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.

“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).

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.