The author of this piece, Rita Williams, is among the documented complainants in matters connected to KL and JM. She holds active personal protection orders against both. Philip L. Ellison of Outside Legal Counsel PLC, who represents Lindke and Murray in multiple proceedings, is also the plaintiff’s attorney in active litigation against Williams: Outside Legal Counsel PLC and Philip L. Ellison v. Williams, Saginaw County Circuit Court No. 25-2441-CZ, Michigan Court of Appeals No. 380599 (declined). All claims in this article are sourced exclusively to public court records, docketed filings, and confirmed agency communications. Nothing in this piece is sourced to Williams’s personal experience alone.
More than ten documented victims across multiple Michigan counties. Years of court filings. False police reports that were never prosecuted, with the Facebook posts still publicly visible today. Two assistant attorneys general with documented connections to KL’s proceedings. Law enforcement across multiple counties that generated no meaningful enforcement action. One county that produced no police report at all when children were being stalked. And a question the pattern now demands: did the state’s consistent enforcement silence run parallel to, and possibly in connection with, its active defense of the PPO statute in federal court? The record does not prove coordination. It proves a pattern that requires a public answer.
What the Record Shows
The court records that document KL’s history with complainants across Michigan do not show a he-said-she-said dispute. They show a pattern, sustained across years, across counties, and across victim populations, that the state’s enforcement apparatus encountered repeatedly and, with remarkable consistency, declined to address.
At least ten complainants appear across the documented court record. They span multiple counties. They include adults and children. They include individuals who filed police reports and received no response, individuals who sought protective orders and were subjected to continued harassment, and individuals who watched the people responsible for their protection move against them rather than the person harassing them.
That last item is not rhetorical. It is documented.
False police reports were filed against victims and others connected to these cases. Those reports were documented. They were not prosecuted. The social media posts used to coordinate and publicize that harassment remain publicly accessible today. The brazenness of that record is itself data: it reflects a reasonable expectation, built over years of experience, that nothing consequential would happen.
When a harassment network operates openly enough that its communications remain publicly documented years after the fact, and no prosecution results, the network has received reliable information about the limits of state response. That information shapes future conduct.
Law Enforcement Across Multiple Counties: A Documented Non-Response
Police reports were filed. Across multiple counties. The response, in case after case, was functionally nothing. No charges. No referrals that produced results. No enforcement action that disrupted the pattern.
Barry County’s record in this area is specific and documented. When children connected to this case were being stalked, harassed, and threatened, Barry County law enforcement did not generate a single police report. Not a report that went nowhere. Not a report that was filed and declined. No report at all. The documented absence is the finding.
Barry County law enforcement generated no police report in response to documented stalking, harassment, and threats directed at children. The failure to document is itself a record: it forecloses investigation, review, and accountability by ensuring no official record of the conduct exists.
The institutional context makes the documented silence harder to explain away. The Barry County Prosecutor sits on the board of directors of Safe Harbor Children’s Advocacy Center, an accredited nonprofit whose stated mission is providing intervention, treatment, and advocacy for child abuse victims in Allegan, Barry, and Van Buren Counties. The organization exists precisely to serve the population that was not served here. The gap between the institutional affiliation and the documented county response is not rhetorical. It is a matter of public record on both ends.
This is worth pausing on, because the absence of a police report is not a neutral administrative outcome. A police report is the entry point for every downstream enforcement mechanism: prosecutorial review, protective order proceedings, pattern documentation, eventual federal referral. When no report is generated, all of those mechanisms are foreclosed before they begin. The children remain unprotected not because the system reviewed the situation and found it insufficient, but because the system never processed it at all.
Across the broader geographic record, enforcement responses ranged from inaction to, in at least one documented instance, outright prosecution of a victim. The pattern is not one jurisdiction making a bad call. It is a multi-county failure that sustained itself over years, across Barry, Kalamazoo, Macomb, Saginaw, and St. Clair Counties, and extending to the Michigan State Police.
Cross-forum record building, enforcement gap analysis, and pattern documentation for stalking cases, wrongful conviction matters, and institutional accountability investigations. Written findings memo delivered in 24 hours.
See the Consulting Tracks ?The Attorney General’s Office: Two Documented Connections
The Michigan Attorney General’s Office has appeared in this record in ways that require direct accounting.
Frezza was connected to a proceeding involving documented stalking and harassment of children in which the AG’s Office declined to intervene on behalf of victims. What makes the Frezza connection more than a routine declination is what the record shows the office did instead: it moved against a victim. The AG’s Office, under Frezza’s involvement, pursued action against a complainant while the documented harassment of her children went unaddressed. That proceeding did not succeed. The attempt is nevertheless in the record, and the contrast it creates with the office’s simultaneous refusal to act on the harassment is its own form of documentation.
Restuccia appears as counsel for the state in Lindke v. King et al, No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.), the active federal civil matter in which KL challenges the constitutionality of Michigan’s PPO statute. His appearance is documented in the federal docket. The nature of the state’s representation in that matter, and what it means for the AG’s office’s posture toward a party with the documented history this record reflects, is a question the office has not publicly answered. It is also the question at the center of the hypothesis this article now raises directly.
Two separate assistant attorneys general appear in the record of proceedings connected to KL. One is documented in a matter where the office declined to protect children from documented harassment while pursuing action against a victim. The other represents the state in active federal litigation where Lindke is challenging the constitutionality of the very statute his victims relied on for protection. The AG’s Office has offered no public accounting of either connection.
The federal constitutional challenge to Michigan’s PPO statute in Lindke v. King et al is framed as a civil liberties matter: a challenge to the procedural adequacy of the PPO process. What that framing does not state, but what St. Clair County court records and the federal docket together document, is that Michigan’s PPO statute is the instrument that cost KL custody of his daughter. The PPO proceedings connected to his conduct are not abstract policy grievances. They are the documented legal mechanism by which a family court assessed his behavior and removed his parental access. A constitutional challenge that succeeds in undermining the PPO statute does not merely vindicate a legal principle. It retroactively delegitimizes the legal framework that produced the custody outcome he is subject to. That is a personal stake in the litigation that exists alongside and beneath the constitutional framing, and it is documented in the same court records that document his conduct toward his victims. The question of whether the federal challenge is a civil liberties case, a custody remedy in disguise, or both, is one the record supports asking directly.
KL Is Currently in Jail. That Is Not a State Enforcement Success.
KL is currently held at St. Clair County Jail. This fact is sometimes cited as evidence that the system eventually worked. It should not be.
Lindke’s current detention is a function of federal court process in Lindke v. King et al, No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.), where Federal Judge Matthew Leitman required his participation in a deposition at that location. He is not in custody as the result of a Michigan law enforcement investigation, a state prosecutorial decision, or any enforcement action taken by the agencies that received police reports, reviewed complaints, or were formally notified of the documented pattern across multiple counties over multiple years. The federal judiciary accomplished through civil process what Michigan’s enforcement apparatus did not accomplish through any of the mechanisms that exist precisely for this purpose.
The man whose victims filed police reports across multiple Michigan counties, whose harassment network operated openly enough that its communications remain publicly visible today, whose conduct was documented in court records across multiple jurisdictions for years, is currently in custody because a federal judge required his presence at a civil deposition. That is the state’s record.
The Legal Question the State Has Not Answered
The constitutional baseline on state responsibility for private harm is well established. DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989), holds that the Due Process Clause does not impose an affirmative obligation on the state to protect individuals from privately inflicted harm. Courts have applied that baseline consistently, and it provides significant insulation to agencies that choose inaction over intervention.
But DeShaney has limits, and those limits matter here.
First, the state-created danger doctrine recognizes liability when state actors affirmatively act in ways that increase a victim’s vulnerability to private harm. When an enforcement agency receives a report, declines to act, declines to document, and thereby signals to a perpetrator that continued conduct carries no consequence, the question of whether that inaction constitutes affirmative contribution to ongoing harm is not foreclosed by DeShaney.
Second, Michigan’s statutory framework for stalking creates obligations that operate independently of constitutional baselines. MCL 750.411h and 750.411i define stalking and aggravated stalking as criminal offenses. They do not vest agencies with unreviewable discretion to ignore documented violations. When enforcement agencies receive reports that meet the statutory definition and decline to act, the gap between statutory obligation and documented response is a legal exposure point, not a policy preference.
Third, the documented attempt by the AG’s Office to pursue action against a victim in a matter where the victim’s children were being stalked and harassed raises a distinct question. A victim who is simultaneously unprotected from a documented harasser and subjected to state prosecution is in a materially different position than a victim who is simply unprotected. That difference is legally cognizable under the state-created danger doctrine.
At what point does a documented pattern of non-response across multiple counties, multiple agencies, and multiple victim populations constitute something the state is institutionally required to account for? The record in this case is long enough and documented enough that the answer is no longer hypothetical. It is a litigation posture waiting for a plaintiff with the right factual record and the right counsel.
A Question the Pattern Raises: Did the State Stand Down?
The documented pattern of multi-county enforcement non-response across more than ten complainants, sustained over multiple years, raises a question that is uncomfortable to ask directly and necessary to ask anyway: is the state’s consistent failure to act on PPO violations connected to the active constitutional challenge to the PPO statute itself?
This is not a conclusion the record establishes. It is a hypothesis the pattern supports well enough to require a public answer.
KL, through Philip L. Ellison of Outside Legal Counsel PLC, is actively litigating a constitutional challenge to Michigan’s domestic PPO statute in Lindke v. King et al, No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.). His argument, as documented in his own federal filings, depends on the accumulation of PPO proceedings against him. B. Eric Restuccia, Deputy Solicitor General of the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, represents the state as the defendant defending the PPO statute’s constitutionality in that same case. While that defense proceeds at the federal level, enforcement agencies across Barry, Kalamazoo, Macomb, Saginaw, and St. Clair Counties, and the Michigan State Police, have declined, repeatedly and across multiple victim populations, to enforce PPO violations, pursue aggravated stalking charges, or generate police reports when children were being stalked. The simultaneity of those two tracks is documented. Whether it is coincidental is a question the state has not answered.
The mechanism by which coordination of this kind could occur is not exotic. An active federal constitutional challenge to a state statute creates institutional sensitivity at the Attorney General’s Office level. Enforcement actions that generate additional PPO violations, contempt proceedings, or aggravated stalking charges against the party bringing the challenge could, in theory, complicate the state’s litigation posture, generate additional federal claims, or produce the kind of enforcement record that a court could use to assess the statute’s real-world application. Whether those considerations have shaped enforcement guidance, formally or informally, is precisely the kind of question that FOIA requests, legislative oversight inquiries, and discovery in civil proceedings are designed to answer.
If the state’s enforcement silence is connected to its litigation posture in the PPO constitutional challenge, the implications are direct and serious. It would mean that the victims of documented stalking and harassment connected to the party bringing that challenge have been functionally sacrificed to the state’s interest in managing active federal litigation. It would mean that the institutional non-response across multiple counties is not a collection of independent bad judgment calls but a coordinated policy outcome. And it would mean that the women and children who sought protection from the Michigan enforcement apparatus during this period were denied that protection in part because the state’s legal strategy made their protection inconvenient. That is a theory of state liability that operates well outside the DeShaney framework and squarely within the state-created danger doctrine.
To be precise about what the record does and does not show: it documents the pattern of non-enforcement. It documents the Restuccia appearance in the constitutional challenge. It documents the enforcement non-response across multiple counties involving a complainant population connected to the party litigating that challenge. It does not contain a document in which a Michigan official states that enforcement was suppressed to protect the litigation. The hypothesis is supported by the pattern. It is not yet proven by a direct communication.
That distinction matters editorially. It does not make the question less worth asking. A state that is simultaneously defending a protective statute in federal court and declining to enforce that statute on behalf of its intended beneficiaries has questions to answer regardless of whether the two decisions are connected. The connection is the sharper question. The non-enforcement is the documented fact.
The appropriate institutional response to this hypothesis is not silence. It is a public accounting from the Michigan Attorney General’s Office of what guidance, if any, was provided to enforcement agencies regarding stalking and PPO enforcement during the pendency of Lindke v. King. If no guidance was provided, that is its own answer. If guidance was provided, the public is entitled to know what it said. FOIA requests directed to the AG’s Office and each of the six county enforcement agencies for any communications regarding the Lindke litigation and enforcement posture are the documented next step.
What Brazenness Tells You About Institutional Signals
The Facebook posts are still up. The false police reports filed against victims were never prosecuted. The harassment network operated, and continues to operate, with sufficient confidence that its public-facing communications were never scrubbed.
That confidence is not irrational. It is the product of years of consistent information about what the state will and will not do. When a pattern of conduct produces no meaningful enforcement response across multiple counties and multiple years, the participants in that pattern receive reliable feedback. The feedback this record produced was that the conduct was survivable. That it was, in fact, survived. Repeatedly.
Institutional signals are real. They shape behavior. When the state’s consistent signal is non-response, that signal belongs in any honest accounting of why the pattern continued as long as it did. And when that non-response runs parallel to an active constitutional challenge brought by the primary actor in the pattern, the signal is worth examining with additional scrutiny.
The longevity of a harassment pattern is partly a function of perpetrator behavior and partly a function of what the enforcement environment permits. In this case, the enforcement environment permitted a great deal, across a great many jurisdictions, for a very long time. The state does not get to be surprised by that outcome. And if the enforcement environment was shaped by the state’s litigation posture, the state does not get to hide behind DeShaney to avoid answering for it.
What Comes Next
The Macomb County contempt proceedings are scheduled for June 8, 2026. The federal matter, Lindke v. King et al, No. 2:22-cv-11767, continues in the Eastern District of Michigan before Judge Leitman. The Michigan Court of Appeals matter, No. 380599, which the Court of Appeals declined to hear. AGC File No. 25-2363, assigned to Senior Counsel Cora Morgan, remains open.
FOIA requests to the Michigan Attorney General’s Office and the six county enforcement agencies documented in this piece, seeking any communications regarding the Lindke litigation and enforcement posture during the pendency of that case, are the next documented investigative step. Clutch Justice will file and publish the results.
Clutch Justice will continue to cover each of these proceedings as the record develops. The sourcing is the court record. The standard is what can be documented. The question this piece raises will be answered, eventually, by what the state does next with a record this long and this public.
Update: Court of Appeals Declines. Contempt Withdrawn. The Record Stands.
This section reflects developments that occurred after the original publication date of June 1, 2026.
Two developments have occurred since this article was published, and both belong in the record.
First, the Michigan Court of Appeals declined to hear Michigan Court of Appeals No. 380599, the appeal arising from the Saginaw County proceedings, which the Court of Appeals declined to hear, in which Philip L. Ellison of Outside Legal Counsel PLC filed suit against the author of this piece. The Court of Appeals declined jurisdiction. The matter is concluded at that level.
Second, Petitioner Rita Williams has withdrawn her pending Motion for Contempt in the Macomb County PPO matter against JM, styled as Williams v. Murray, No. 2026-000730-PH, Hon. Tanya A. Grillo. The June 8, 2026 contempt hearing has been cancelled by notice of withdrawal filed with the court.
The withdrawal is not a concession that no violations occurred. The violations have never stopped. The withdrawal is a documented response to a documented reality: no enforcement authority, across six counties, the Michigan State Police, and two assistant attorneys general, has acted on this record in any way that has protected Petitioner or her children. The contempt proceeding was the latest iteration of a process that has consistently produced no protective outcome while consuming the resources of a pro se litigant with children and a professional practice to maintain. The Notice of Withdrawal filed with the Macomb County Circuit Court states this plainly and for the record, naming every agency that failed to act and stating Petitioner’s documented belief that the pattern of non-enforcement may be connected to the active federal constitutional challenge to Michigan’s PPO statute in Lindke v. King et al, No. 2:22-cv-11767 (E.D. Mich.).
The withdrawal is without prejudice. The Personal Protection Order remains in full force and effect. All statutory rights under MCL 600.2950a, MCL 750.411h, and MCL 750.411i are reserved. The record assembled across these proceedings, the court filings, the police reports, the documented non-responses, the on-record jail threat made by JM at the Dean Hines hearing, the process server dispatched to Petitioner’s home in a procedurally void lawsuit, the tires slashed at a contempt hearing, does not disappear because a contempt motion has been withdrawn. It exists. It is public. And it is cited in a filed court document now part of the Macomb County Circuit Court record.
The system has shown, across every jurisdiction and every enforcement mechanism available to a stalking victim in Michigan, that it will not act. That conclusion is not rhetorical. It is the documented output of years of engagement with the enforcement apparatus that exists to prevent exactly what has continued to happen. Withdrawing from a process that has produced nothing is not giving up. It is an accurate assessment of what the process produces, stated on the record, for anyone who reviews this matter in the future.
The lesson this record teaches is not subtle. KL is currently sitting in St. Clair County Jail, held on state custody pursuant to federal civil process, because he sued the State of Michigan. Not because Michigan law enforcement investigated the more than ten documented complainants across six counties. Not because a prosecutor assembled the pattern record and charged aggravated stalking. Not because any court treated the documented harassment of women and children as the felony course of conduct it is. He is in custody because he is a plaintiff in active federal litigation and a federal judge required his deposition. The protection the State of Michigan could not extend to his victims, it delivered incidentally, as a byproduct of defending itself from his lawsuit.
What makes that picture more damning is what was available and unused. Law enforcement had multiple documented opportunities to arrest KL. Not hypothetical opportunities. Not situations that required new investigation or additional evidentiary development. Opportunities, in the field, where the legal predicate existed and the choice not to act was made. He was not arrested. He remained free. The victims remained exposed. And the system that had the authority and the opportunity to intervene, on more than one occasion, declined to use either. That is not bureaucratic delay or resource constraint. That is a decision, made repeatedly, by people with the authority to make a different one.
When law enforcement declines to arrest on a single occasion, the explanation might be evidentiary caution, judgment call, or resource prioritization. When law enforcement declines to arrest across multiple documented opportunities, over multiple years, involving multiple complainants including children, while the subject is simultaneously a plaintiff in active federal litigation challenging the statute those complainants relied on for protection, the explanation is no longer a collection of individual judgment calls. It is a pattern. And patterns have causes. The cause here has not been publicly accounted for by any agency that made those decisions.
Apparently, the most reliable path to protection from the State of Michigan is to be the one suing it. Sue the state, and the state shows up. Be stalked by someone who sued the state, and the state looks the other way while he sends people to your door. Law enforcement had multiple opportunities to arrest him. They did not. He is in state custody today because a federal judge required his deposition, not because Michigan law enforcement ever used any of the opportunities it had to pick him up. That is the complete record. That is what it says.
He Told You Exactly What He Believed. The System Proved Him Right.
Before the PPOs. Before the contempt proceedings. Before the process server at the door and the procedurally void lawsuit and the motion to strip protective orders from the record. Before any of it, KL sent a text message to his victim. The message has been placed on the court record in Barry County, Kalamazoo County, and St. Clair County. It reads: “Go ahead. I want the cops to come.”
That text message is not a threat of violence. It is something more operationally significant: it is a documented declaration of premeditated confidence in system non-response. He was not daring law enforcement to stop him. He was telling his victim, at the outset, that he already knew law enforcement would not. That he had made a calculation about what the system would and would not do, and the calculation told him he was safe to continue. The message predates the PPO proceedings, the contempt hearings, the multi-county enforcement failures, and the federal litigation. It is the opening statement of a pattern that has since been validated, repeatedly, by every agency and court that received a report, declined to act, and handed him the outcome he predicted from the beginning.
That text is in the record in three counties. It has been before courts and law enforcement agencies that had the authority to treat it as evidence of premeditated, knowing harassment and chose not to. It sat in Barry County’s file while Barry County generated no police report for children being stalked. It sat in Kalamazoo County’s file while Kalamazoo County declined to prosecute. It sat in St. Clair County’s file while St. Clair County processed contempt violations and declined to escalate to the felony charges the pattern warranted. In each of those jurisdictions, the documented proof that he knew the system would not act was available to the people who then proved him right by not acting.
A harasser who tells his victim at the outset that he wants law enforcement to come has already modeled the enforcement environment and concluded it poses no meaningful risk to him. That conclusion, stated in a text message and preserved in court records across three counties, is not incidental background. It is evidence of the mindset that organized and sustained the conduct that followed. It is also the most concise summary of what the documented institutional record ultimately confirmed: he was right. The cops did not come. Or when they came, they left without acting. And the pattern continued.
The pattern of conduct and what exists in the record together support a hypothesis about why this particular victim was targeted. The documented conduct suggests that Lindke may have selected a target with children not despite the presence of children but because of it. The calculation, if accurate, is specific: a mother with children is more vulnerable to law enforcement contact than a person without them. Any police interaction, regardless of its outcome for him, carries asymmetric consequences for her. Custody implications, professional licensing scrutiny, reputational harm, the involvement of child protective services, all of these are downstream risks of police contact that attach to a parent and not to him. “Go ahead. I want the cops to come” reads differently against that analysis. It is not merely confidence that law enforcement will not act against him. It is confidence that any law enforcement contact serves his purposes, because the collateral consequences of that contact fall on her, not on him. The pattern of conduct toward this victim specifically, compared against his conduct toward others in the documented record, is consistent with a targeting methodology that identified and exploited that asymmetry deliberately.
That hypothesis has not been proven by a document in which Lindke states his targeting rationale. What the record does show is: a text message expressing desire for police contact, directed at a victim with children; a subsequent pattern of conduct designed to generate official contact and documentation involving that victim; and a litigation strategy that uses every piece of official contact generated, including police reports, PPO proceedings, and civil suits, as raw material for his federal constitutional challenge. If the targeting of a mother with children was calculated to produce police contact that he could then weaponize as evidence of state overreach in his federal litigation, the record is consistent with that calculation having been made. It is a question the documented evidence supports asking, and one that has not been examined by any of the agencies that received it.
Two Saginaw County Judges and a Lawsuit That Should Not Exist
The Ellison suit, styled as Outside Legal Counsel PLC and Philip L. Ellison v. Williams, No. 25-2441-CZ, has been presided over by two Saginaw County Circuit Court judges: Judge Kevin Borrello and Judge Janet Gafkay. The suit was filed by Philip L. Ellison, the attorney who represents KL in multiple proceedings, against a stalking victim who holds active Personal Protection Orders against Lindke and his associate JM. The suit was filed after those PPOs were in place. It proceeded while those PPOs were active. And a motion filed within that same proceeding seeks to strike those protective orders from the record entirely.
The question this record raises for Judges Borrello and Gafkay is specific and documented. Michigan courts have the authority to dismiss abusive litigation. They have the authority to recognize when a civil suit functions as a continuation of the harassment conduct that produced the protective orders the plaintiff’s client is subject to. They have the authority to consider the full context of a filing, including who is suing, who they represent, and what relationship the lawsuit bears to active protective orders entered against their client. Two judges have had that authority in this case. The suit continues.
Philip L. Ellison filed a lawsuit against a stalking victim, in a county of his choosing, while his client was subject to her Personal Protection Orders, and then filed a motion within that lawsuit to strip those orders from the record. Two Saginaw County judges have presided over that proceeding. The question of how a court allows that suit to continue, with that motion pending, while active PPOs document the relationship between the plaintiff’s client and the defendant, is a question the Saginaw County Circuit Court has not publicly answered.
It is worth stating plainly what the combination of these facts describes. A man sends a text message telling his victim he wants the cops to come, knowing they will not act. Years of documented enforcement non-response validate that prediction across six counties. His attorney files a civil suit against the victim after her PPOs are in place, in a county where that attorney has procedural familiarity, and moves to strip her protective orders within that same suit. Two judges allow the proceeding to continue. And somewhere in the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, the Deputy Solicitor General is defending the state in that same man’s federal challenge to the statute his victims relied on for protection.
That is not a collection of coincidences. It is a documented record. And it has been stated, now, in print, sourced to public court filings, with the names of the judges, the attorneys, the agencies, and the case numbers attached. The record does not require interpretation. It requires an answer.
Children as Collateral Damage: The State’s Final Accounting
A domain was registered in the name of Petitioner’s oldest child. That registration is on the court record in Barry County, Kalamazoo County, Saginaw County, and St. Clair County. It is not an allegation. It is a documented act, placed before four separate county courts, involving a child by name. A domain registered in a child’s name is not incidental harassment. It is a specific, targeted act that identifies that child, by name, as a subject of the conduct. It is the kind of act that, in any functional enforcement environment, would produce an immediate and serious response.
It did not. Four counties have that record. None of them treated it as the predicate for escalated action it was.
A CyberTipline report was filed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Report No. 222110727, confirmed November 18, 2025, transmitted to the Michigan Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The ICAC task force exists for precisely this category of conduct: the targeting of children through digital means by adults with documented harassment histories. The report was filed. The transmission was confirmed. The task force received it.
The Michigan Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received a confirmed CyberTipline report involving the documented targeting of a child by name, filed by a complainant with active Personal Protection Orders, connected to an actor with court records across six counties documenting years of harassment conduct. What that referral produced, in terms of protective action for the child named in the domain registration, is consistent with what every other report, filing, and referral in this record has produced: nothing that disrupted the pattern or protected the people it was supposed to protect.
The targeting analysis established earlier in this article hypothesized that Lindke may have selected a victim with children because the asymmetric consequences of police contact fall on her. The domain registration in her child’s name makes that analysis more specific. He did not merely target a mother. He targeted the child by name. He made the child’s identity part of the documented conduct. And four counties received that fact and treated it the same way they treated every other documented fact in this record: as something that did not require action.
The State of Michigan received reports involving a child targeted by name. It received a confirmed NCMEC CyberTipline referral transmitted to its own ICAC task force. It received police reports, PPO violation records, and contempt proceedings across six counties over multiple years. At every step, in every jurisdiction, with children present and named and documented, the state’s enforcement apparatus produced the same outcome. If children are not sufficient cause for the State of Michigan to act, the only remaining explanation the record supports is that the state has decided its exposure in federal litigation matters more than the safety of the children its own statutes were written to protect. That is not an accusation. That is what the documented non-response, taken in full, means.
There is one more thing this record requires stating before the institutional analysis moves on to who does and does not have time for litigation. The investigative work that built this record was not performed by a law enforcement agency. It was not performed by a prosecutor’s office. It was not performed by the Michigan Attorney General or any of the six county enforcement agencies that received the results of it. It was performed by the victim. A working mother with children assembled the cross-county documentation, filed the reports, placed the conduct on the court record in multiple jurisdictions, identified the connections between the federal litigation and the enforcement non-response, filed the CyberTipline report, and handed every piece of it to the institutions with the statutory authority and the public funding to act on it. They did not act on it. The investigative labor that the state was funded and staffed to perform was performed instead, without compensation and without result, by the person the state was supposed to be protecting.
The State of Michigan has a Fraud Investigation Unit. It has an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. It has county prosecutors, a state police force, and an Attorney General’s Office with a full litigation division. It has six county sheriff’s departments and circuit courts with contempt authority. What it did not have, across years and jurisdictions, was the institutional will to use any of those resources on a documented pattern that a private citizen identified, assembled, filed, and handed to them. The unpaid investigative work that should have triggered a state response instead replaced one. That is not a gap in the system. That is the system working exactly as it chose to work.
There is one more thing the institutional analysis consistently omits, and it should be said plainly. KL does not appear to maintain conventional employment. JM does not appear to maintain conventional employment. Philip L. Ellison is an attorney whose professional output is the production of legal filings. For all three, the time required to generate, sustain, and escalate litigation across multiple counties and multiple years is not a sacrifice. It is the activity itself. There is no job to leave early, no client meeting to reschedule, no school pickup to arrange around a hearing date. The filings are the work. The continuances are the strategy. The volume is the point.
The people on the other side of that equation are not in the same position. A working mother with children and a professional practice does not experience a new filing as a legal event to be managed at leisure. She experiences it as an emergency dropped into a life that was already full. Every contempt hearing requires childcare arrangements, travel, lost work, and the particular exhaustion of preparing to fight in a forum that has already demonstrated it will not protect her. Every new lawsuit requires a response deadline that does not care what else is happening. Every continuance extends a period of exposure and uncertainty that she is living inside of while the people generating the filings move on to the next one.
The legal system is not designed with that asymmetry in mind. It processes filings. It schedules hearings. It extends deadlines. It does not ask who has the time and resources to sustain indefinite multi-forum litigation and who is being ground down by it. It does not distinguish between a party who files because they have nothing else to do and a party who files because the alternative is losing everything she has built. That distinction is not academic. It is the mechanism by which vexatious litigation works: not by winning, but by continuing. The cost of continuing falls almost entirely on the person who has something to lose. The people generating the filings in this record have demonstrated, across years and counties, that they understand this perfectly and have no intention of stopping.
Bluebook: Rita Williams, The State Watched. The Victims Kept Coming. At What Point Does That Become Negligence?, Clutch Justice (June 1, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/01/state-failure-stalking-victims-lindke-murray/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, June 1). The state watched. The victims kept coming. At what point does that become negligence? Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/01/state-failure-stalking-victims-lindke-murray/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “The State Watched. The Victims Kept Coming. At What Point Does That Become Negligence?” Clutch Justice, 1 June 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/06/01/state-failure-stalking-victims-lindke-murray/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “The State Watched. The Victims Kept Coming. At What Point Does That Become Negligence?” Clutch Justice, June 1, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/01/state-failure-stalking-victims-lindke-murray/.
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