressions by menacing rhetoric notwithstanding, you have every right to challenge the legitimacy of an unfair procedure (in fact, doing so makes you the last bastion of civilization).

Reject the impulse the process inspires to withdraw and hide. Seek counsel (consult with an attorney—or three—even if you can’t afford to employ one). Get information. Harry court clerks until your questions are answered. Ask others for help in the form of character and witness testimony and affidavits, advice, legwork, or just moral support. Get familiar with a local law library (university librarians, in particular, are very helpful). Request a postponement from the court if you need more time to prepare a defense. File a motion to see a judge if your appeal is normally conducted in writing only. Be assertive. Make the plaintiff work for it.

The restraining order process is a specter that feeds on fear. Switch on the light. Remember that as horrible as the accusations against you may seem or feel to you, they’re not likely to be credited by those who know you—especially if those accusations are completely unfounded. And chances are lawyers you explain them to will yawn rather than wag their fingers at you. They’ve heard it all before and know to take allegations made in restraining orders with a shaker of salt. So don’t hesitate to reach out, particularly if the case against you is trumped up. The last thing you want to do is give it credibility by behaving as though it’s legitimate. Don’t violate a restraining order but do resist its tearing your life apart.

And if one has compromised your life and you’re “out of the court system” as the commenter in the epigraph awaits becoming, recognize that your freedom of speech is sacrosanct. This nation was founded on the blood of men who died to guarantee your right to express yourself.

This travesty, the restraining order process, is a breach of the contract between the state and its citizens, and it endures because defendants feel impotent, helpless, and vulnerable (even after their cases are long concluded). This is how you’re meant to feel, and the effectiveness of this emotional coercion is what ensures that the cogs of the meat grinder stay greased.

Don’t give ’em the satisfaction.

Tic-Tac-Toe: The Vulgar Game of Restraining Orders

November 9, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 1 Comment

I corresponded this year with a woman who was accused of domestic violence by a man against whom the most aggressive act she had made was giving him a friendly hug at a class reunion. This woman was a former city official who walked dogs to raise money for animal shelters and had once volunteered to donate a kidney to a boy in need she had no relation to. She’d dedicated much of her adult life to the service and welfare of others. She was a vegetarian who kept a garden and was rearing a young daughter by herself. They donated $100 to a fundraiser for a surgery needed by my dog to run again (she’s now mending).

How was the accusation against this woman registered with the courts and stamped on her public record? By marking a box on a restraining order application: tic.

You know, a box like you’ll find on any number of bureaucratic forms. Only this box didn’t identify her as white or single or female; it identified her as a batterer. A judge—who’d never met her—reviewed this form and signed off on it (tac), and she was served with it by a constable (toe) and informed she’d be jailed if she so much as came within waving distance of the plaintiff or sent him an email. The resulting distress cost her and her daughter a season of their lives—and to gain relief from it, several thousands of dollars in legal fees.

After requesting that it be postponed, her accuser eventually confessed at her appeals hearing (under cross-examination by her two attorneys) that his allegations were a fraud urged by his wife, who was jealous of his renewed relationship with a former flame. The innocent victim in this story was one of several they had brought restraining orders against. The false allegations cost them nothing: tic, tic, tic.

The lines below from the restraining order application used in my home jurisdiction illustrate how easily serious allegations may be brought against a person the judge approving that application has never met and knows absolutely nothing about. Allegations that may be utterly fraudulent and that take mere seconds to make may cause an innocent defendant years of torment—or even dismantle his or her life.

In a country that prides itself on its system of law, maybe leveling allegations of violence and threat shouldn’t be a kindergarten game of tic-tac-toe. If you agree, get ticked off and say so.

Tic.

False Allegations and Restraining Orders: The Moral Snare

November 4, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator 2 Comments

Someone writes: “I made false allegations to obtain a PPO [an order of protection]. What do I do?”

Disappointingly, this is the first such query this blog has received. Hearteningly, it’s something. And this person should congratulate him- or herself on having a belated pang of conscience.

The ethical, if facile, answer to his or her (most likely her) question is have the order vacated and apologize to the defendant and offer to make amends. The conundrum is that this would-be remedial conclusion may prompt the defendant to seek payback in the form of legal action against the plaintiff for unjust humiliation and suffering. (Plaintiffs with a conscience may even balk from recanting false testimony out of fear of repercussions from the court. They may not feel entitled to do the right thing, because the restraining order process, by its nature, makes communication illegal.)

The lion’s share of the blame for fraud and its damages, of course, clearly falls on the shoulders of plaintiffs—the knots are theirs to untie—but the court should also recognize culpability.

The restraining order process is a honeypot to people nursing a grudge: it’s cheap, convenient, and accommodating. Its making the means to lash out readily available to anyone with a malicious impulse might even be called entrapment. And the court neither acknowledges this process’s consequences to wrongly accused defendants nor impresses upon plaintiffs the consequences to them of making false allegations.

(One defendant I corresponded with this year—who happily succeeded in having the order against her quashed months and thousands of dollars later—was clawing her hair out and dosing herself to sleep. Her young daughter was traumatized by the episode, too. She was accused of domestic violence by a man she’d briefly renewed a friendship with. He was put up to baselessly attacking her through the courts by his wife, who felt jealous—which he admitted in court after dragging the defendant through hell.)

By definition, a civil process shouldn’t foster discord and distress. Maybe lawmakers should mandate a cooling-off period before judges are authorized to approve restraining orders, as they do with handgun purchases.

Or maybe they should put this corrupt institution on ice.

Lying and Restraining Orders: How the Justice System Doesn’t NOT Encourage Perjury

October 31, 2012July 25, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

A woman writes: “What was the legislative intent of having the petitioner sign under oath in a civil TRO [temporary restraining order]…?”

The question seems ingenuous enough. The answer, obvious to anyone who’s run afoul of the restraining order racket, is that people lie.

Less ingenuous is the state’s faith that a warning against perjury in fine print on the last page of a restraining order application (that its petitioner has just spent 20 minutes filling out) is going to discourage a liar from signing his or her name to the thing. (In my county this “warning” reads, “Under penalty of perjury, I swear or affirm the above statements are true to the best of my knowledge….” No explanation of perjury or its penalties is provided.)

If the courts really sought to discourage frauds and liars, the consequences of committing perjury (a felony crime whose statute threatens a punishment of two years in prison—in my state, anyhow) would be detailed in bold print at the top of page 1. What’s there instead? A warning to defendants that they’ll be subject to arrest if the terms of the injunction that’s been sprung on them are violated.

Led by the dated dictum that it should in no way discourage would-be restraining order petitioners, the state relegates its token warning against giving false testimony to the tail end of the application where it will most likely be disregarded.

And why not? Perjury is never actually prosecuted.

What this woman’s question reveals is (1) that the average petitioner doesn’t equate statements made on restraining order applications and in affidavits with sworn testimony given in a courtroom, and (2) that neither the consequences to plaintiffs of making inaccurate, misleading, or intentionally false statements to the court nor the consequences to defendants of being emotionally saddled with a restraining order are seriously weighed.

After a more complete digestion of this woman’s question, the unavoidable answer to it is that the legislative intent of having the petitioner sign under oath is plausible deniability of the process’s inviting and rewarding fraudulent abuse.

The Problems with Restraining Orders: Flaws, Flimflam, and Other F-words

October 29, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

Their administration is both biased and anti-feminist

The justice system takes it as axiomatic that plaintiffs who say they are victims are victims, especially when these plaintiffs are female. This policy ignores the obvious, namely, that people lie. Moreover, the court’s showing partiality toward female plaintiffs to redress a perceived inequity between the sexes only fosters reverse discrimination and exhibits contempt for the essential feminist conviction that women merit equal treatment under the law—no less and no more. This disdained expectation, the right to equal treatment, is the same one that restraining orders were originally conceived to acknowledge and validate. Women are still patronized. They’re just patronized in a more favorable way (“There, there, dear”).

They play into the fabulistic and sympathy-seeking tendencies of women

When women are in love, the objects of their affections can do no wrong. They exhale perfume. A spurned woman or one who otherwise nurses a grudge, however, will vilify a man to his toenails. A slight is an attack, a slammed phone is an act of violence, a hand balled in frustration is a death threat. Women, long habituated to the practice by conversations with other women, anatomize the smallest details of masculine conversation and conduct, and apply to them the interpretations that suit the color of their feelings. Exaggeration, embellishment, and caricature in conversation with judges, which is essentially what the brief interviews between judges and restraining order plaintiffs amount to, are to be expected. Judges, subjected to the equivalent of sensitivity training on steroids, accept statements made in these conversations as the equivalent of testimony, which, if made on a witness stand before a jury, would in fact be held to much higher standards of objectivity, accuracy, and accountability.

They’re more effective as instruments of abuse than as instruments of protection

The reliability of restraining orders as shields against violent abuse is iffy at best. Anyone dedicated to doing another harm is unlikely to be deterred by a piece of paper, which may just fan the flames. As vindictive weapons against those who never intended their plaintiffs any harm, however, restraining orders can’t be beat. They demolish lives.

Guilty verdicts are foregone conclusions

The nature of restraining orders being to silence, fetter, humiliate, and intimidate, efforts by defendants to dissuade judges from their institutionally schooled biases are enfeebled and easily disregarded. Defendants who resist are already presumed guilty, and their ability to defend themselves is compromised both by this prejudgment and their consciousness of it. Defendants (men, especially) are likely to file into appeals hearings feeling the presence of a noose around their necks: heads bowed, postures shrunken, voices pinched. Defendants, before they’ve even had a chance to hear the allegations made against them, let alone respond to them, have been confronted by a police officer at their homes and served a judgment by the state: harasser, stalker, deviant, aggressor, villain. When you feel judged, you look and sound guilty.

The system is broken

The failure of judicial oversight committees and state lawmakers and administrators to impose the expectation of fairness on the restraining order process provides judges of a certain bent the opportunity to let loose on defendants with both barrels, indiscriminately and with impunity (judges of this disposition, what is more, seem to be in the majority—maybe because they like adjudicating in this arena). This misconduct is not only sanctioned but oftentimes encouraged and applauded (“Throw the bums to the curb! Atta boy!”). No statutory consequences for plaintiffs’ giving false testimony are enforced, nor are judges held to their canons of office. The victims of abuses by plaintiffs and judges have no advocates or recourses: there’s no impartial ear within the system to turn to. Even those on the outside, journalists and civil rights advocates, shy away from the political razor wire that protects this airtight system.

Summary

The restraining order process is f*ed, and so is everyone it snares. Even the wrongly accused who manage to escape it—like bugs sucked into a vacuum cleaner and dumped from the bag—are lastingly damaged.

“I Felt Like a Sex Offender”: More Stories of Restraining Order Abuse

October 13, 2012September 1, 2023Moderator Leave a comment

“I’ve never been treated like that in my life! I felt like a sex offender.”

That was the reaction of a Georgia man, a former English teacher and aspiring songwriter who speaks with a gentle drawl, after his appeals hearing for a restraining order spitefully filed by his on-again, off-again girlfriend (whose mental stability was also on-again, off-again: he had turned to find her pointing a gun at him not long before). “We were like a married couple,” he told me. He was reeling from being publicly berated by the judge, a complete stranger, whose condemnation was based on an evidentiary review as lengthy and thoughtful as a trip to the men’s room.

“It was all over in about 10 minutes,” he said. He was rattled and still riding a wave of adrenaline. Barely out of the courthouse, he was concerned that the restraining order would pop up every time he was stopped for a routine traffic violation and that it would cling to his record forever and foul his ambitions.

Rightly.

All of those who’ve contacted me in the past year about their own cases have been identically tormented. They’re chafed and gnawed at not only by the injustice of this karaoke process—scripted score, add voice—but by the implications of having a restraining order on their permanent records, which implications are exactly as this man characterizes them: aggression, violence, sexual deviancy, etc.

In recent weeks and months, I’ve been contacted by an entrepreneur and Ph.D. whose entire life has been dismantled by assaults made through the courts both on him and his business—along with maliciously anonymous peripheral attacks like phony Craigslist ads and a webpage pornographically parodying a site crafted by his children. He says there have even been attempts on his life, compelling his wife and him to separate from their kids and relocate them to another part of the country for their safety. These assaults—including falsified restraining orders and bogus legal motions by a corrupt attorney (a phrase that may be redundant)—dominate his every waking moment. “I fight for my life every day,” he writes.

Another man, the victim of his ex-wife, a serial restraining order abuser intent to deny him access to his children, writes that he’s tempted to forfeit his visitation rights just to protect them from the fallout. “Recently she called me and asked if she could change some things on our parenting plan. I didn’t agree with the changes,” he writes, “and she told me I would regret it if I didn’t. Two weeks later I was being served with a restraining order. I didn’t show up to court, because this was the third time she had done this, and I was just tired of fighting.”

One woman, a young attorney barely out of law school who was seduced by an older, married peer (also an attorney), was issued an emergency restraining order petitioned on fraudulent grounds, the motive for which was no doubt to discard her and hastily shut her up. She aspires to work in federal law enforcement, a career ambition that stands to be permanently derailed by this man’s viciously selfish manipulations. “Please help,” she closes.

Yet another man, whose ex-wife is an attorney whose new husband is also attorney, has been hit with two restraining orders (the first dismissed as groundless; the second in effect pending appeal) since his ex-wife heard four months ago that he planned to remarry. “They are trying to ruin my wedding and my relationship with my fiancée,” he writes. “They thrive on using the kids as pawns. How do I protect myself from this?” He and his ex-wife have been divorced for 10 years.

Most recently a woman reports she’s been cattily threatened with a restraining order by her neighbor, a disturbed woman who monitors her every move and had physically assaulted her years before. She’s waiting apprehensively for the other shoe to drop.

The themes that run through these accounts are common ones: abuses by attorneys who know how to bend the system to their own self-serving ends, abuses by vindictive lovers and ex-lovers, abuses by the deranged, abuses by the parasitic.

The victims in these stories are the casualties who get whisked under the rug, purportedly in the interest of serving the greater public good.

Many more stories of restraining order abuses can found among the comments on various posts in this blog, and hundreds if not thousands more on this e-petition (the number of respondents to which has nearly trebled since the summer of 2011 when this blog was conceived and published).

Not surprisingly, most of the fraction of fraudulent restraining order victims who do summon the courage to share their stories withhold their names.

The restraining order process remains a crude, unprincipled, and stigmatizing one. Abuse is rampant and largely abetted by the courts, and the tide shows few signs of turning—though one recent visitor indicates that judges in his or her district have imposed a moratorium on issuing protection orders (no reason was given).

If the momentum of this runaway steamroller is finally arrested, it won’t be the result of studies, statistics, or reasoned appeals to social conscience. This debauched institution is all but immune to facts, as any of its victims can well attest. Change will only occur, because victims who refuse to quietly tolerate unjust punishments and public excoriation defiantly talk back.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag false testimony