The Motion to Call Me Vexatious Just Died in the Michigan Court of Appeals

What the Order Says

I read this one twice before I let myself believe it. Two lines. The motion to file a reply is granted and the reply filed with it is accepted. The motion for vexatious appeal sanctions is denied. No qualifiers. No “denied without prejudice.” Just denied, signed by Presiding Judge Adrienne N. Young, certified by Chief Clerk Jerome W. Zimmer Jr., dated today.

A vexatious sanctions motion is not a routine ask. It is a request that the court formally brand a party’s litigation conduct as abusive, and attach consequences to it. Someone made that request about me, by name, to a three judge panel. The panel looked at it and said no.

The Timeline Matters

On May 12, a different order from the same court denied my application for leave to appeal, for what the order itself calls a failure to persuade the court of the need for immediate appellate review. That is standard language. It shows up on a large share of discretionary applications the court declines to take up, and it says nothing about who is right on the merits. It is a pass, not a verdict.

The next day, May 13, Outside Legal Counsel PLC filed the motion for vexatious appeal sanctions, built in part on that denial. Today, the same panel that declined the leave application looked at the sanctions request built on top of it and declined that too.

What Else Was Before the Court

The sanctions motion did not arrive in a vacuum. On May 18, I filed a notice alleging a pattern of witness intimidation under MCL 750.122, and requested referral to the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office, the Michigan State Police Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. I have written elsewhere about the existence of an NCMEC report connected to this case. I am not naming the family member it concerns, and I am not walking through the details again here. That is not what this article is about.

What it is about is this. The panel that denied the vexatious sanctions motion had the fuller record in front of it, not a sanitized one. I am not going to tell you a two line order is a finding that everything I have alleged is true. It is not, and I am not in the business of lying to the people who read this site. But I put the heaviest material I have in front of that court and asked it to weigh whether fighting this case makes me the problem. It looked at all of it, and it said no.

What This Does, and Does Not, Mean

I want to be precise about this, because precision is the entire premise of this website. This order does not decide the underlying Saginaw County case. Docket No. 380599 is the appellate proceeding. Case No. 25-002441-CZ, the case in which Outside Legal Counsel PLC is suing me, is still being litigated, and every claim in it remains an allegation until a court says otherwise. What this order decides is narrower, and, to me, still worth marking down: a court looked directly at the argument that my conduct in this litigation has been vexatious, and rejected it.

Why I’m Writing This Down

I built this website to document institutional failure, and that includes documenting what happens when the machinery of a court gets pointed at the person doing the documenting. This is one entry in that record. Every attempt to have me sanctioned, discredited, or talked about as the vexatious one has failed so far. I intend to keep writing that sentence for as long as it stays true.