Everybody loves a winner,
but when you lose, you lose alone.

william bell

Recall that on August 10th, 2023, less than two weeks into serving as my own attorney, I filed a declaration in my case in Multnomah County Court revealing the incompetent job Marc Mohan had done as my attorney and the unethical ways in which Michael Fuller bullied him into being afraid to represent me.

I also made ethics complaints to the Oregon State Bar Client Assistance Office (CAO) about both Marc Mohan and Michael Fuller on that same day. This was in the middle of the time that I was preparing for our in-person hearing about the anti-SLAPP motions. I did not at that moment have a lot of time to put into communicating to the Bar, so I just gave a one paragraph summary on their web form, and attached the two most important files.

Most of the details are explained in the attached declaration file, which has also just been filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court today. Marc Mohan was my attorney on this case until he withdrew on July 28, 2023. While he did a number of other wrong things that are mentioned in the declaration attachment, mostly I believe due to incompetence, the biggest issue is probably that on May 16, 2023 he signed a Stipulated Protective Order along with the Defense Attorney Michael Fuller, which was signed by Judge Kelly Skye on March 25, 2023. He never informed me of the order, and I only learned about it through another attorney after Marc Mohan and I were already beginning to plan for his withdrawal. Michael Fuller used the Stipulated Protective Order to coerce and intimidate Marc Mohan into wanting to withdraw from my case for false reasons. I am submitting the same complaint for both Marc Mohan and Michael Fuller.

ethics complaints filed to oregon state bar client assistance office (CAO) on August 10th, 2023

As told in The Circus, less than a week later Judge Kelly Skye would remove my case from the court, resulting in an award of defense attorneys fees. I had already spent $14,085.20 on a terrible lawyer who had driven my case into the ground. And now the court in its infinite wisdom had decided that I owed money to the people who helped my abusers get away with breaking the law, when I had not done a damn thing wrong.

Lola’s attorney Ashley Vaugh petitioned honestly and reasonably for $9,339.65. Michael Fuller petitioned for an extortionate $84,717.25.

I had no idea how to fight this. I did not have a lawyer anymore and could not afford one. I have not worked in three years, am now on food stamps and Oregon’s version of Medicaid, continue not to have my PTSD treated in any useful way, and do not know how I am going to pay rent beyond the next few months.

I figured that the best thing to do might be to pursue a malpractice case against Marc Mohan. Although I had no taste for continued litigation nor trust in the justice system of Oregon to fix what had been done to me, I thought that activating Marc Mohan’s malpractice insurance might be my only hope of mitigating my losses.

I searched for legal malpractice attorneys in Oregon, hoping to hire someone on contingency. No one was willing to take my case, because the amount of money that I could expect to recover in damages did not compare favorably to the cost of hiring a new lawyer and pursuing the malpractice case.

I then learned that Marc Mohan, like all lawyers barred in Oregon, had malpractice insurance coverage through the Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund (PLF), and that I could make a claim directly against that fund without hiring an attorney to represent me. I had no idea what my chances of success were, but it did not cost anything to do so.

Meanwhile, the CAO had written back to me at the end of September with the defenses of both Marc Mohan and Michael Fuller to the ethics complaints against them and asking if I had more information.1

When I had first reported Marc Mohan and Michael Fuller to the CAO, I had only started finding my bearings in the paperwork of the case and just focused my complaint on the protective order they agreed to behind my back. By this time I was much more familiar with the wide scale of Mr. Mohan’s negligence and incompetence as well as Mr. Fuller’s malice and dishonesty.

On October 17th and 19th, 2023, I submitted follow-up statements to the CAO detailing all of the unethical things that both Mr. Mohan and Mr. Fuller did throughout the case.2 In the interest of fairness, here are the statements that Mr. Mohan and Mr. Fuller’s representative sent in response to my follow-ups.

On October 24th, I submitted a malpractice claim against Mr. Mohan3 to the PLF. I included everything that I sent to the CAO about him, and I also wrote up an additional statement explaining the things that he did that I deemed to be in the realm of incompetence and malpractice but not necessarily ethical lapses.4 I claimed $108,142.10, which was the total of the amount of money that Mr. Mohan had billed me and that Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Fuller were petitioning for in attorney fees.

On November 3rd, I filed in the court an objection to Michael Fuller’s extortionate claim of attorney fees in which I plainly admitted that I was at a loss about how to fight against this because I could not afford new counsel, concluding with the plea, “I ask the court to take a small step toward a more fair outcome by awarding Mr. Fuller $0.01 in legal fees, which is exactly as much as he deserves.” I also included the full CAO ethics complaint against Michael Fuller in my court filings.

On November 15th, the PLF wrote back to me denying my malpractice claim against Marc Mohan in full. They admit in everything that they write that they represent the lawyers and are an adverse party to me. In short, the only way I can hope to collect on Mr. Mohan’s malpractice insurance is to sue him for malpractice, but I cannot find a lawyer willing to do it.

Meanwhile, the ethics cases against Mr. Mohan and Mr. Fuller remain open. Based on what the CAO last told me, the cases will be heard in summer 2024.

The judge did not handle the petitions for attorney fees until February 2024. She granted Ms. Vaughn the full $9,339.65 that she petitioned for, but she knocked Mr. Fuller’s attorney fee award down to $50,437.50. That award is still more than twice as much money as Mr. Mohan and Ms. Vaughn billed for combined. Furthermore, the judge awarded this money before the Oregon State Bar has concluded its ethics investigations into Mr. Fuller and Mr. Mohan.

The paperwork for the judge’s approval of the attorneys fees carried over into late March. Ever since the last week of that month, Mr. Fuller has been stepping on the gas pedal. The “erratic and concerning” communications I received from him over the next several weeks are summarized in an email I sent to the CAO in early May. More recently, he submitted a motion to the court to compel me to come in for a hearing to answer questions about my assets and income.

Meanwhile, I have written letters to my State Senator and State Representative. On advice from the State Representative’s office, I also reached out to the Oregon Attorney General. I even sought out help from professors and clinics at a local law school. I have made clear in all of these communications that I believe Mr. Fuller has been unethically abusing protective orders in this way in many cases besides my own. He started asking for a protective order in his first round of communications with my former attorney at the beginning of my case. However, I have gotten no help from any of these places and am still without any legal support.

I am exhausted, alone, and defenseless. Disgustingly unethical abusers have lied incessantly, broken rules, and weaponized institutions, both in the competitive Scrabble world and in the Oregon legal system, to reward them and to punish me, the victim of their defamation and abuse. I have made a superhuman effort of cataloging all of their wrongdoing and describing it as dispassionately and accurately as possible, but it seems not to matter at all.

There is still a glimmer of hope that the Oregon State Bar Client Assistance Office will disbar Mr. Fuller and Mr. Mohan for their egregious ethics violations, but I do not count on that happening. Should I expect an institution of lawyers to do anything other than to protect its own? Everyone else in this story seems only interested in protecting themselves, their friends, or their associates and in obscuring the truth of the despicable behavior by so many parties that has completely derailed my life.

You think I’d crumble?
You think I’d lay down and die?

gloria gaynor

By putting the full contents of the ethics cases against Mr. Fuller and Mr. Mohan here, I hope that the light of public accountability increases the likelihood of the CAO handling this matter justly. At very least, showing the details provides ample warning to prospective future clients of Mr. Mohan of the astounding depth of his incompetence. Revealing Mr. Fuller’s entire unethical and dishonest playbook will hopefully help both future lawyers who oppose him and future judges who preside over his cases to see right through his bullshit.

I have removed the robots.txt restriction on this entire website, so that its contents will be indexed by Google and other major search engines.

Today, July 8th, 2024, is the day that I am ordered to appear in court to answer questions about my finances. I am bringing several printed copies of this statement, and I will only read from it verbatim in response to such questions.

I have been an upstanding citizen my entire life. The only “trouble” I have ever gotten into with the law, if you can call it that, consists of a few parking tickets and moving violations. I paid all of my fines in a timely way, as I have also always done with all of my bills and debts.

I sued Mr. and Mrs. Clinchy, the defendants whom Mr. Fuller represented, because of their pattern of abusive and defamatory behavior toward me over the period of six years, behavior which has resulted in my psychiatrist-diagnosed PTSD and in me losing my community, my family, my career, and my savings.

Judge Kelly Skye’s decision to remove the case from the court on an anti-SLAPP motion was unjust. She admitted in our recorded hearing that she had not read my response to the motion and that she was inclined to uphold the motion before I gave a single oral argument.

Mr. Fuller is still under investigation from the Oregon State Bar Client Assistance Office for ethics violations pertaining to his behavior in my case. He helped his clients get away with defaming me by defaming me further. He told false stories about me to the court and to my former lawyer, stories which I disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt. Mr. Fuller also intimidated my former lawyer into being afraid to represent me through the unethical use of a protective order.

I will never pay any money to Mr. Fuller, nor to the State of Oregon for any fines for my failure to comply. My conscience forbids me from ever giving any financial support to the person who helped my abusers get away with it by piling on his own immoral behavior.

What I will do is to continue to amplify this story by talking to reporters and telling it myself at my website splenetic.net. My solitary voice may not be enough to change the course of actions for anyone else in this story, but it is what I must do to maintain my self-respect, which is the most valuable thing that I have left. Paying any amount of money to Mr. Fuller would mean sacrificing that self-respect. I am not willing to do that, regardless of whatever punishment the court might put on me for refusing to comply.

Footnotes

  1. The Fuller defense had the full Clinchy Motion to Strike appended to it, but I have truncated the document here to reduce redundancy. ↩︎
  2. The narratives at the beginning of both of the follow-up documents do a good job of summarizing the unethical behavior, but in the attachments of the document about Mr. Mohan, take especial note of the spreadsheets on pages 17 and 18, which show the absurdly high proportion of the documents filed in the case and served to the opposing attorneys that Mr. Mohan never shared with me while he was representing me. ↩︎
  3. If your interest is more in the relevance of this story to Scrabble politics than in the legal nitty-gritty, you will still probably want to read the section “Analysis of Mr. Mohan’s Defense to Failing to Execute Subpoenas” on page 6 of the malpractice claim. ↩︎
  4. The version of the malpractice claim document here has been truncated to remove the submissions which are redundant with the previously linked ethics complaints about Mr. Mohan. ↩︎