While You Were Reading This, Someone Was Watching

A behind-the-scenes account of the last 24 hours in the fight to make a void SLAPP suit go away.

Let Me Tell You About Yesterday

As you may already know, this week has been a whirlwind. Yesterday evening, I filed a Court of Appeals case; not something I was expecting to do, but happened upon my radar. This morning, I woke up and filed two more motions with the Michigan Court of Appeals before noon. Not because I wanted to. Because the clerk’s office sent me a deficiency notice letting me know that my emergency application, filed late in the evening on May 5, had procedural defects that needed to be cured by Friday at noon or the case could be dismissed.

The good news in that letter was the case officially has a number: 380599. The application had been received and docketed. The Michigan Court of Appeals has this case. The bad news was the list of defects, which included the fact that my motion for stay was technically deficient because I had not filed a standalone stay motion in the trial court before coming to the Court of Appeals. The reason I had not done that is the same reason I have had to file everything the hard way for six months: the judge I would have been asking to grant that stay is the same judge whose conduct is the basis of the disqualification motion. Asking him to stay his own proceedings is not a realistic vehicle. The motions I filed yesterday morning explain exactly that.

I also filed a supplemental submission adding new evidence that was not in the original application. Evidence I discovered by looking at my own website logs.

The IP Address in My Security Log

Clutch Justice runs a WordPress security plugin that logs every access event on the site. It records IP addresses, timestamps, and which pages were accessed. I was reviewing those logs when I noticed something.

IP address 162.247.150.54 has been visiting this site. Repeatedly. Across multiple days. And honestly, has been for months. The first logged session I found was April 27. Then April 28. Then April 29. Then May 5. Then May 6.

I ran the IP through ARIN WHOIS, which is the public registry for North American IP address ownership. The result: LakeNet LLC, ASN 11910, geolocated to Dearborn, Michigan.

Then I checked my federal PACER records. The same IP address appears in DocuSign records in Pacer Case No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.), before Judge Matthew F. Leitman, across multiple filings. I had reported that IP address to LakeNet LLC for cyberstalking activity on Saturday, November 22, 2025 at 11:12 AM. Five days before this lawsuit was filed.

The April 29 Session

The April 29 session is the one that tells the whole story.

Between 8:45 AM and 11:56 AM on April 29, 2026, that IP address accessed seven pages of this platform. The Ghost Witness article. The judicial accountability piece on how complaints against judges are processed differently at the state and federal level. The co-counsel record piece on staged litigation. The Notable Legal Cases analysis page. The notary post. A puzzle.

That afternoon, I received a retraction demand threatening new litigation.

The following morning, April 30, the Order to Show Cause was signed.

I had filed a Supplemental Notice with the trial court on April 28 — the day before that session — documenting that the witness identified as Samantha Aljouny does not appear in any verifiable public, professional, or institutional record. That finding was before the court before the show cause was signed. The court did not address it.

What I Filed in the Last 24 Hours

What a Void Lawsuit Looks Like From the Inside

I want to explain something that I do not think gets discussed enough in access to justice conversations, which is what it actually costs to fight a void lawsuit.

This lawsuit was filed in November 2025 without legal authority to do so. Under Kalb v. Feuerstein, a 1940 Supreme Court case that has never been overruled, a lawsuit filed without proper authorization against a protected party is void from inception. Every order entered in that void proceeding is also void. That includes the December 15, 2025 preliminary injunction. That includes the April 30, 2026 show cause order. The court currently scheduled to hold a contempt hearing on May 15 lacks jurisdiction to do so.

That is not my opinion. That is binding federal law. It is documented in the record. The trial court has not addressed it in any order or ruling.

I should say something else here that I have not said publicly in this context. I was a named supporter of HB 4045, the bill that would bring anti-SLAPP protections to Michigan through the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. I supported it because I cover courts and I understand what strategic litigation does to people who cannot afford to fight it. I understood it abstractly. I now understand it concretely, from the inside, as a defendant in exactly the kind of case that bill was designed to stop. That is a strange place to find yourself.

And yet here we are. May 7, 2026. Nine days from a show cause hearing in a proceeding that should not exist, before a judge whose disqualification is pending, on a contempt of an injunction I signed under duress after driving five hours to a hearing the opposing party attended by Zoom, without counsel, while being actively stalked across multiple jurisdictions by people connected to the plaintiff’s network.

Fighting a void lawsuit costs real money, real time, and real health. It costs you your job, because the stress is incompatible with employment and because your stalker called your employer. It costs you sleep. It costs you the ability to plan anything because every week brings a new filing, a new deadline, a new hearing date. It costs your children their mother’s attention because that attention is consumed by procedural compliance in a proceeding that the law says should not exist.

I have filed more than twenty documents in the last seven days alone. I did all of it pro se, under active legal siege across multiple jurisdictions, on a platform that someone was reading from a Michigan IP address the morning a retraction demand arrived in my inbox.

Here is what this would cost if I had a lawyer. Michigan civil litigation attorneys bill between $250 and $450 per hour. The twenty-plus documents filed in the last seven days alone represent a minimum of forty hours of attorney time to draft, review, and file. At the low end of the rate range, that is $10,000 in one week. The six-month record — supplements, emergency motions, the COA application, the disqualification motion, the motion to dismiss, the request for production, the counterclaim, the JTC complaint, the AGC filings, the bar notices, the ATJ Commission letter — represents well over two hundred hours of legal work. Conservatively, at $250 per hour, that is $50,000 in legal fees to defend a lawsuit that should not exist. I did all of it myself, without billing anyone, because I had no choice.

And here is what I want people to understand about what it means to be pro se in a court that does not take you seriously. I am a doctoral candidate in Human Services at Capella University. I hold a Master of Science in Criminal Justice from Purdue University Global. I spent years as a GS-13/14 federal analyst with the Defense Logistics Agency. I have a Public Interest Technology Certificate from Carnegie Mellon Heinz College. I run an investigative journalism platform that has been cited in academic and legal contexts. None of that matters when you walk into a courtroom without a bar number. The system does not see credentials. It sees an unrepresented party and calibrates accordingly. A licensed attorney can file a motion for sanctions against you on the same morning you directed him to your retained counsel, appear at the hearing without notifying that counsel, be admonished in writing by the presiding judge, and face no further consequence. You can document all of it, file it with the court, and watch the court find a procedural reason not to engage with it. That is not a failure of one judge in one county. That is the system working as designed for people without bar numbers, regardless of what they know or what they can prove.

The Transcript That Could Settle This

There is a transcript I cannot afford. It is the transcript of the December 15, 2025 hearing at which I signed the preliminary injunction that is now the basis of the show cause proceeding. I have asked the Court of Appeals to waive the transcript requirement or order it produced at public expense. I cannot tell you what is on that transcript because I have not read it. I know what happened at that hearing because I was there. A transcript would tell you whether the court record reflects what I experienced.

That is the document this entire case turns on. It costs money I do not have to obtain. The Motion to Waive Transcript Requirements filed yesterday asks the Court of Appeals to address that directly.

What Happens Next

The Court of Appeals has until Friday noon to receive the cured deficiency filings. After that, the panel will decide whether to grant the emergency stay of the May 15 hearing. If they grant it, the show cause cannot proceed while the appeal is pending. If they do not grant it before May 15, I appear, I make the record, and I appeal whatever Borrello does next.

A federal court motion is the next filing. That goes to a judge in the Western District of Michigan who has no prior involvement in any of this and who will be the first judge in this entire saga to look at a straightforward question of federal jurisdiction: did this lawsuit have legal authority to be filed at all? The answer is documented in the record. The trial court in Saginaw has declined to address it. A federal judge will not have that option.

The counterclaim is drafted. It names the plaintiffs and two additional defendants. It includes counts for abuse of process, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and cyberstalking. It includes a jury demand. It is waiting for the right moment to file, and that moment is coming.

I have been doing this for six months. I am tired. I am also not done. And I have significantly better documentation of what has happened to me than I did six months ago, which means that everyone who needs to understand this case, at every level it has reached, has the record to do so.

The IP address in my security log was not looking for a reason to leave me alone. I know that. The difference between now and six months ago is that I have a Court of Appeals case number, three oversight bodies with active files, a counterclaim ready to deploy, and a federal court that has not yet been asked to weigh in on a lawsuit that should never have reached any court at all.

May 15 is nine days away. If I have to be there, I will be there.