How a Falling Out, a Return, and Threats Became a Federal Lawsuit, a SLAPP Suit, and a Criminal Perjury Investigation

I briefly “knew” Kevin Lindke online. Then I did not. Then he came back to harass and stalk me. Then his attorney filed a lawsuit to silence me. This is the story of what happened next.

It Started With a Falling Out, Then a Return

I only ever “knew” Kevin Lindke online.

We met in 2023, very early in my advocacy work; before I realized we held very different philosophies and approaches to our work. By April 2024, we had a significant falling out. Occasionally he would send me emails taunting me, or accusing me of harassing him. I would later find out that he had kept pictures of me, including a snapshot of my feet in hot pink Tieks, standing on a doormat at my front door that said, “Come Back with a Warrant.” As soon as I found out, I immediately filed a DMCA Copyright Strike and had the picture removed from his profile.

In August 2024, he accused me of making a website about him. I deleted it and moved on. It turned out that he already knew who the author was because he and his parents were actively suing that person in Sanilac County; he had been bragging about it on social media. I once again ignored it. I pushed the encounter out of my mind completely until one year later. Late July 2025, Kevin’s emails returned to my inbox. These threats were much harder to ignore, because he threatened to kill me.

Once again he accused me of harassing him, but this time, he came with accusations of creating websites about him and his family. In a string of profanities and threats of jailing me, harming me, and threatening to kill me, he claimed I had been harassing him. That framing, me as the aggressor and him as the victim, turned out to be the template for every single thing that followed. It was also, as documented investigations by two Macomb County law enforcement agencies have since established, completely false.

Right out of the gate, he threatened to kill me. He threatened to have me jailed. He stole and posted photographs of my children and me. He publicly posted my address. He posted my private financial information. He called me at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning and told me he would make me and my children homeless.

In return, I told him not to drop the soap in Federal prison and blocked his number.

As a journalist, when something does not make sense to me, I immediately begin looking for the documents that explain it. So I looked.

What I found was not a random act of aggression from someone with a grievance. What I found was a man with a very long and documented history of breaking and entering, violence, stalking, abuse of legal process, social media defamation, and coordinated harassment to go after people who got in his way (real or imagined), represented by an attorney who had been building a legal architecture around that campaign for years. And at the center of that architecture was a federal civil rights case that was supposed to make him rich.

The Through My Eyes Network and the Attorney Who Was Already There

The Through My Eyes Facebook group began as a platform devoted to Kevin Lindke’s custody dispute over his daughter. Over time it expanded into something else: a coordinated network used to identify, surveil, and publicly attack people that Lindke and his associates viewed as adversaries. It has thousands of members. It has administrators. And it has been used, in documented and timestamped posts in court cases across multiple Michigan counties, to organize harassment campaigns against real people in real time.

Philip L. Ellison, a licensed Michigan attorney and the principal of Outside Legal Counsel PLC in Hemlock, Michigan, has been a documented member of that group since July 6, 2020.

In August 2025, I would reach out to Dean Hines, a Michigan man who also had no connection to Lindke’s custody dispute, but like me became a victim of Kevin’s harassment campaign. He obtained a Personal Protection Order against Lindke in St. Clair County in April 2025, Case No. T25-625-PH, before the Honorable John D. Tomlinson. The PPO petition clearly documents what happened, mirroring my own experience play by play: Lindke called Hines from a burner phone, threatened violence, and organized in-person harassment against him through the Through My Eyes group. The PPO was granted. It quickly became part of Lindke’s federal litigation record.

At that time, two individuals, both men, had secured PPOs against Kevin after prolonged death threats and harassment. And the harassment began the same way it did for me; unprovoked and without warning. We all filed police reports. We began speaking out.

The backlash and retaliation was instant.

Early September 2025, Kevin had made new taunting posts, purchasing domain namse in my and my oldest minor child’s names, and threatening to make harassment sites about us. Threatening an innocent child was a terrifying new low, even for Kevin. And it was one I refused to stay quiet about.

I immediately made a police report. I couldn’t sleep that night, so I sent a cease and desist to Philip L. Ellison, regarding Kevin’s harassment and stalking, specifically citing Kevin creating domain names in my and one of my minor child’s names, harassing, stalking, and threatening a child to his audience who cheered it on.

In response, Ellison claimed he represented Kevin in the federal suits only. He then forwarded my letter to Kevin as a “courtesy.” Not call the police, not show concern for our well-being and safety, but send it to someone who was threatening us. Immediately, Kevin promptly belittled me online for it and mocked me to his most loyal followers. Apparently, people who had never met me enjoyed watching my children and me be harassed and stalked, because they applauded his efforts.

I have never claimed to understand why.

In October 2025, after months of documenting the harassment phenomonon, after receiving my Cease and Desist letter complaining of Kevin’s harassment and even responding to me personally, after posts where Dean Hines was mocked for defending himself against a perjured restraining order, Ellison filed a Fourth Amended Complaint in Lindke v. King, Case No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.), before Hon. Judge Matthew Leitman. I was gobsmacked.

In that filing, Ellison argued that the Michigan non-domestic PPO statute was unconstitutional as applied to his client because courts were issuing ex parte orders restricting Lindke’s speech without adequate process. The argument was, in essence, that Kevin Lindke was a victim of an unconstitutional system that kept silencing him. Ellison claimed it was so “widespread”, that it was an ongoing problem that just kept happening to Mr. Lindke.

He failed to mention that it kept happening because Kevin gave people no choice but to protect themselves.

Three days later, Kevin Lindke once again threatened both Dean Hines and me on Facebook. I once again forwarded it to his attorney and told him the abuse needed to stop.

I received no response.

At that time, I loudly spoke up, explaining that the Federal filing was misleading; that this was not some grand conspiracy happening to Kevin. He was intentionally provoking, stalking, and harassing people, to include minor children.

One month later, on November 3, 2025, Ellison filed a defamation lawsuit against me in Saginaw County Circuit Court, Case No. 25-2441-CZ. Later in the month, by way of the Through My Eyes group, Kevin doxxed me and published my private financial information with mocking and degrading commentary. This same group of people celebrated the SLAPP Suit filing after it was filed. Prior to that, these people, people who had never met me, made false police reports, seeking to have me jailed and leave my children parentless for no reason other than Kevin asked them to do it.

The Three Macomb County Cases and the Perjury Investigation

I did not know Dean Hines until August 2025, after Lindke began threatening me and I went looking for answers. What I found, once I started looking, was a clear-cut pattern. The Lindke family network had done to Hines what they were doing to me, and they had used the same instruments: PPO proceedings, social media harassment, false claims to law enforcement, and the courts.

Three Macomb County PPO proceedings of their doing are now under active criminal investigation by both the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department and the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office. The perjury under investigation involves false sworn statements made in each of those proceedings, all connected to Kevin Lindke and his network.

Case No. 2025-002649-PH is the foundational Macomb County matter establishing the network’s documented use of restraining orders as harassment instruments. The family venue-shopped, filing in Macomb County rather than St. Clair County where they live, exploiting MiFILE’s significant accessibility and security limitations. While claiming to be victims, they taunted their targets online, photographed them in court, and posted mocking videos. The same false narrative pattern, including phone call allegations that never happened, appears in the federal Lindke v. King filings, where he claimed he needed “emergency intervention” against his “harassers” to avoid a jail sentence.

Case No. 2025-006106-PH Lindke family member falsely claimed under oath and penalty of perjury, that I was the process server who came to their home to serve Kevin on May 19, 2025. St. Clair County court records clearly show the process server was a woman named Amy Dove. My paystubs confirm I was working in Kalamazoo, more than one hundred miles away. That person also claimed, in sworn testimony in Adams County, Ohio, that I was a journalist. He filed the perjured restraining order weeks after that testimony. The person is SCM in LW v. SCM, the Court of Appeals case in which Lindke was found to have weaponized process servers as harassment instruments; a technique he used across multiple victims, myself included. Believing I was going to backdoor file a PPO against him (I wasn’t), Ellison made an unauthorized appearance in the PPO proceedings without filing a formal appearance under MCR 2.117(A), resulting in a written admonishment from Judge Dennings.

Case No. 2025-006455-PH this PPO petition relied on the same faulty basis: that I had called and harassed Kevin, submitting screenshots without a single phone number in them, claiming I was the process server, and that I was going to “chase their family out of Michigan.” Obviously that was false because Kevin was harassing and threatening to kill me.

This person also filed two rounds of perjured show causes against me. At the first round, I was forced to drive round-trip five hours – twice – to defend myself, as Macomb County refused to do virtual hearings, creating intentional financial burden. I had to pay $2,500 for an attorney and spend two days in the courthouse defending myself against a person I had never met, let alone threatened. While filling my water bottle at the fountain, just around the corner from the elevator bank where she couldn’t see me, I heard the person complain on the phone that I was fighting the Show Causes. She didn’t know I could hear her.

I ultimately not only prevailed, but on February 11, 2026, I was granted two PPOs: one for Kevin and one for a family member.

For the second show cause, the family member claimed I had posted content on Facebook, a platform I left and wanted nothing to do with after the harassment and abuse I suffered at their family’s hands. Like others before me, I learned that Meta does the bare minimum to protect its users from harassment and defamation. As a result, I absolutely refuse to have an account.

I filed DMCA copyright strikes with Meta both times and filed them as exhibits. Meta upheld both strikes, confirming the content was posted by another party entirely. Rather than face an angry judge, the person backed out of the show cause. A few weeks prior, Ellison had also inserted himself into those proceedings; a second occurrence, even after the Dennings Opinion and Order.

What the Court of Appeals Already Knew About Kevin Lindke

Before any of this happened to me, the Michigan Court of Appeals had already ruled on Kevin Lindke’s methods multiple times. ARM v. KJL, a published Michigan Court of Appeals opinion decided July 14, 2022 (Docket Nos. 357120, 358858, and 358859), upheld Lindke’s contempt conviction for using a Facebook profile to tag his child’s mother in comments and posts in violation of a PPO. The Court held that “a person’s right to free speech must be understood in light of another person’s interest in being left alone” and that the Facebook tag was a means of unlawful contact. TT v. KL, a published COA opinion cited at 965 N.W.2d 121, arose from another PPO against Lindke and was significant enough to be referenced by the Sixth Circuit in federal proceedings. And LW v. SCM and KJL, unpublished per curiam opinion issued January 19, 2023 (Docket Nos. 359150 and 359153), affirmed PPOs against Lindke, Steve Murray, and an associated individual for using process server activity as a pretext for surveilling a harassment target’s residence. The Court held in that case that otherwise legitimate conduct, when deployed in a documented pattern of harassment, supports PPO relief.

Three published or affirmed rulings. The same respondent. The same cast of characters. The same pattern.

KJL, the respondent in that case, is Kevin Lindke. He was represented by Philip L. Ellison.

Ellison’s client was found by Michigan courts to have weaponized process servers as harassment instruments. Ellison is now arguing in proceedings against me that physical process server contact at my home is legitimate court procedure, compelled by MCR 2.107. He is making that argument while representing himself as a plaintiff against the harassment target of the client whose conduct was found to be pretextual stalking.

The Federal Case That Was Supposed to Make This Worth It

The financial architecture of the Lindke litigation matters because it explains the motive. The federal civil rights cases, Lindke v. King Case No. 2:22-cv-11767 and Case No. 2:25-cv-14148, pursued claims under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against St. Clair County officials for enforcing PPO orders that allegedly violated Lindke’s First Amendment rights.

In the Fourth Amended Complaint filed in October 2025, Ellison argued that the Michigan non-domestic PPO statute was being used unconstitutionally against his client, that the PPO orders silenced his protected speech, and that declaratory and injunctive relief was required. Fee awards in successful civil rights litigation under 42 U.S.C. 1988 can reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For that litigation strategy to work, Lindke had to be the victim. He needed the PPO orders against him to be the product of a conspiracy, a coordinated effort by adversaries to silence his protected speech through an unconstitutional statute. The perjured PPOs and show causes in Macomb County, the false restraining order petitions, the false testimony in Adams County, Ohio, the harassment campaign against Hines and me, all of it served the same structural purpose: to manufacture evidence that Lindke was being systematically targeted, while suppressing any counter-narrative from the people he was actually targeting.

On May 6, 2026, Judge Leitman signed a Stipulated Order Dismissing the Claims by Plaintiff Kevin Lindke With Prejudice in Lindke v. King, Case No. 2:25-cv-14148 (E.D. Mich.), ECF No. 21. The same day, my Court of Appeals case number was assigned: COA No. 380599.

The foundational new case is gone. Ellison had filed to withdraw from representing Lindke in both federal matters on April 23, 2026, the same day Lindke was booked in St. Clair County for contempt of court. Lindke is currently incarcerated, serving 105 days. He violated my PPO against him while incarcerated on April 30, 2026.

What Remains

Out of the entire litigation architecture, one case remains standing against me: the Saginaw County defamation lawsuit filed by Lindke’s attorney against the woman his client threatened to kill.

That case is void ab initio, filed in violation of my active automatic stay under Kalb v. Feuerstein, 308 U.S. 433 (1940). Every order entered in that void proceeding, including the preliminary injunction and the show cause, is equally void. At the time of publishing, the trial court has not addressed this jurisdictional defect in any order or ruling.

On May 6, 2026, the same day the federal case was dismissed, I filed a UPEPA special motion under Michigan’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, MCL 691.1851 et seq. The automatic stay under MCL 691.1854(1)(a) took effect the moment I filed it. The May 15, 2026 show cause hearing is stayed by statute. Ellison is judicially estopped from arguing that UPEPA does not apply because he filed his own UPEPA special motions twice in a parallel Saginaw County case, arguing the identical legal position I now advance.

I was a named supporter of HB 4045, the bill that became UPEPA. I supported it because I cover courts and I understood what strategic litigation does to people who cannot afford to fight it. I now understand it from the inside, with six months of documentation behind me, a perjury investigation active in two law enforcement agencies, and a federal case collapsed on the same day the Court of Appeals docketed my appeal.

Lindke is in jail. One case that motivated the scheme is dismissed. The perjury is under criminal investigation. The SLAPP suit is stayed by statute.

My children are still afraid of strangers at the door. I am still fighting a lawsuit that should not exist, filed by an attorney who represented the man who threatened to kill me, who knew I was in financial hardship when he filed, who introduced a witness that does not exist in any public record, and who told a Saginaw County Circuit Court that the disciplinary investigation against him was closed when it was open and assigned to a named investigator.

That is the whole story. I built it from the documents. All of it is now on the public record.

I’ve always known that the court system was broken, but I have now seen the brokenness from a very different angle; as a victim who had to fight to be believed and is still waiting for justice. Who had to file for emergency crime victims compensation because of the damage that’s been done. In the face of how hard it has been to rid myself of my harassers, I’ve realized the system isn’t failing by accident. It is performing exactly as it was designed and it wasn’t designed for me. But the damage is done. The compensation is just a band-aid. There is so much work ahead, because I will never trust the court to fix itself. But I am looking to hold the floor until it’s forced to.