The Court That Knew: Discovery, Stalking Victims, and What Judge Borrello Chose to Ignore

The motion is filed March 24, 2026. Philip L. Ellison, attorney of record for Outside Legal Counsel PLC in Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 25-002441-CZ, asks Judge Andre R. Borrello to do two things in a single document: compel me to provide initial disclosures and a witness list, and strike the personal protection orders I have been filing into the record.

The same motion. One filing.

This is not an accident of drafting. When an attorney moves simultaneously to force a stalking victim into civil discovery and to erase from the court record the legal documentation of why she is a stalking victim, he has written the argument against himself. The court does not need to be told what this proceeding is. The court needs to decide whether to participate in it.

Judge Andre Borrello, Saginaw County, participated.

What Was Filed and When

Outside Legal Counsel PLC and Philip L. Ellison filed suit against me on November 3, 2025. The case was assigned to Judge Andre R. Borrello of the Saginaw County Circuit Court. I appeared as the defendant, pro se.

In the months leading up to that filing, the Through My Eyes Facebook group — a network to which Ellison has belonged since July 6, 2020 — published defamatory and harassing information. On November 23, they posted private financial information. Four days later, Ellison filed a defamatory show cause document intended to harass and burden me, just before Thanksgiving.

The court record is not shy about what followed. Within the first two weeks, Ellison filed an ex parte motion for alternate service, a motion to strike my letter to the court, and a notice of withdrawal of the alternate service motion when it became moot. I filed a correspondence requesting dismissal, a protective order, and sanctions on November 4, 2025 — the day after the complaint landed. By December, the docket showed show cause proceedings, a preliminary injunction, discovery requests filed by Ellison on December 7, a scheduling order, a mediation referral, and my first motion to dismiss.

On February 11, 2026, Judge Borrello issued his opinion and order denying my motion to dismiss. On February 11, 2026 — the same day — I filed copies of the personal protection orders with the Saginaw court, placing them in the record before the judge who had just ruled against me.

Borrello had the PPOs. He denied the motion to dismiss. Those two facts coexist in the same date on the docket.

The Law That Courts Are Supposed to Apply

Michigan Court Rule 2.302(C) is not ambiguous. When a moving party demonstrates good cause, the court may issue any order that justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense. Michigan appellate courts have affirmed this obligation repeatedly. In Thomas M. Cooley Law School v. John Doe 1, the Michigan Court of Appeals stated plainly that despite the state’s broad discovery policy, a trial court should protect parties from excessive, abusive, or irrelevant discovery requests.

Good cause for a protective order does not require a lengthy showing when the record already contains what is needed. The movant demonstrates good cause; the court acts. The standard does not require the victim to argue the abstract proposition that stalkers use courts as weapons. It requires only that the documented relationship between the parties be brought before the court and taken seriously.

The National Crime Victim Law Institute’s published legal guidance on civil discovery identifies at minimum three independent grounds for staying or quashing discovery when a stalking victim is a party to civil litigation. Courts should consider the victim’s right to refuse participation in proceedings functioning as harassment. Courts should consider the interest in preventing civil discovery from circumventing victim protections. Courts should consider the victim’s constitutional and statutory rights to protection from the behavior of the criminal actor. Any one of those three grounds, standing alone, is sufficient to support a protective order under MCR 2.302(C).

The Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center’s judicial guide for court officers states directly that when stalking behaviors are present and overlooked or not taken seriously by a court, the orders that court issues will not be effective in curbing stalking and other abusive behaviors, compromising victim safety. The guide instructs that judicial officers should make findings regarding such conduct across criminal, family, and civil cases — because those findings provide a record and documentation of the trajectory of escalation.

Borrello had the trajectory. He had the documentation. He had the rule and the authority it confers. Even as of today, he has chosen to do perhaps worse than nothing; he denied Motions to Dismiss and a request for Emergency Intervention. At this point, I have to wonder: is he ignorant or complicit?

The SLAPP Gap Michigan

For the entirety of this litigation from November 3, 2025 through March 23, 2026, Michigan offered defendants in abusive civil suits essentially no structural protection. The state had earned a failing grade from the Institute for Free Speech for its absence of anti-SLAPP protections. While 38 other states and the District of Columbia had enacted some form of protection against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, Michigan defendants were left to fight through the full cost and duration of abusive litigation with only the ordinary motion practice available to any civil defendant.

SLAPP suits against stalking victims and domestic abuse survivors follow a documented pattern. The National Women’s Law Center has described it precisely: the discovery-pausing provision of a strong anti-SLAPP statute protects survivors from the expense and retraumatization of sharing private records with their abuser and submitting to aggressive interrogation from their abuser’s attorney. The D.C. organization that advocates for survivors noted that one client was sued by her stalker after she filed for a civil protection order against him — and that after she used D.C.’s anti-SLAPP law to get the case dismissed, he finally stopped stalking her. The lawsuit was the stalking by other means.

Michigan enacted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act on December 23, 2025. Governor Whitmer signed House Bill 4045 into law; the legislature passed it 103 to 0 in the House and 36 to 0 in the Senate. The law took effect March 24, 2026. Under UPEPA, once a special motion is filed, all proceedings between the parties including discovery are automatically stayed until the court rules on the motion. The burden shifts to the plaintiff to demonstrate a likelihood of prevailing. Fee-shifting applies if the motion succeeds.

Ellison filed the motion to compel on March 24, 2026. This was a mere four days after he filed a UPEPA motion of his own into Saginaw County Case 26-000243-CZ, a case he initated against Consumers Energy. The same day the law took effect. This case was filed November 3, 2025. UPEPA applies only to actions filed on or after its effective date. I had to wait for two actions to line up: first, I had to have the time and mental capacity to file a fee waiver. Next, I had to have a new speech-limiting action that I could challenge.

Michigan spent years as a SLAPP-friendly jurisdiction and paid for it in the documented experiences of people like me. One individual, Matthew Dinoto, was also a victim of these exact tactics by my stalker and his family. It cost him nearly $80,000 to defend himself before my stalker’s parents settled with him for $1.

Thankfully the legislature has finally acted. The timing, for me, created some delay and challenges before I could finally apply for relief this past week.

A Witness List Built From the Harassment Network

The evidentiary picture that emerged from the litigation explains why the motion to compel and the motion to strike the PPOs appeared in the same document. To make this case work at trial, Ellison needed two things to be true simultaneously: I would be required to participate in discovery, and the court record showing why that participation is unreasonable would disappear.

The witness list Ellison filed tells the rest of the story. Placed into the record for Clutch Justice’s review through my filings:

Samantha Aljouny, identified by Ellison as a journalist with “Aljouny Media Consulting,” does not exist in any verifiable public, professional, institutional, or governmental record. No articles. No LinkedIn. No Michigan business registration. No response to a direct email I sent on February 13, 2026. Ellison submitted correspondence from this person as sworn evidence and has not produced a single document confirming her existence.

Kevin Lindke is currently incarcerated for 105 days in St. Clair County for contempt of court committed during his own arraignment on PPO violation charges in proceedings directly connected to this matter. He is Ellison’s documented client. He is a Through My Eyes member. The September 9, 2025 post published by Lindke — the same night the harassment domains targeting me were registered — displayed a GoDaddy interface showing active management of domains incorporating my name and stated, among other things, “Now it’s my turn to spin the wheel.” Ellison filed this man as a witness.

The other filed a PPO petition in Macomb County containing statements that have been documented as materially false. On February 11, 2026, Judge Rachel Rancilio issued a personal protection order against this connected person in my favor. That order is in the Saginaw court record. My motion filed specifically notes that Judge Borrello and his court staff have “conveniently ignored” it.

Another witness has a felony embezzlement conviction — Macomb County Case No. 1998-000500-FH, guilty plea April 24, 1998, sentenced June 22, 1998 — constituting a crime of dishonesty under MRE 609. In the Through My Eyes comments following the post that celebrated the nighttime approach of my home and included Ellison’s own text message about the residential visit, she wrote: “I’ll be home soon to handle mine against them.” She also sent hate mail and made false statements via phone calls to a government entity regarding me. Ellison filed her as a witness.

Another received a formal cease and desist letter on April 22, 2024 — more than a year before this lawsuit was filed — from my then-retained counsel for defamatory statements published to the Through My Eyes Facebook group. No retraction was made. She is a documented network member. Ellison filed her as a witness.

Chrystal Lambert is the subject of a formal SCAO inquiry for court record tampering in Barry County, where I documented that a court-stamped filing had its received stamp physically obscured with correction fluid before being returned to me rather than allowing it to be filed. That person is named in my SCAO complaints. Ellison filed her as a witness.

This is not at all a witness list assembled to support legitimate claims. Each person on it is traceable to the Through My Eyes network. Ellison has belonged to that network since July 6, 2020. He filed document four days after that network published my private financial information. He submitted a sworn affidavit vouching for a witness who cannot be verified to exist. He told the court that the Attorney Grievance Commission complaint against him — AGC File No. 25-2363, assigned to Senior Associate Counsel as of December 17, 2025 — had been closed. It has not been closed. It remains open.

What It Looks Like from Inside the Proceeding

I put the personal protection orders into the Saginaw court record the same day Borrello denied my motion to dismiss. February 11, 2026. I had just received copies of the Macomb County orders — against the two stalkers — and I filed them that day because I needed the judge who just ruled against me to have no basis to claim he didn’t know.

He absolutely knew.

What came next, even with restraining orders in place, was a motion to compel me to participate in discovery filed by the attorney for my stalker. In the same document, Ellison asked the court to strike the PPOs I had just filed. He wanted the evidence of why I shouldn’t have to participate erased at the same time he was demanding that I participate. Borrello received that motion.

On April 28, 2026, I filed documentation that Aljouny did not exist. Borrello ignored it. On April 30, 2026, Borrello signed an order to show cause initiating contempt proceedings against me. On May 5, 2026, he denied my emergency motion for injunctive relief seeking protection from ongoing harassment and abuse of process.

I have a pending motion to disqualify Borrello, filed May 5, 2026, on grounds of actual bias, appearance of bias, and personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts. I have a pending emergency application for leave to appeal. I have filed a motion to stay trial court proceedings pending that appeal. Trial is currently set for July 28, 2026.

I am a stalking victim being asked by a court to sit across a discovery table from my stalker’s attorney — who is also a member of the network through which my stalker operated — while that same attorney files motions to erase my protection orders from the record. I am being threatened with contempt for declining to do so. The court had everything it needed to stop this. It chose not to.

The Standard a Court Is Supposed to Meet

A judge in possession of active personal protection orders, a documented harassment network, a witness list assembled entirely from that network, and a motion that explicitly seeks both to compel discovery and strike the PPOs in one instrument has what the law calls good cause. Multiple times over.

MCR 2.302(C) does not require the court to wait for a formal motion before recognizing that something is wrong. Courts have inherent authority to control their own proceedings and to prevent those proceedings from becoming instruments of abuse. The National Crime Victim Law Institute’s published guidance is direct on this point: courts weighing competing interests when a stalking victim is a party must consider the victim’s significant rights and interests, including the right to protection from intimidation, harassment, and abuse by the abuser.

The argument against a protective order in these circumstances would rest on the general proposition that civil litigants are entitled to discovery. That is true. It is also true that civil courts are not required to enforce discovery against victims of the parties seeking it when those parties’ attorneys have documented membership in the harassment apparatus that produced the litigation. The law draws that line through the good cause standard in MCR 2.302(C) and through the inherent authority every Michigan court holds to prevent abuse of process.

Borrello had the tools. He had the record. He had the notice — placed before him by me on the same day he denied my motion to dismiss.

What he did not have was the will to use any of it.