obscurantism noun
opposition to knowledge and enlightenment
oxford dictionary and thesaurus, american edition
The Oregon State Bar Client Assistance Office (CAO) made me wait a long time for their response to the ethics complaints against Marc Mohan and Michael Fuller, first telling me that they would make their determination in the summer and then setting themselves a deadline at the end of October that they failed to meet. Finally on November 18th, 2024 they emailed me their decisions.
The gist of the dispositions of the CAO is that the complaint against Marc Mohan is proceeding to the next step and that the complaint against Michael Fuller is being dismissed. This is, of course, a completely unsurprising result. Marc Mohan is a nobody in the Oregon legal community, a one-man legal firm that exists almost in name only, who has no meaningful influence to provide him any protection from accountability for his wrongdoing. Michael Fuller, on the other hand, is a partner at a large law firm, OlsenDaines, who has likely already been enriching that firm for many years through his exploitation of legal loopholes.
Furthermore, the unethical ways in which Michael Fuller has been using protective orders to create backchannels between lawyers on opposite sides of a case that their clients are not privy to and thereby to undermine the relationship between an opposing party and the opposing party’s counsel may well be common practice for other lawyers besides Michael Fuller, both in his own firm and in others.
Over a year ago, while my defamation case was still open, I was at a happy hour event here in Portland where I got into a conversation with several other attendees who had been soured by bad experiences with legal cases. Multiple people expressed that there was a sense in which the opposing lawyers were on the same side and that they were happy to drag things out in a way that drove up expenses for the clients on all sides. More money for all the lawyers, regardless of who wins.
In retrospect, it strikes me now that in some of the cases of the people I was talking to, there might have been protective orders in place and the opposing lawyers might have been having a lot of communication that the clients did not know about. The protective order itself is a publicly filed document, but how many people actually think to check whether their lawyer and the one on the other side signed agreements that they did not tell you about?
Furthermore, “publicly filed” does not mean that something is so easy to discover. Lawyers who are barred in Oregon and who pay into the computer system get the ability to download any publicly filed document from any court case directly onto their computers. However, those of us who are not lawyers—even those of us representing ourselves pro se—do not have the capability to see the publicly filed court documents on a computer attached to the internet. The only way we can access them is to walk into the courthouse and go to one of the kiosks, which are not connected to the internet, and search through the public filings there. If we find a document that we want a copy of, we have to request either a printout or a digital copy be sent to us.
Most of those kiosks do not even have chairs in front of them, because you certainly do not want to make it easy for an outsider to spend a lot of time digging through the documents that you only want your cabal to have privileged access to. Fortunately, I learned that the legal library in the courthouse has a few kiosks with seating.
I have made the following points in earlier writings, but let me reiterate that I have good reasons for believing that these protective orders are used widely across many cases. For one thing, Michael Fuller started asking for a protective order at the very beginning of my case. It is obvious that he must do this all the time. Furthermore, as I mentioned in The Smokescreen, I first learned about the protective order in my case from an associate at a completely different law firm that was not involved in my case, and in our phone and email conversations the associate did everything he could to minimize the importance of this protective order. In the beginning of our court hearing, the complete audio of which is at The Prejudice, Judge Kelly Skye was also dismissive of my concerns about a protective order being in place against my will in my case, going so far as to call it “very routine in litigation.”
Perhaps these protective orders are very routine in litigation. But they should not be. They are a disgustingly unethical means for lawyers to talk behind the backs of their clients. This is not to the advantage of the clients who are paying for the representation of these lawyers. It is not to the advantage of the court in having fair hearings based on full visibility into all the relevant facts. The only parties who are advantaged by this feature of the system are the lawyers, who can unethically work in collaborative ways to the disadvantage of their clients on both sides of a case without their communication being seen by either their clients or the court.
As such, it is no surprise to me that a completely disinterested lawyer who was not involved in my case was so dismissive of my concerns about the protective order. “Don’t worry about that. That’s exactly how we screw you over and enrich ourselves and the lawyers on the other side.”
Given the nature of these protective orders and the exploitative ways in which they are used, who is the last group in the world who should be in charge of ethics hearings about such exploitation? The lawyers, of course. How in the world can we expect the Oregon State Bar to hold Michael Fuller responsible for unethical use of a protective order? To challenge his ability to do that would be to endanger a loophole that makes money for many other lawyers too.
As the leaders of multiple organizations, CoCo, WGPO, NASPA, WESPA, and now even the Oregon State Bar, have put protection of their own interests above fair treatment of me, there has been a common pattern in many of their communications, and I only learned recently that there is a word for it: obscurantism. When organizations do not have a good defense to the accusations against them or the people they are trying to protect, or when they are challenged on their false accusations about an outsider, they will give deliberately vague and misleading answers to avoid direct confrontation with the truth that they are violating.
Mr. Fuller’s Use of the Protective Order as an Unethical Legal Weapon
The Oregon State Bar’s response to my ethics complaint against Michael Fuller is a perfect example of obscurantism. The third paragraph gives a succinct and accurate summary of my complaint:
You expressed concerns that Michael Fuller, opposing counsel in a civil suit you filed, made false statements to the court, and used a Stipulated Protective Order you were unaware of to bully and harass your attorney to withdraw from representing you. Because it appeared that your concerns might implicate our rules, we asked Mr. Fuller to respond.
dismissal of ethics complaint against michael fuller, paragraph 3
The next paragraph is designed to look and sound like a rationale for upholding Mr. Fuller’s side, but it is irrelevant to my accusations1 and is instead a defense to a nonsensical accusation that I did not make.
In his response, through his attorney, David Elkanich, Mr. Fuller stated that he was unaware that your attorney did not have your agreement to sign the Stipulated Protective Order, and that he did not make any false statements, but only what he reasonably believed to be truthful based on his clients’ representations and evidence. He pointed out that he did not have a duty to communicate with you directly regarding the case because you were represented by counsel.
dismissal of ethics complaint against michael fuller, paragraph 4
My ethics complaint against Marc Mohan was primarily about his disclosure failures, including his failure to disclose the protective order to me. I never stated in anything I submitted to the Oregon State Bar that Michael Fuller had committed an ethics violation by not telling me about the protective order. I never stated that Mr. Fuller had an obligation to tell me anything.
In my ethics complaint against Michael Fuller, I was very clear that my concerns with respect to the protective order were that there were no good grounds for putting Terry Kang’s email under the protective order and that it was an intentional move by Michael Fuller to make accusations against me without me being able to see and respond to them.
Ms. Kang’s July 6th email had no private or personal information in it that would require it being labeled as “Confidential – Attorney’s Eyes Only.” There is only one reason that it was marked as such: so that Mr. Fuller could manipulate Mr. Mohan into abandoning my defense without me being able to see what they were talking about and without me being able to defend myself from the false accusations that both Ms. Kang and Mr. Fuller made…
I wish Mr. Mohan had been wise and strong enough not to fall for Mr. Fuller’s bullying and deception. That said, the extent to which the Oregon State Bar tolerates using a protective order to create a back channel of communication between opposing counsels and putting their clients into a position where they are dealing with accusations that they are not allowed to see makes a mockery of our justice system.
Although the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment technically may not apply, because I was not the accused in a criminal prosecution, the same principle should apply. Anyone who is accused of anything should have the right to know who is accusing him or her and what the
accusations are. Anything less than that is Kafkaesque.
follow-up statement about Michael Fuller’s ethics violations to CAO, sixth paragraph of page 4 & last two paragraphs of page 6
If you read the letter that Michael Fuller sent to Marc Mohan on July 6, 2023 that accompanied Terry Kang’s email, and the letter that Mr. Mohan sent me on the next day threatening to withdraw from my case,2 it is obvious that Mr. Fuller planted the false story of my supposed witness tampering in Mr. Mohan’s head and that that particular falsehood was exactly Mr. Mohan’s rationale for attempting to abandon my case.3
Mr. Fuller also made clear in a statement in our recorded court hearing that his specific intention in designating the Terry Kang email “Confidential – Attorney’s Eyes Only” was to prevent me from seeing it, thereby deliberately putting me in a position whereby I could not know what I was being accused of and defend myself to my own lawyer.
It was an email that was sent from a third party to my clients which we produced under the protective order to avoid potential retaliation. The email was, I would say, it was critical of plaintiff and accused plaintiff of various things. And so we designated it confidential.
Michael Fuller’s justification for why the terry kang email was marked “confidential – attorney’s eyes only”, starting at 5:19 into the hearing
It is indisputable that Michael Fuller intentionally created a situation in which he used false claims about me to scare my lawyer into being afraid to represent me and intentionally attempted to keep me from having any legal way to see those false claims and to see who said them. Furthermore, it is indisputable that I have demonstrated this fully to the Oregon State Bar, and that they have deemed it acceptable behavior for a lawyer who is barred by them.
This is clearly grotesque and unjust, and it means that the State of Oregon has a moral duty to step in and prevent both individual lawyers and the Oregon State Bar from getting away with this. If the Judicial Department of the State of Oregon cannot prevent this themselves, then the Oregon State Legislature has a responsibility to change the laws regarding protective orders to ensure that this cannot happen anymore, because the Oregon State Bar has made clear through its actions that it will not do the right thing, and that it wants to continue to allow lawyers to exploit protective orders in this unethical way.
Mr. Fuller’s Dishonesty
Now let us look at the Oregon State Bar’s mealy-mouthed phrasing of their defense to Michael Fuller’s dishonesty:
In his response, through his attorney, David Elkanich, Mr. Fuller stated… that he did not make any false statements, but only what he reasonably believed to be truthful based on his clients’ representations and evidence…
We find that there is insufficient evidence to support a reasonable belief that Mr. Fuller may have violated the rules of professional conduct with respect to making false statements.
dismissal of ethics complaint against michael fuller, excerpts from paragraphs 4 & 5
Paragraph 4 purports to be a summary of Michael Fuller’s argument, not a statement by the Bar itself, and only in paragraph 5 does the Bar state its own findings. There is a significant disparity between those two paragraphs, as the snippets I have quoted above highlight. The Bar does not say that Mr. Fuller did not make false statements, only that “there is insufficient evidence … that Mr. Fuller may have violated the rules of professional conduct with respect to making false statements.” That is tantamount to admitting that he did make false statements but saying that he did so in a way that he is allowed to get away with.
But there is a bigger problem here, and that is that the Oregon State Bar is in paragraph 4 of their dismissal letter misrepresenting the arguments in Mr. Fuller’s two defense documents. I gave a comprehensive description of every falsehood that Mr. Fuller put into writing in his letters to my former attorney, to me, and in his emails to court staff, of which there were many, in addition to mentioning one time that he told a lie directly to the judge’s face in our hearing. The only one of these lies that Mr. Fuller even attempted to explain away was the lie that was spoken in the courtroom. Aside from the footnote which argued why that lie was not really a lie,4 the only other time that the documents even attempt to dispute that Mr. Fuller was lying was: “Mr. Koenig claims that Mr. Fuller made false accusations about Mr. Koenig’s alleged witness tampering. Not so.“5 That’s it. The entire substance of the argument against him lying on that occasion is a two word denial.
In short, I pointed out dozens of times that Mr. Fuller lied, and his defense only even bothered to address two specific times that he lied. And in the case of only one of those two lies did the defense even bother to give a rationale for why it should not be considered a lie. So not only did Mr. Fuller not even bother to contest most of my accusations of his lying, but also the Oregon State Bar was intentionally misrepresenting the situation when they claimed “Mr. Fuller stated… that he did not make any false statements, but only what he reasonably believed to be truthful based on his clients’ representations and evidence.” He did not say any part of that!
It would be dishonest for the Oregon State Bar to say, “Mr. Fuller stated… that he did not make any false statements,” as a stand-alone sentence. Mr. Fuller literally did not say that he never lied in the communications for this case. But the extra verbiage that the Oregon State Bar tacked on to the end of this sentence is an even more dishonest spin of Mr. Fuller’s defense. He never defended any of his lies by saying they were “what he reasonably believed to be truthful based on his clients’ representations and evidence.” The Oregon State Bar is making up this argument to let him off the hook.
There are three places in Mr. Fuller’s defense documents in which the phrase “reasonably believed” is used, and all three of them are in the exact same sentence:
Mr. Fuller reasonably believed that Mr. Koenig had agreed to the terms of the SPO [Stipulated Protective Order].
A sentence repeated three times in Michael Fuller’s first response to the cao and second response to the cao
So the only thing that Mr. Fuller used a “reasonable belief” defense on, was that he reasonably believed I knew about the protective order. Again, this was an irrelevant defense to an accusation that I did not make. He never made the argument that any of the falsehoods he put in writing in the case were things that he reasonably believed to be true.
When the Oregon State Bar intentionally generates new arguments to defend Mr. Fuller in their one page letter dismissing the ethics complaint against him and falsely portrays those arguments as something that Mr. Fuller said, we can be sure that the Oregon State Bar has zero intention of giving a fair reading to the facts of this ethics complaint. The purpose of this letter is to obscure Mr. Fuller’s ethics violations with vague verbiage specifically designed to help him get away with them. More concisely, the purpose of the letter is obscurantism.
I do not believe that honest readers need to have their intelligences insulted by me going back and relisting all of the lies that Mr. Fuller told, that both he in his defense to the ethics complaint and the Oregon State Bar in their dismissal of it ignored. But I do think it is worth refocusing on one time in particular when Mr. Fuller lied egregiously.
I began my Supplemental Response to the Clinchy’s Special Motions to Strike by highlighting the massive lies that Mr. Fuller told in subsection 6 of the FACTUAL BACKGROUND section of the Special Motions to Strike,6 including that (1) my taking the Clinchys to court for defamation was something that I did in lieu of appealing my NASPA suspension, and that (2) my first attorney Clifford Davidson “was either unwilling or unable to certify a complaint.“
I provided ample explanation and evidence to show that (1) my writing of the appeal to NASPA was happening concurrently with the pursuit of legal claims against the Clinchys, and that (2) the reason that I did not pursue legal claims with Mr. Davidson was that it was never part of our legal agreement to do so. Not only did Mr. Davidson and I agree that we were not the right match to work together on this legal case, but the last word that I had gotten from him on the subject was that he thought I did have a worthwhile case.
What this means is that the entirety of subsection 6 is a baseless lie. Mr. Fuller made up his own false conjectures about my working relationship with Mr. Davidson to peddle a false narrative that my court case was not worthwhile in the eyes of an experienced attorney and a false narrative that I was failing to go through the NASPA appeals process in a reasonable way. What is all the more shameless is that he put this in the section of the motion called “FACTUAL BACKGROUND.”
Now, the Oregon State Bar might make a specious argument that what Mr. Fuller said in that subsection 6 was not technically a lie, because Mr. Fuller did not know that the things he was saying were false. That there was a chance he was guessing correctly about why Mr. Davidson and I had stopped working together and why it took a while for me to submit my appeal to NASPA. That is a garbage argument in my opinion. (“Oh, lawyers can make up any unlikely, grotesque argument they want, with no evidence to support what they say, as long as they are not in possession of evidence that contradicts it.” Please.)
But here is the thing. Even if the Oregon State Bar could get away with making the argument that it is okay for Mr. Fuller to lie to the court in the way he did in subsection 6, because he did not know any better, it is indisputable that after Mr. Fuller received my Supplemental Response to the Special Motions to Strike, he was now in possession of evidence proving that what he wrote in that subsection 6 was false.
And yet, in Mr. Fuller’s first response to the CAO in the section called “Brief Factual Background” he wrote the following:
I have attached as Exhibit A, a copy of Evans Clinchy’s Special Motion to Strike so that you can understand the factual background.
michael fuller first response to CAO, page 2, end of third paragraph of “Brief factual background” section
So he doubled down on his lying by including the entirety of the same Special Motion to Strike document in his defense to the Oregon State Bar, which included that same FACTUAL BACKGROUND section with that same subsection 6. And he did not just include the document; he specifically directed the reader to the “factual background” portion of the document that I had already debunked. So this means that he intentionally lied to the Oregon State Bar while in possession of evidence that proved he was lying.
I pointed this out when I wrote to the Bar:
Not only did Mr. Fuller have the gall to put the title “Factual Background” on a section of a public court document that he filled with made-up stories about the plaintiff and the attorneys the plaintiff worked with, he also had the even greater gall to refer to the same lies in a section called “Brief Factual Background” of his letter to the CAO, after the plaintiff had already disproven those lies.
follow-up statement about Michael Fuller’s ethics violations to CAO, page 1, second paragraph of “Dishonesty And Bad Faith Litigation Conduct In Motion To Strike” section
Mr. Fuller’s entire response to this instance of pointing out his lies was the following:
Mr. Koenig alleges that Mr. Fuller engaged in dishonesty and bad faith litigation in drafting and filing the Special Motion to Strike on behalf of his clients, and Mr. Koenig relies on his Supplemental Response to the Motion to Strike, as well as his Declaration filed in support, to suggest that Mr. Fuller’s recitation of facts was incorrect. This is not accurate at all: Mr. Koenig lost that motion, and the court agreed with the factual and legal argument presented by Mr. Fuller. There is no basis to suggest that Mr. Fuller engaged in bad conduct in filing or arguing the successful Motion to Strike.
michael fuller second response to CAO, bottom of page 1 & top of page 2
As is clearly demonstrated in The Prejudice and in the audio recording of our hearing linked therein, Judge Kelly Skye did not read the Supplemental Response to the Motion to Strike at all, and she repeatedly refused to hear anything about it or anything else about Mr. Fuller’s bad faith litigation conduct.
Mr. Fuller’s defense here does not even deny his dishonesty and bad faith litigation conduct. It simply makes the case that, because the Special Motion to Strike was upheld, all of the lies in it need to be accepted as truth now. Furthermore, it implies that, because I lost that motion, the arguments and evidence I provided that prove Mr. Fuller was lying and engaging in bad faith litigation conduct do not matter.
This is a completely Trumpian argument. “We won. Never mind that we lied and used bad faith litigation conduct. Never mind that the judge didn’t read the evidence and argument you provided that proved we were lying and that proved our bad faith litigation conduct. The judge already made her decision, and therefore we get to pretend that everything we said was true and that nothing you said was. The winners get to decide what is right or wrong. The winners get to decide what truth is. We are not guilty of lying and of bad faith litigation conduct because we got away with it in plain sight.”
A Further Message for the Oregon State Bar
The Oregon State Bar’s letter dismissing the ethics complaint against Michael Fuller gave me the option of appealing their decision to the Oregon State Bar General Counsel. I will be sending a copy of this blog post to the General Counsel to serve as my appeal. All of the rationale for the appeal is contained above.
I ask the Oregon State Bar to reconsider their decision and to disbar, or at least censure, Michael Fuller for his obvious ethics violations, as I have clearly shown not only that he behaved unethically but also that the Oregon State Bar has lied in their response to try to help him get away with it. However, I do not believe that the Oregon State Bar is suddenly going to start behaving ethically and honestly when they have already committed themselves to a contrary course of action.
I am not holding my breath for the Oregon State Bar to change their mind, and I do not think that they got their decisions entirely wrong. To a certain extent, I think that I got just about the best possible result I could have hoped for from their Client Assistance Office, even though I did not from the Professional Liability Fund. Because Marc Mohan was my lawyer and Michael Fuller was not, Mr. Mohan had a higher level of professional duty to me. As such, Mr. Mohan is the only one of these two lawyers I could have made a malpractice claim against, and the standard for me to prove an ethical violation by an opposing lawyer is understandably higher.
If I look at this story in terms of whose ethical violations wronged me directly and personally, I accept the idea that Mr. Mohan is the more guilty party. Mr. Fuller had an obligation to his clients, the Clinchys, to represent them as vigorously and effectively as possible, and if he is working within a system that tolerates his disgustingly unethical behavior, I cannot say that it is entirely his fault that he engages in such behavior.
Lawyers lie and deceive. This is an obvious truism that none of us would dispute. People get cases against them improperly dismissed all the time because judges get fooled. This is hardly a unique outcome. It is ridiculous to expect that a State Bar, an organization run by lawyers for the purpose of supporting their own profession, would suddenly put the clamp down on lawyers intimidating the other side, deceiving judges, and producing unjust verdicts. A massive amount of money the whole industry makes is on defending guilty people. Of course lawyers have to be able to do these things to survive and thrive as an industry!
I am not the primary victim of Michael Fuller’s ethical violations, nor of the Oregon State Bar’s ethical transgressions in their handling of his case. The primary victims are the Judicial Department of the State of Oregon, the Multnomah County Circuit Court, and Judge Kelly Skye. They are the ones who come across looking foolish because they were conned so badly by an obviously pathologically dishonest Michael Fuller and looking toothless if they let him get away with what he has done because the Oregon State Bar says that it is okay.
I am asking the General Counsel to handle an appeal even though I believe it is very likely that it will not change the decision, because I know that there is no way the General Counsel can defend the Oregon State Bar’s covering up of Michael Fuller’s misdeeds without putting more dishonesty and obscurantism in writing. And my entire reason for doing this is to give the State of Oregon more ammunition with which to punish the Oregon State Bar.
Furthermore, it is not acceptable that even though the Client Assistance Office thinks the ethics case against Marc Mohan is strong enough to proceed to the next level, the Professional Liability Fund refuses to pay anything to me for Marc Mohan’s obvious malpractice.
Update: The Oregon State Bar General Counsel’s response to the appeal is here.
Message for the Multnomah County Circuit Court and My Friends, Enemies, and Frenemies
I will also make a declaration including this blog post in the case for remedial sanctions for contempt against me which is currently being prosecuted by Michael Fuller on behalf of the Clinchys. I have mentioned this case in passing in the last blog post, but to catch readers up, here is the complaint that Michael Fuller filed against me,7 and here is the answer to the complaint that I filed.8 We will be having a hearing about this, presided by Judge Rima Ghandour, at Multnomah County Circuit Court, 1200 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR 97204, courtroom 16B at 8:15 AM on Wednesday, December 11th, 2024.
It is not acceptable for Judge Kelly Skye to make an obviously wrong decision to uphold anti-SLAPP motions based on being persuaded by proven lies and intimidation by a horribly unethical lawyer, and then for the court to act as if the lies and intimidation are outside their jurisdiction and just a matter for the Oregon State Bar to decide on. If the court was fooled by Mr. Fuller’s unethical actions, it has a moral obligation to look into the details of those actions and to fix the bad decision it made that was heavily swayed by those actions.
I already know what the other side will argue in court and what Judge Ghandour might say to me in response to this: That if I thought the decision to uphold the anti-SLAPP motions was unjust, I needed to appeal that decision in the court, and that the deadline to appeal that motion has passed, so now it must be accepted. That the hearing on the complaint for contempt is not the time and place to be having that argument. According to the letter of the law they would be right.
As I already summarized in my answer to the complaint, I was unable to appeal that decision. I will now go into more detail about why. When I use the word “you” over the rest of this document outside of a quote, I am referring to others in my Scrabble community, as well as to other friends and family members whose help I would have appreciated.
I have been fighting against abusive behavior from the Clinchys since 2017 and from their evil lawyer for the last two years. We are coming upon the eight year anniversary of when all of this madness began. And I have been superhuman in my ability to withstand injustice and abuse from so many different parties while keeping finding ways to get back up again and effectively argue for my side. I had a few allies who spoke up for me briefly in 2020, even fewer who spoke up by writing statements of support for me to the Scrabble organizations in 2022, and a lawyer who temporarily tried to help me in the middle of 2023, even though he completely bungled my case and eventually ran away. But for the vast majority of the time I have been fighting this war alone, and it has destroyed my life and psyche.
It was already psychologically devastating when friends were abandoning me and gossiping about me and I was losing opportunities to play Scrabble between 2017 and 2022, while I was shadowboxing with the Clinchys, knowing that they were incessantly disparaging me but not having anything concrete I could respond to. For five years! I spoke up about it only once in that five year period, for about a week or two,9 just turning the other cheek and receiving the abuse in a Christlike way for almost the entire time.
When the Clinchys and Lola lied through their teeth to make this devastating attack on me in April 2022 and the leaders of the Scrabble associations piled on the abuse bandwagon for months afterwards, I took it all in silence. Part of me just wanted to run away and not even try to fight against them. What I learned is that the longer I did not speak up, the greater number of you would feel entitled to attack me. Every email I got from Steven Pellinen, from WGPO, and from CoCo was harassment. Every piece of news I got about Michael Tang making a rule that specifically targeted me, as well as about tournament directors switching their events from NASPA to WGPO/CoCo, while I was getting news that the leaders of WGPO/CoCo were specifically using their false stories about me to give themselves political advantage over NASPA, was further abuse.
The only way I could ever stop the abuse from escalating was to get my story out there publicly and hold every one of these abusers accountable. And I did it almost all by myself. I paid a criminal defense lawyer a few thousand bucks just to provide me editorial support on my initial defense to NASPA in September 2022. Not Mr. Davidson, not Mr. Mohan, a completely different lawyer. I had to, because I did not have any friends, family, or community who were still willing to put the energy into providing me editorial support to fight this war against disinformation. I had already expended all of my friends’ and family’s good will into helping me with editing the writing of the first two blog posts in mid-2020.
And that was just the September 2022 defense. When I found out in November 2022 about the extra statements and that I would have to write a whole other appeal document, the only way I was able to get it written was to pay Marc Mohan to edit it, while he was simultaneously prosecuting my case. (Truly, the editorial support on the appeal document was the only thing he did well the entire time I paid him.)
Everything I have put on the blog since then, starting with The Conspiracy, has been completely on my own with no editor. Everything I did to represent myself pro se by making all the public filings and serving evidence to the lawyers as I described in The Circus, I did by myself.
When I went into Multnomah County Circuit Court on the afternoon of August 16th, 2023 and listened to Judge Kelly Skye’s ridiculously biased and uninformed take on my case and heard her make a decision which would award the other side attorney fees that I had to pay, I was utterly alone. I had no lawyer, no friends, no family members, and no community members with me in the courtroom. Literally everyone else in that room was a lawyer looking to get enriched off my back and an apathetic judge who was happy to let them have their way.
What happened in that courtroom that day has nothing to do with the seven years of abuse I had already received that was started by the Clinchys. No one else in that room even knew that the first name of one of the defendants was Evans. Go back and listen to the hearing. The judge and both other lawyers called him Evan the entire time. I was the only one who correctly named him. What happened in that courtroom does not resemble justice in any way, shape, or form.
I have been finding ways to keep fighting this for years, and all that my fighting has succeeded in doing is producing a greater number of people who have fucked me over harder, whether it was because of malice, dishonesty, herd mentality, intimidation, gullibility, incompetence, or apathy.
After all that, I still found a way to write up my full ethics complaints about Mr. Fuller and Mr. Mohan, and to write up my malpractice claim about Mr. Mohan. I still found the energy and wherewithal to contact every malpractice lawyer I could find in the area, only to be refused by all of them. I still persisted by contacting every law professor I could find at a nearby law school who mentioned anything about “ethics” on their website bio, and I followed up with every law school clinic those professors directed me to. I still persevered by writing letters to my State Senator, State Representative, and State Attorney General. I tried legal aid societies too, but none of them had a clue how to help me. None of these actions got me any legal support.
Maybe after all of that, I should have just found a way to read through all the arcane rules on the Oregon state websites, gone to the court library to ask legal questions, and found a way to make an appeal against the anti-SLAPP motions all by myself. But even superhumans have limits. It was too much for me to do alone.
You know what might have helped? A friend, family member, or community member who sat by my side while we read through the legal websites together and figured out how to file an appeal. Or if we could not sort it out on the websites, maybe that person could have gone to the courthouse with me and helped me ask the right questions at the legal library to point me in the right direction to filing an appeal myself.
But you know what every friend, family member, or community member I tried to talk to said to me? “You just need to walk away from this and move on with your life.” That was the worst advice anyone could have given me. By not taking action in time to appeal the anti-SLAPP motion, I am now in even worse legal shape. And I easily could have explained that to any of you, if you gave me the time and attention to do so.
I know it has not been easy being around me for the last several years. But you know what has been a hell of a lot harder? Being me. And I know there are still a lot of people who remember what a great guy I was and what a wonderful influence I was in their lives, when things were going better for me; who remember that when I was high up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I spent a ton of my time, energy, and financial resources on helping those who had greater need than I did.
In my time of desperate need, you have all put your emotional need to run away from things that are difficult, scary, and sad ahead of my practical need to tackle my problems head-on. But I have gotten as far as I can by myself, and it is way further than any of you would have gotten in my shoes.
It is not everyone else’s job to fix my problems. But given that I cannot make any more progress on my own, I am assigning one person to help me. That person is Judge Rima Ghandour.
I am going to Multnomah County Circuit Court on December 11th for one reason. That reason is to attempt to have a conversation with Judge Rima Ghandour about how to get this unjust award of attorney fees removed. I do not care if we are past an appeal date. There must be a way to get this done, whether it is by pardon of the Governor or action by the State Legislature.
What I hope for is not only a removal of my debt of these attorney fees, but also a changing of rules by the Judicial Branch or action by the State Legislature to prevent any lawyer in Oregon from ever again abusing protective orders in the way that Michael Fuller has done in this case, and likely in many other cases.
What I would hope for in the most optimistic timeline is a thank you note from the Governor, or someone in the state government, for all of the hard work that I have done to uncover this unethical use of protective orders and for my monumental efforts to attempt to get the Oregon State Bar and the State of Oregon to do something about it.
I fully recognize this may be a pipe dream, but it was the best legal strategy I could come up with all by my damn self.
When I had to go back to the court on July 8th, 2024, I was not alone that time. I had one good friend here in Portland who came with me. It was not a lot, but it was something. My friend did not need to say or do anything, but his presence there was a comfort to me. It was good to know that there was at least one other person on the planet who cared enough about what was happening to me to be there to witness it.
In truth, I wanted him there for a practical reason. I did not know if the debtor’s exam would happen in front of a judge, and I worried that I might get thrown in jail for contempt of court that day. I do not fear going to jail for this, but I wanted someone just to be there and know if it happened, so that he could call and inform a few relevant parties whose lives it might affect.
This time, I think I will have at least one friend, maybe two, accompanying me to court. I am not holding my breath for anyone else to show up, but I suppose if you have read this far, you might care about my outcomes more than the average Joe or Jane might. You are welcome to show up. The address, date, and time are all at the top of this section. What I would really love is for a reporter to show up. I am not expecting anyone to be there on my behalf beyond my two close friends with whom I have already discussed it. But at this point, prayer is all I have got.
Footnotes
