The Attorney Who Fought Michigan’s PPO Statute Has a Client Who Proves Why It Exists

Philip L. Ellison spent years in federal court arguing that Michigan’s Personal Protection Order statute was unconstitutional as applied to Kevin Lindke. The documented record of what Lindke and his family have done to the women and children in their path is the most complete answer to that argument anyone could have written.

Where This Started: A Pattern That Predates Me

I did not start this. I need to say that plainly because six months of litigation have been designed to make it seem otherwise.

Kevin Lindke’s documented harassment pattern did not begin with me. It began with the women in his life before I ever knew he existed. His first documented PPO proceedings arose from his conduct toward his ex-partner and the mother of his child. The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed PPO relief against him in ARM v. KJL, Docket Nos. 357120, 358858, and 358859, on July 14, 2022, for using Facebook to tag the petitioner in posts and comments in violation of a court order. 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. It also affirmed PPO proceedings in TT v. KL, 965 N.W.2d 121, and in LW v. SCM and KJL, Docket Nos. 359150 and 359153, on January 19, 2023, for using process servers as instruments of harassment against multiple targets. Kevin Lindke was represented by Philip L. Ellison in that last case.

Three published or affirmed Court of Appeals opinions against Kevin Lindke in PPO proceedings. All before I became a target. All establishing the same pattern: Lindke uses platforms, proxies, and legal instruments to pursue people who have sought to end contact with him, and he does it with enough persistence that multiple courts across multiple proceedings have found it necessary to issue, affirm, and enforce orders for his targets’ protection.

I became a target in July 2025. We had a prior online working relationship that ended badly. He came back. And he came back with the same playbook the Court of Appeals had already ruled on three times.

The Constitutional Argument and What the Record Says About It

While Kevin Lindke was accumulating PPO orders and contempt convictions, Philip L. Ellison was in federal court arguing that the Michigan PPO statute was unconstitutional. In Lindke v. King, Case No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.), before the Honorable Matthew F. Leitman, Ellison argued on Lindke’s behalf that MCL 600.2950a was being applied in ways that silenced protected speech without adequate constitutional process, invoking Carroll v. Princess Anne, 393 U.S. 175 (1968). The theory was that Lindke was a victim: of an unconstitutional statute, of courts that issued PPOs without adequate procedural protection, of a system that used prior restraint to silence a man who was simply trying to speak.

Judge Leitman was not persuaded. Lindke v. King, Case No. 2:25-cv-14148 (E.D. Mich.), was dismissed with prejudice by stipulated order on May 6, 2026, ECF No. 21. The federal constitutional challenge to Michigan’s PPO statute as applied to Kevin Lindke is over.

The Victims Who Were Not Given a Choice

There is something that needs to be said directly: Dino Hines and I did not volunteer for this. We did not ask to become leverage in a federal litigation strategy. We did not consent to having our harassment experiences deployed as procedural tools, our names attached to court filings, our restraining orders published as exhibits, our private victimization turned into argument. We wanted our lives back. We still do.

Dino Hines and I are not public officials. We are private citizens who were harassed into the documentary record and whose experiences of that harassment were then submitted by Ellison as federal evidence to support his client’s constitutional theory of victimhood. The PPO I hold against Kevin Lindke exists because he threatened me and targeted my children. The PPO Dino Hines holds against Lindke exists because Lindke called him from a burner phone and threatened him. Those proceedings were not created so that Ellison could use them in federal court to argue that his client is a silenced victim of an unconstitutional statute. They were created because we needed protection from his client’s conduct.

The parallel to Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024), matters here. In that case, Philip L. Ellison represented Kevin Lindke in a matter that reached the United States Supreme Court on the question of when a public official’s social media conduct constitutes state action. The litigation infrastructure around it had a specific quality: it turned the experiences of people who were harassed into instruments for a broader legal argument, without their meaningful participation in whether that use was appropriate.

I know one specific thing that is documented about the Lindke v. Freed network: Ellison called a witness in that case who gave a deposition before Todd Shoudy. That same woman was subsequently identified as a potential witness in the litigation against me. She sent hate mail to me directly. She made harassing phone calls. Her documented history raises serious credibility questions relevant to any proceeding in which she is called. Her appearance across both matters reflects a shared network of individuals appearing in the same formations across different cases and different targets.

I did not want to be in Lindke v. King. Dino Hines did not want to be in Lindke v. King. We wanted to be left alone. We filed for protection because we needed it. The case is dismissed. The theory is over. The harassment is not.

The Legal Gap Nobody Has Named Yet

There is a specific harm in this case that existing law has not fully caught up to. Both Dino Hines and I were harassed. We sought court protection. Those proceedings produced orders, case numbers, transcripts, and records. Those records then appeared in or adjacent to federal filings in ways that neither of us consented to, had advance notice of, or had any meaningful opportunity to object to before they were filed. The attorney representing the man who targeted us used our victimization as material without asking us, without compensating us, and without any apparent concern for what that use cost us.

No existing cause of action cleanly addresses this. Abuse of process focuses on the use of process against a party. Misjoinder and improper joinder protect parties, not non-parties who are referenced and instrumentalized without being joined. Privacy torts reach toward it but are blocked by the litigation privilege. Intentional infliction of emotional distress is narrowed by that same privilege. The litigation privilege exists for good reasons, but it is being used to shield conduct that is the opposite of advocacy: the exploitation of vulnerable people’s documented harm in service of a strategy they were never asked to join.

A cause of action for instrumentalized victimization in litigation would require something like: the plaintiff was a documented harassment victim; the defendant’s attorney used the plaintiff’s victimization as litigation material in a proceeding where the plaintiff was not a party; this use was without consent and over express objection; the defendant or attorney knew of the objection and proceeded anyway; and the use caused cognizable harm. The litigation privilege would need a carve-out for using a non-party victim’s documented harm on behalf of the person responsible for that harm when the victim has expressly objected. The question is how many victims have to document this gap before someone with the authority to close it decides to act.

Brute Force, Stalking, and Fabricated Evidence as Solutions

What strikes me most, after six months of living inside this case, is that the Lindke and Murray network genuinely appears to believe that these tactics work. Brute force. Sustained harassment. Coordinated contact with employers and law enforcement contacts. Fabricated PPO petitions. False police reports. Process servers dispatched to targets’ homes after dark and on Easter Sunday. A domain registered in a 14-year-old girl’s legal name. Thousands of followers on a Facebook group used as an amplification platform for every new accusation and every new target.

They may have worked before, but they work on people who do not know how to build a record. They work on people who cannot afford to fight. They work on people who are so exhausted by the volume of the attacks that they eventually go quiet. What the network did not anticipate is a target who is a forensic analyst by training, a journalist by practice, a public servant good at building paper trails, and someone who documents everything in real time as a professional habit. The record that now exists across eight PPO proceedings in three counties, two federal cases, one active AGC investigation, multiple active law enforcement investigations, a seven-count counterclaim, and nine published investigative articles was not supposed to exist. It exists because I built it while they were trying to stop me from building it.

The Law Enforcement Coordination Failure

On May 17, 2026, I escalated this matter to the Michigan Attorney General’s office. I should not have had to do that. I am a registered Michigan crime victim. I reported Kevin Lindke’s targeting of my minor daughter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in November 2025. NCMEC confirmed my report and transmitted it to the Michigan State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, CyberTip No. 222110727. That was November 18, 2025. It is now six months later and here we are.

The Macomb County Sheriff’s Department and the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office opened a perjury investigation spanning three interconnected PPO proceedings. That investigation is active. But the agencies are not coordinating with each other or with the ICAC investigation in any way that has produced a unified response to what is a documented multi-agency, multi-county, multi-year stalking and harassment campaign.

I do not think this is entirely accidental. A fragmented law enforcement response is the environment in which this kind of campaign thrives. If no single agency has the full picture, no single agency can act on it. If the Macomb Sheriff does not know what MSP ICAC knows, and MSP ICAC does not know what the Macomb Prosecutor knows, and Kalamazoo is not coordinating with the others, and none of them know what the Saginaw County Circuit Court knows or what the Court of Appeals knows, then the network can continue operating in the gaps. It has been operating in those gaps for almost a year.

Phil Knew in September 2025

There is one fact at the center of this case that I want to state clearly, as a matter of public record, because it has not been answered in six months of litigation and I intend to keep asking it until it is.

On September 10, 2025, I sent Philip L. Ellison a formal cease and desist through the Outside Legal Counsel PLC website contact form. That communication documented, in writing, that his client Kevin Lindke had registered a domain in my minor daughter’s legal name, that his client had engaged in a sustained harassment campaign against me and my children, and that my children and I had no involvement in the conduct his client and the Murray network were accusing me of. I identified who I believed was responsible for the domain registrations. I told him what had been done to my family. I asked him to make it stop.

He acknowledged receipt the same day. He forwarded the complaint to Kevin Lindke as a courtesy.

On May 16, 2026, Ellison sent me a retraction demand expressing concern about “damage” to his professional reputation. He called my journalism false and defamatory. He threatened to sue me, a victim of his clients …again. He demanded I retract statements about his conduct in this case and acknowledge the harm to his standing before courts, clients, and the public, all things controlled by his actions and filings.

There’s a very stark contrast to be noted here. He received a formal cease and desist from me in September 2025 that documented damage being done to my family, my children, and my daughter specifically. He said nothing about that damage. He expresses no concern about my reputation, my children’s safety, or my daughter’s name appearing on a harassment domain his client registered. He did not investigate. He did not counsel his client to stop. He forwarded my complaint to the man targeting my child and moved on.

Philip L. Ellison is deeply concerned about his professional reputation. He was not concerned about Dean “Dino” Hines’ in April 2025. He was not concerned about mine in September 2025. He was definitely not concerned about my children’s. The cease and desist he received in September 2025 documented all of it in writing. He treated it as a “courtesy” item to pass along rather than the unwanted harassment and stalking of children. The retraction demand he sent seven months later is documented expression of concern about reputational harm in this case. And only about his.

Perhaps that is par for course, because he does not seem to care about the reputational damage done to any of the people his client has had in his crosshairs, whether it’s City Manager James Freed, Dino Hines, or even innocent children.

Additionally, Ellison did not conduct the required due diligence on whether the accusations his clients were making against anyone were accurate. He did not file a John Doe action to identify the actual creator of the domains at issue. He did not subpoena the registrar. He did not verify a single claim his client’s network was making before filing documents about Kevin’s victims into federal litigation, or before he filed a defamation lawsuit against me. He took his client’s word, forwarded my child protection complaint to the man I was complaining about, and escalated at every opportunity, even after I reported that man to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

If he had simply done his job on September 10, 2025, there would be nothing to write about. My children would not be in therapy. My family would not have been gutted. I would not have had to escalate to the Michigan Attorney General. None of this would have happened.

Why Journalism Has Been the Only Accountability Available

I did not start this case planning to write about it. I started it trying to survive it. The journalism came from necessity: when law enforcement coordination is slow, when the court system was being weaponized against me, when every institutional mechanism that was supposed to protect a crime victim and her children was either unavailable, underfunded, or deliberately fragmented, writing about it was what I could do. Documentation was all I had.

It has turned out to be enough. The record I built while being harassed has become the foundation for every court filing, every law enforcement referral, every institutional escalation, and every article I have published. The timestamps, the screenshots, the case numbers, the email headers, the IP addresses, the domain registration forensics, the NCMEC CyberTipline confirmation, the Meta DMCA victories, the court transcripts, the federal PACER records: all of it exists because I documented it in real time as a professional habit. And all of it is now in front of courts, investigators, prosecutors, bar authorities, and journalists at institutions larger than mine.

Even after everything that has happened to my family, Ellison deflects because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions. He called my documentation paper terrorism in a court filing, yet his clients and his actions are the paper generators. He called my filings a blizzard. He accused me of generating garbage. He filed a motion asking the Michigan Court of Appeals to sanction me for responding too quickly. He filed a retraction demand threatening to sue me again for publishing accurate information about his own conduct. He has done all of this without once explaining why he forwarded my child’s exploitation complaint to the man exploiting her, or who Samantha Aljouny is, or why the domain registrations at issue trace to activity consistent with his firm’s GoDaddy account.

A desperate man who has done terrible things and is grasping at straws calls accurate journalism garbage. The record does not care what he calls it. It exists. It is indexed. It is before the courts, the AGC, and the Attorney General. Just because he cannot explain away the harm does not mean it does not exist. And it is not going anywhere.

What Comes Next and Why I Think It Will Be Over Soon

A new judge will be assigned to the Saginaw case. That judge will read this record for the first time without any prior investment in the orders Borrello signed. They will see a void proceeding, a fabricated witness, a false statement to the court about an AGC investigation, a coercive injunction, and a seven-count counterclaim with a jury demand and $171,234.90 in documented damages. They will see the UPEPA special motion that has been pending since May 6, 2026, with mandatory fee-shifting on success. They will see the settlement offer on the table with a June 16, 2026 deadline.

Jamie Murray faces contempt hearings in Macomb County on June 8, 2026. The perjury investigation continues. The AGC investigation continues. The Attorney General’s office has been contacted. The Michigan State Police ICAC Task Force has a referral that is six months old. That is changing.

I do not know exactly how this ends. I know it ends. I have built the record. I have filed the motions. I have escalated to every institution available to me. I have documented everything in real time and published what I could document. My children have watched their mother fight this for six months and they know she did not stop. That matters more than any case outcome.

My hope is that we do not have much longer to wait. The record is complete. The institutions have it. What remains is for them to act on it.