When You Report a Crime Against Your Children, the Law Is Supposed to Protect You. Michigan Institutional Accountability, May 17, 2026

On September 10, 2025, a cease and desist was sent to Philip L. Ellison’s law office documenting that his client had registered a domain in a minor child’s full legal name. The communication was acknowledged the same day. Ellison did not contact law enforcement. He did not contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or any child protection authority. He forwarded the cease and desist to his client as a courtesy.

The harassment continued. Court documents were provided by Ellison to his client, who used them to publish the family’s address. Threats were made against the family’s safety and financial stability. Fabricated statements were distributed. A domain in a child’s legal name remained active.

On November 18, 2025, a CyberTipline report was confirmed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and transmitted to Michigan’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, CyberTip No. 222110727. Nine days later, Ellison filed a show cause motion against the journalist who had filed that report, in a proceeding the federal bankruptcy automatic stay had rendered void from the moment he signed the original complaint under 11 U.S.C. 362(a) and Kalb v. Feuerstein, 308 U.S. 433 (1940).

The motion filed May 15, 2026 asks the Court to look at the full record and call the conduct what it is. Every fact in it is sourced to a public court record, a confirmed federal agency communication, or a filed document. The case has not been adjudicated on the merits.

The May 15 Motion: Six Filings, Three Grounds, One Request

The Motion for Sanctions for Frivolous Filings, Vexatious Litigation, and Litigant Abuse was filed simultaneously in Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 25-2441-CZ and submitted to Macomb County Circuit Court for consideration at the June 8, 2026 contempt hearings in Case No. 2026-000730-PH before Hon. Tanya A. Grillo. Certificate of service confirms copies were provided to the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office and the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department.

The motion asks the Court to do three things: designate six specific filings as frivolous under MCR 2.114 and impose sanctions; exercise inherent equitable authority to sanction the pattern of vexatious litigation conduct across the proceeding, including consideration of dismissal with prejudice; and refer Plaintiff Philip L. Ellison (P74117) to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, where AGC File No. 25-2363 is active and assigned to Senior Counsel Cora Morgan.

The motion documents $171,234.90 in total damages in the counterclaim, including $8,494.90 in litigation expenses and $27,300 in projected therapy costs for Defendant and her minor children, who are currently in therapy as a result of the documented harassment campaign.

What the Record Shows: Michigan’s Fragmented Communication Infrastructure

Michigan’s county-siloed court and law enforcement systems do not share a unified flagging infrastructure. A party can file proceedings in Saginaw County, Macomb County, Oakland County, and St. Clair County simultaneously or sequentially, and no court officer in any of those jurisdictions receives an automated alert that the other proceedings exist. Each court processes its own docket. Each law enforcement agency works its own jurisdiction. The cross-jurisdictional picture exists only for the person who builds it manually.

That structural condition is not a technical limitation awaiting a software patch. It is an operational architecture with identifiable beneficiaries. Anyone who understands how to use simultaneous multi-forum filing as a pressure instrument benefits from courts that cannot see what they are doing across jurisdictions. The target must defend on multiple fronts simultaneously while no court officer ever sees the full scope of what is being deployed against them.

The piece maps what closing that gap would structurally require, what other states have built toward unified flagging, and why Michigan has not.

What the Record Shows: Doris Bither and the Cost of Being Believed Too Late

Doris Bither reported what was happening to her. Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor from UCLA documented physical evidence. Photographs were taken. What those researchers could not provide was institutional authority to intervene. The systems with that authority chose not to act on what they were told.

The story became The Entity, a 1982 horror film. Doris Bither became a footnote, occasionally named in discussions of the case on which the film was based. The RRE installment this week is not about whether the paranormal explanation is credible. It is about what the documented record shows about how institutions respond when a woman reports harm, and what it costs when the people who believe her are the people without authority to act on it.

What This Issue Establishes

The retaliation documented in the featured piece followed the fragmentation architecture mapped in the investigation: multiple forums, no single officer with full visibility, the target left to build the cross-forum record alone. The sanctions motion filed May 15 is itself an example of what doing that work produces. The Doris Bither piece extends the same pattern across decades and a different institutional context. The guide to rebuilding after retaliation exists because enough people have survived this to describe what comes next.

This issue is also a record. It will be cited and linked. The courts involved have it in front of them. That is the point. The record is either working or it is not. It is working.

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