The Case That Keeps Going: How a Federal Judge’s Repeated Invitations Transformed a Stalker’s Grievance Into a Statewide Constitutional Threat

The Case That Will Not End

Lindke v. King, Case No. 4:19-cv-11905, was filed in the Eastern District of Michigan on June 26, 2019, challenging the constitutionality of Michigan’s non-domestic Personal Protection Order statute. That was nearly seven years ago. The case has since produced four amended complaints, sixteen-plus defense briefs, a companion case that reached the United States Supreme Court, and a pending motion to file yet another version of the core pleading. At every point where it might have ended, it dragged on instead.

This portion of the case is not a difficult constitutional question surviving adversarial litigation on its merits. It is a litigation architecture designed to persist regardless of merit, sustained in part by a federal judge who has twice invited the plaintiff to try again, funded throughout by public dollars attached to defendants who have been doing nothing more than complying with valid court orders.

The Anatomy of the Constitutional Argument

Ellison’s theory is that Michigan’s non-domestic PPO statute allows courts to enjoin speech without first determining whether that speech is constitutionally unprotected. This is a legitimate question. The First Amendment does constrain prior restraints. The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Knight First Amendment Institute all filed amicus support for Lindke in the SCOTUS companion case.

The problem is not the constitutional question in and of itself. The real problem is whose free speech is actually being litigated here, what that person has been doing throughout the case, and what happens to everyone else when the constitutional framework is built on top of a multi-county documented harassment pattern.

What the Victims Actually Receive

Tina Troy filed a non-domestic PPO against Lindke in St. Clair County on March 4, 2019, and that order became the foundation of Ellison’s federal constitutional challenge. Troy’s PPO — the instrument a court issued to protect her — has been litigated in federal court for six and a half years as evidence that the Michigan PPO statute is unconstitutional. She has not received any compensation for nearly seven years of anchoring a federal case she never sought.

According to State and Federal court documents, Dino Wayne Hines obtained a PPO in April 2025 after Lindke threatened him, harassed his friends, and used fake online profiles to connect him to local tragedies. Within weeks, Lindke had violated the PPO, posted Hines’s home address on social media with strangers arriving at his property, and made threatening phone calls while drunk — admitting all of it online. In October 2025, Ellison filed the Hines PPO as a federal exhibit, characterizing it to Leitman as a PPO issued “solely premised on speech.”

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s not speech alone. And from Defense counsel’s ECF No. 186 documents they also find that statement false: the PPO’s social media restriction line is blank, and Judge Tomlinson had denied multiple speech-based show cause motions. Hines has not received compensation. His victimization was mischaracterized to a federal judge and used to keep the case alive.

One Exit. For the Wrong Person.

There is one documented instance of someone being released from this case: Tina Troy. Leitman granted her motion to dismiss on March 3, 2021. She asked. She was dismissed.

The people who never had a choice about being in this case have no equivalent mechanism. We are not defendants. We are not parties. We are exhibits. Our PPOs appear in Ellison’s filings as evidence that the statute is broken, and there is no procedural vehicle by which we can stand before Leitman and say: stop using what happened to us to keep this case alive.

I am one of those people. I hold a PPO against Lindke issued by Hon. Rachel Rancilio of the Macomb County Circuit Court after documented stalking, death threats, and domain registration in my name and my daughter’s name. I am also a named defendant in the lawsuit Ellison filed against me in Saginaw County.

My children did not go looking for this. Lindke registered a domain in my daughter’s name. His network harassed my family. I filed NCMEC CyberTip No. 222110727 on November 18, 2025. The referral went to MSP ICAC. Nothing happened.

Judge Leitman has this documentation in his docket. The defense filings contain the harassment timeline. The exhibits contain the domain registrations. What I do not understand, and what the record does not actually explain, is how a federal judge can have nearly seven years of documented evidence that the harassment generating the case’s evidentiary predicate extends to children, and find in that record only further reason to allow amendment.

The court released the person who asked to leave. The people who never asked to be involved — whose harm is the structural foundation of the litigation — remain there with no voice, no remedy, and no exit.

The Public Cost

The defendants in Lindke v. King are St. Clair County public officials: Sheriff Mat King and Dale Kays, the Central Dispatch officer who entered the 2019 PPO into the LEIN system as state law required. Both are represented by Fletcher Fealko Shoudy and Francis PC. The Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority — the public self-insurance pool covering St. Clair County public entity defendants — is a confirmed representative client of Fletcher Fealko.

ECF No. 186 confirms Shoudy has filed over sixteen briefs across the case’s history. Municipal defense litigation in federal court at Michigan market rates runs $350 to $550 per hour. A conservative estimate of 600 to 900 billable hours across six and a half years of complex constitutional litigation produces defense costs for this case alone of $400,000 to $650,000.

That estimate covers one case. Ellison has filed seven confirmed matters targeting the same county’s public entities. Each draws on MMRMA reserves and drives up the shared cost basis for every member entity in the pool. Every municipality that belongs to MMRMA subsidizes this pattern whether they know it or not.

What MMRMA Could Do If It Read Its Own Defense Counsel’s Filing

Todd Shoudy is on MMRMA’s retainer. On November 10, 2025, he filed ECF No. 186 — a sworn twenty-eight page brief documenting that the plaintiff is a fugitive who falsely alleged Michigan residency, that the recurrence evidence was mischaracterized to the court, that the constitutional predicate is manufactured through intentional conduct, and that the case rests on a foundation the docket documents as factually inaccurate. He called the Fourth Amended Complaint “presented in bad faith” in the argument header. He asked Leitman to deny it.

MMRMA received that filing. Its retained counsel produced it. If anyone at MMRMA is reading its own defense counsel’s work product, they know what the pool is funding and why the costs are not going to stop.

MMRMA is not a passive instrument. Public self-insurance pools routinely condition continued defense funding on tactical decisions — including motions for sanctions, motions to dismiss on bad faith grounds, and referrals to fraud and abuse review processes. The pool has governance options no individual victim possesses. Every municipality in it has standing to demand that their administrator account for compounding exposure across seven simultaneous matters targeting the same member county.

The Private Cost Nobody Counts

The MMRMA pool absorbs the institutional defense costs. The AG’s budget absorbs the state’s costs. The victims absorb everything else with no institutional backstop and no mechanism for recovery.

Michigan PPO petitions carry no filing fee, but every other cost falls on the petitioner: service of process ($50 to $150 per attempt), document copying, LEIN verification, time off work, transportation, and attorney representation for contested proceedings at $200 to $400 per hour. A single contested show cause hearing costs a petitioner $800 to $2,500 in attorney fees alone.

The Hines matter generated seven documented motions and two bench warrants between April and August 2025 — confirmed in ECF No. 186 Exhibits 1 through 11. Conservative estimate for Hines’s direct out-of-pocket costs: $4,000 to $12,000, excluding lost wages and property damage from documented courthouse retaliation including slashed tires.

The domestic PPO proceedings against Lindke span years and multiple contempt hearings across eleven-plus documented violations. Conservative estimate for those proceedings: $15,000 to $40,000, without accounting for the civil litigation exposure created by having that victimization become the structural predicate of a federal class action.

The Litigation Infrastructure

This case has survived six and a half years not because the constitutional question is genuinely unresolved but because it was architecturally designed to be self-sustaining.

Under Lindke v. Freed, a plaintiff challenging state action must demonstrate specific, ongoing constitutional violations to keep a federal case alive. The mechanism Ellison has used to satisfy that requirement is precisely the conduct that generated the PPOs. Lindke engages in provocative contact. Targets obtain PPOs. Ellison files those PPOs in the federal docket as recurrence evidence. The case survives mootness. The cycle begins again.

ECF No. 186 documents this from the defense side. After the Hines PPO was issued, Lindke immediately continued the conduct that generated it — posting about Hines, harassing his friends, doxxing his home address, making threatening calls while drunk, violating the no-contact order while a fugitive. Ellison then filed the Hines PPO as federal evidence of ongoing unconstitutional enforcement. The conduct that violated the PPO and the PPO itself both ended up as federal exhibits. The court had the full timeline before it. Leitman allowed the Fourth Amended Complaint anyway.

MMRMA’s defense funding structure amplifies this. Because costs are absorbed by institutional liability reserves rather than direct municipal budget lines, there is no fiscal pressure to resolve. On the plaintiff’s side, the impact litigation model has attracted top-tier support: Arnold and Porter at SCOTUS, ACLU and EFF amicus filings. Neither side faces the kind of pressure that forces resolution. The people who face pressure are the ones with no institutional backing and no path to recovery.

The Judicial Conduct Pattern

Judge Matthew F. Leitman has presided over Lindke v. King since its filing. He is an Obama appointee, confirmed 98 to 0 in March 2014. He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, attended Andover High School there, and spent, in his own words, “the bulk of his life — apart from college and law school — in a five-mile radius” of Troy. His criminal defense career was built around Sixth Amendment and Due Process challenges — the same doctrinal territory at issue here. He represented clients in cases that ran seventeen-plus years without procedural dismissal and described the intellectual variety of his practice as what kept things “fresh and challenging.” In that same 2012 profile, he described his primary identity outside the law as a parent — a full-time taxi driver for his kids, he said. He has no documented personal or financial connection to any party in this case.

The documented judicial conduct pattern in this case has five components, all sourced to the federal docket.

One: Both the Third and Fourth Amended Complaints were filed at Leitman’s sua sponte suggestion — confirmed in ECF No. 186. Inviting a plaintiff to amend a complaint is an affirmative judicial act. Leitman did it twice.

Two: In June 2024, ECF No. 147, Leitman denied defendants’ summary judgment motion by distinguishing the Sixth Circuit’s own prior ruling in Lindke v. Tomlinson, which had held King could not be sued under Ex Parte Young for LEIN entry. Leitman kept the case alive against directly on-point appellate precedent.

Three: Leitman denied mootness based on Lindke’s affidavit stating he “remains concerned” about the petitioner and her family. At that time, the docket contained sworn documentation that Lindke had been a fugitive for approximately two years, had multiple outstanding bench warrants, was actively doxxing Hines’s address, and was making threatening calls while violating court orders. Lindke was not chilling his speech. He was defying court orders from outside the state while claiming PPO enforcement prevented him from speaking. The court did not address this contradiction.

Four: The Fourth Amended Complaint falsely alleged Lindke was a St. Clair County resident. His own counsel’s representations to the court established he was a fugitive. Called out explicitly in ECF No. 186. No corrective order.

Five: Ellison characterized the Hines PPO to Leitman as issued “solely premised on speech.” The PPO’s social media restriction line is blank. Judge Tomlinson denied multiple speech-based show cause motions. ECF No. 186 documents both facts with exhibits. Leitman allowed the Fourth Amended Complaint incorporating that characterization to proceed.

The Good Faith Question

Shoudy’s ECF No. 186 called the Fourth Amended Complaint “presented in bad faith” — in the brief’s own argument header. He documented the fugitive status. He documented the false residency allegation. He documented the mischaracterized recurrence evidence. He asked for denial.

Judge Leitman allowed the Fourth Amended Complaint to proceed.

Understanding why requires understanding who he is. This is a man who grew up in Bloomfield Hills, practiced in the Oakland County legal corridor for twenty years, organized Harvard Law alumni gatherings with sitting federal judges, and publicly stated in 2012 that joining those judges on the federal bench was his ultimate professional dream. His criminal defense career was built around keeping constitutional questions alive across long timelines. The constitutional question in Lindke v. King is genuinely interesting to him. The procedural architecture of sustaining a complex First Amendment challenge is the kind of work he built his career to do.

The people this litigation is running over are not abstract to the record. They are in the docket. They are just not in the frame.

That is not corruption. It is something the legal establishment produces reliably and rewards consistently: a class of legal actors whose professional formation, social world, and institutional position insulate them from the human cost of their decisions. The harm being caused in St. Clair County, in Macomb County, in Richland, Michigan — to women, to children, to people who used the court system the way it was designed to be used and found themselves instrumentalized by someone else’s federal constitutional strategy — does not arrive in Leitman’s courtroom in any form that his training, career, or professional community has equipped him to weigh against the intellectual interest of the question on his docket. The record does not require him to weigh it. So he does not.

What makes that particularly striking is that Leitman is not unaware of what prolonged litigation does to the people inside it. He said so himself. In the 2012 Legal News profile, describing a murder-for-hire case that had been in active litigation for seventeen years, he said this: “The case has been an emotional roller-coaster for my client and his family.” He understood it from the defense side. He articulated it. He kept litigating.

He also described the case as evidence of his professional distinction — named it as an example of the complex, sustained constitutional work that made his practice interesting. Seventeen years of active litigation, two wins later reversed, a client’s life in continuous legal jeopardy — and the framing was professional pride. That is the worldview this court brings to case management. Long-running litigation is a mark of a difficult and important case. It is not, in that framing, an emergency. It is not something that requires resolution. It is something that demonstrates the seriousness of the legal question.

Tina Troy did not find the six and a half years of having her 2019 PPO litigated in federal court to be intellectually stimulating. Dino Hines did not find it fresh and challenging when Lindke posted his home address on social media while the case that used his PPO as an exhibit was pending. I do not find it professionally rewarding to be a named defendant in a lawsuit filed by my harasser’s attorney while the federal constitutional challenge that depends on my protection order continues with no end in sight. The people whose lives this litigation has occupied did not choose it as a venue for constitutional development. We did not sign up for this. We were put here. And the judge managing the case that put us here built his career on the proposition that long-running constitutional litigation is something to be proud of.

The record does not require him to reckon with what that pride costs the people who didn’t choose to be in the case. So he has not.

I want to be direct about what that looks like from where I am standing.

To the attorneys on both sides of this case, this is a billing matter. Ellison is paid to advance it. Shoudy is paid to defend against it. Their professional obligation is to their clients and their invoices, not to the people caught in the machinery between them. To Judge Leitman, this is an intellectually interesting constitutional question — the kind that keeps things “fresh and challenging,” to use his own words.

It is not fresh or challenging from where I sit.

It is wondering whether someone is going to be sent to your home. It is watching a man convicted of distributing intimate images of his daughter’s mother without consent, who registered a domain in your daughter’s name, who harassed your children to the point where you filed a federal child safety referral, have his alleged right to comment publicly about his harassment targets treated as a weightier constitutional interest than your right to be left alone. It is watching a federal judge — a man who described his primary identity as a parent — read a docket full of that conduct and find in it only further reason to allow amendment.

Every attorney in this case knows what is happening. Every court with a record in this network knows what is happening. The knowing has not changed anything. That is the part that does not appear in the constitutional analysis, in the billing statements, or in the judicial orders. We are the only ones in this entire architecture who did not choose to be here.

The Constitutional Rights That Don’t Appear in Leitman’s Docket

Lindke v. King has consumed six and a half years of federal judicial resources on the constitutional rights of one person. The First Amendment interests of Kevin Lindke have been analyzed, argued, briefed sixteen-plus times, and twice invited to amendment by the presiding judge.

The constitutional rights of the people on the other side of this record have received none of that attention.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause protects liberty interests conferred by state action. A Michigan circuit court issued each PPO in this case following a judicial determination that the petitioner was entitled to legal protection. Those are state-conferred liberty interests. If Ellison prevails, the procedural framework that produced them is declared unconstitutional — potentially extinguishing the protection those courts determined these individuals deserved. The petitioners have no standing in Lindke v. King to assert those interests. They are exhibits.

The First Amendment also protects the right to petition courts for redress of grievances. Every person who obtained a PPO in this network exercised that right. The litigation architecture took those petitions and converted them — without consent, without standing to object — into federal evidence for the person the petitions were filed against. A person who files a protection order to stop being harassed does not agree to have that order become her harasser’s federal exhibit.

My PPO is part of the evidentiary record of a federal case I have no standing to appear in. My Fourteenth Amendment interest in the protection a Michigan court determined I was entitled to receive does not appear in the management of that case. My First Amendment right to petition — which I exercised, which produced an order, which Lindke’s attorney filed as a federal exhibit — has been converted into ammunition against the very statute my protection depends on.

This Is Also What Misogyny Looks Like in a Courtroom

Look at who is in this record. Tina Troy is a woman. The primary domestic PPO petitioner is a woman. I am a woman. My daughter’s name was registered as a domain. My children were targeted. The false PPO petitions filed against me in Macomb County were filed by a woman acting on behalf of a man convicted of distributing intimate images of his daughter’s mother without consent — a man who met his current girlfriend at an anti-sexual predator rally, a detail the record confirms without any need for editorial comment.

Gendered harassment — stalking, revenge porn, domain registration in a victim’s name, nighttime residential approaches, weaponization of family court proceedings, targeting of children — follows documented patterns that researchers, federal agencies, and the United Nations have identified as technology-facilitated violence disproportionately directed at women. The conduct in this record matches those patterns precisely.

None of that appears in Leitman’s case management. The word “women” does not appear in the constitutional analysis of a case whose entire evidentiary predicate was built on the targeting of women. Treating a gendered record as gender-neutral is a choice. This court has made it consistently, across every order it has issued, across six and a half years.

The Three-Track State Failure

The Michigan Attorney General’s Office is actively present in three distinct roles across this network, each functioning at cross-purposes with victim protection.

Deputy Solicitor General B. Eric Restuccia defends the state’s interest in the PPO statute in Lindke v. King. His success is directly in victims’ interest. The state’s other two roles cut against them.

A second AG attorney sought to incarcerate Williams on Macomb County PPO petitions she had contested with exculpatory evidence — pay stubs and a service form establishing the petitions’ false basis. That evidence was before the AG’s Office. The office pursued incarceration regardless. One AG attorney was simultaneously defending the statute that protects Lindke’s victims in federal court while another arm pursued action against one of those victims on petitions documented as false.

AAG Tyler Kitzmiller represents Colonel James F. Grady II, Director of the Michigan State Police. MSP administers the ICAC Task Force. My NCMEC CyberTip was referred there on November 18, 2025. No enforcement response has been documented. Kitzmiller’s client runs the agency. The referral went there. No action followed.

These roles are not coordinated. They are structural. The same agency defends the legal tool victims rely on, pursues action against one of those victims in related proceedings, and represents the enforcement body that did not respond to a federal child safety referral about their harasser. No individual attorney is responsible for all three tracks. The institution produces the pattern through normal operations.

Against that documented institutional backdrop, one additional fact belongs in the public record.

In a communication that Dino Hines included in his PPO petition filed in St. Clair County Circuit Court Case No. T25-625-PH — the same petition Ellison attached as an exhibit to ECF No. 184, the Fourth Amended Complaint filed October 20, 2025, placing it in the federal docket of Lindke v. King — Lindke wrote: “Why don’t you ask Dana who one of her really good friends is?” Lindke made a similar claim on the Through My Eyes platform, the harassment coordination network that Ellison has belonged to since July 6, 2020 and that is already part of the federal record.

Clutch Justice is not asserting that this claim is true. Kevin Lindke has made false statements in federal court filings, submitted a phantom witness in sworn proceedings, and mischaracterized a PPO to a federal judge. He is not a reliable narrator about his own social connections. The claim may be a harassment tactic — name-dropping a powerful official to intimidate Hines into believing he had institutional protection. That interpretation is equally supported by the record.

What the record does establish is this: Lindke made this claim in a communication a harassment victim submitted to a Michigan court as evidence of threatening conduct, and repeated it on a documented public harassment platform. The claim is therefore in the federal docket. The AG’s Office simultaneously has three attorneys operating in this network in documented roles. Whether Lindke’s claim of a personal relationship with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is true has not been publicly addressed by the AG’s Office. That question belongs before the public. Clutch Justice is documenting it, not answering it. The AG’s Office is the only institution with the standing to answer it, and it has not been asked to do so — until now.

Everyone Knows. Nothing Changes.

This is not a situation where the harm is hidden. Both attorneys know what is happening. Shoudy documented it in a sworn federal filing. Ellison has been a member of the harassment network’s coordination platform since 2020 and built his constitutional case on top of the PPOs it generated. Six counties have documentation. Not one has produced a result that stops it.

What the Law Does Not Yet Require

This case is not an anomaly. It is a demonstration of what the current legal architecture permits when litigation is designed to sustain rather than resolve a dispute. Three structural gaps allow it to persist.

The Non-Party Victim Gap

There is no federal procedural mechanism by which a private individual whose protection order has been filed as evidence in a constitutional challenge can intervene, object, or seek compensation in that proceeding. Tina Troy was a named defendant and could move for dismissal. The remaining victims are not in the case. They have no standing to challenge how their orders are characterized to the court, no right to be heard on whether the conduct that generated their PPOs was protected speech or documented harassment, and no remedy when the characterization used in the federal record bears no relationship to the underlying facts. A limited intervention right for non-party individuals whose court-issued protective orders are filed as recurrence evidence in federal constitutional challenges would directly address what this case has exposed.

The Cost Displacement Gap

The defense costs flow to MMRMA. The state’s litigation costs flow to the AG’s budget. The private costs — the hours Tina Troy spent as a foundational petitioner in a federal case she never sought, the proceedings Hines navigated while Lindke violated his PPO from outside the state, the enforcement failures I documented across six counties — have no mechanism for recovery. Fee-shifting statutes in constitutional litigation were not designed to transfer wealth from public entities to attorneys who manufacture the evidentiary conditions their cases require. Reform that creates a cost-recovery mechanism for non-party individuals demonstrably harmed by litigation-sustaining harassment would begin to correct that inversion.

The Manufactured Controversy Gap

No existing judicial standard requires a federal court to examine whether recurrence evidence reflects genuine constitutional injury or manufactured litigation predicate. Leitman accepted Ellison’s characterization of each new PPO as ongoing unconstitutional enforcement without examining the conduct that generated those PPOs — conduct defense counsel documented in sworn filings as threatening, harassing, and in direct violation of existing court orders. A standard requiring courts to scrutinize whether recurrence evidence is the product of genuine ongoing injury or deliberate provocation would not eliminate constitutional challenges. It would require them to be built on honest foundations.

The record does not require him to reckon with what that pride costs the people who didn’t choose to be in the case. So he has not.

What this case demonstrates, across every layer of its documented record, is that you can behave badly in Michigan’s legal system — badly and openly and repeatedly — and face no meaningful consequences for it. You can stalk, threaten, and harass. You can distribute intimate images without consent. You can register domains in your victims’ children’s names. You can evade Michigan justice for two years while your attorney files federal constitutional claims on your behalf. You can submit a phantom witness to a tribunal. You can misrepresent your client’s residency in a federal pleading. You can mischaracterize evidence to a federal judge in a sworn filing. You can file false PPO petitions against the person documenting your conduct. You can target her children. You can do all of this in documented, timestamped, court-filed, publicly available detail — and a federal judge will invite you to amend your complaint. Your attorney will file the amendment. The case will continue.

The consequences fall somewhere. They fall on the people who filed the PPOs. They fall on the people who reported the harassment to courts, to SCAO, to NCMEC, to six counties, and watched nothing happen. They fall on the people who are defendants in retaliatory lawsuits, who navigate retaliatory PPO proceedings, who check whether the process server at the door at night was legally authorized to be there. They fall on the children. The system that was designed to produce consequences for the people who cause harm has been successfully operated, in this case, to produce consequences exclusively for the people who tried to stop it. That is not a malfunction. That is the result. And every institutional actor who has read the record and done nothing has made a choice to let it stand.