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.

How This All Began

This case did not begin with an appellate order or a sanctions motion. It began last year, when one of Outside Legal Counsel’s clients, Kevin Lindke, began contacting, targeting, and threatening me after claiming I had been harassing him. The record shows the situation escalated from there.

In the first exhibit packet, at pages 38 through 41, screenshots show the Through My Eyes account posting a GoDaddy domain purchased using my oldest child’s name, alongside language I understood as threatening: “fucking with the people closest to me was a dumb move” and “now we’re playing.” I had not done what the post accused me of doing. What mattered to me was simpler and more immediate: my child’s name had been turned into a domain and paired with language that read like retaliation.

On September 10, 2025, I sent Philip Ellison a formal cease-and-desist demanding that Kevin stop contacting or targeting me and my children, directly or indirectly, and preserve evidence. Ellison responded in writing that he had forwarded my message to Kevin by email. That chain appears at pages 43 through 46 of the record. I have located no police report, referral, safety notification, or other evidence showing that Ellison reported the threat to law enforcement or took independent protective action after receiving that notice.

The record also contains a police report identifying Kevin as the suspect in an intimidation and stalking investigation and documenting statements involving threats to me and my children. Those records matter because they establish actual notice. By the time Ellison forwarded my cease-and-desist to Kevin, he had direct written notice that Kevin’s conduct implicated my minor children, that a domain had been created in my oldest child’s name, that the accompanying language could reasonably be understood as threatening toward a minor child, and that I was asking for the conduct to stop because I feared for my family.

Ellison’s chosen response matters too. Based on the records I have, he did not separate himself from the conduct or independently escalate the safety concern. He forwarded my cease-and-desist to the person I had provided evidence about. That letter contained my fears, my evidence, my intended legal response, and what I was asking Kevin to stop doing. Forwarding it gave Kevin a roadmap of what I knew and what actions I was considering.

That is why the later portrayal of me as the harasser and Kevin as the person under attack does not hold. Ellison cannot credibly claim ignorance of the child-safety issue while suing me for describing what happened after I gave him written notice. His own email establishes both the notice and the response.

One of the hardest parts of this has been watching the documentation sit there, plain as day, while I am still cast in the negative light for standing up for my children and myself. The screenshots exist. The email chain exists. The police report exists. My cease-and-desist exists. And still, the public framing asks people to treat my response to those records as the problem, rather than the conduct that made the response necessary.

After I began speaking publicly about the harassment, litigation tactics, and conduct I had documented, Philip Ellison sued me. He then repeatedly sought permanent injunctions that would restrict my speech indefinitely, effectively asking for lifetime bans preventing me from reporting on him, his clients, the related litigation, and what happened to my children and me. Those requests were not narrowly limited to a particular false statement. They sought to control my future speech and prevent me from continuing to tell my own story, preserve the public record, or warn others about conduct I believed required scrutiny.

Why I Reported It

The documented record raises serious questions about Ellison’s professional conduct and could carry significant professional consequences if the relevant facts are confirmed by courts or disciplinary authorities. Ellison received direct written notice that his client’s conduct was affecting me and my minor children, including threatening online content and the publication of a domain using my child’s name. Litigation documents and information connected to service at my home later appeared on a platform associated with his client. Ellison also pursued litigation, contempt proceedings, sanctions, filing restrictions, and permanent injunctions affecting my speech after I began publicly documenting the conduct.

In my opinion, it should not matter if someone argues cases before the United States Supreme Court. Ethics still matter. Prestige does not excuse ignoring documented threats involving a child, forwarding a safety notice to the person accused of making those threats, or using legal process in a way that burdens the person trying to make the record visible.

On Sunday, July 12, 2026, I sent cease-and-desist letters to Outside Legal Counsel demanding that my name, personal information, and materials connected to my protective order be removed or protected in lawsuits where, in my view, the firm did not have permission to use my PPO, name, or likeness. I also told them that if they would not address it, I would seek relief myself under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2(e), the privacy rule that allows a court, for good cause, to require additional redaction or limit remote electronic access to a filed document.

I have reported these matters to the appropriate courts, law-enforcement agencies, and professional oversight authorities. I am not claiming that any tribunal has already found Ellison guilty of misconduct or that discipline is certain. I am stating that the cumulative record warrants independent review of what he knew, what information he shared, what representations he continued making after receiving contrary evidence, and whether legal process was used to protect legitimate interests or to burden, silence, or retaliate against a critic and her family.

Depending on what an independent investigation establishes, the potential consequences could range from sanctions or professional discipline to substantial reputational and practical harm to his law practice. The ultimate determination belongs to the courts and regulatory authorities, not to me.

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 the Reply Actually Leaned On

I want to name what this fight was actually about, because “vexatious” is a word people use to avoid saying what they mean. The core of the amended complaint against me is not a sprawling pattern of misconduct. It is three things I wrote. An email connecting the timing of the litigation against me to opposing counsel’s preparation for arguing Pung v. Isabella County before the United States Supreme Court. A similar letter sent to a school board, raising the same child safety concerns. And an article I published documenting that a witness submitted to the Saginaw court does not appear to exist in any verifiable public record. Those three pieces of my own writing are what the May 13 motion asked the Court of Appeals to punish me for.

He did not stop at the original motion. When I opposed it, he asked for and received leave to file a reply, and that reply is where he leaned hardest on all three, the Pung email, the letter to the school board, and the witness article, reasserting each as proof I had crossed a line. The panel had that reply in front of it when it ruled. Michigan appellate orders like this one are rarely accompanied by a written opinion explaining the reasoning, and this one was no exception, so I am not going to tell you the panel issued findings on each item by name. What I can tell you honestly is what the record shows. The panel had his strongest version of the argument in hand, built specifically around those three pieces of my own writing, and it still said no.

What Defamation Is and What It Isn’t

Defamation is not a label someone gets to attach to criticism because it is embarrassing, inconvenient, or damaging to a preferred narrative. In Michigan, a defamation claim requires a false and defamatory statement about the plaintiff, an unprivileged communication of that statement to someone else, fault by the speaker, and either defamation per se or special harm caused by the publication.

That first word, false, matters. Truth is a defense. So is the absence of an actual statement of fact. Courts look at whether the words can reasonably be understood as asserting provable facts, or whether they are opinion, commentary, rhetorical hyperbole, or conclusions drawn from disclosed records. A reader may disagree with my interpretation. Disagreement is not the same thing as defamation.

Specificity matters too. A plaintiff cannot just point to a subject area, say “she accused us of misconduct,” and make the defendant guess which sentence is supposedly false. Michigan courts require a defamation plaintiff to identify the exact language alleged to be defamatory. That is the gap running through this case: Outside Legal Counsel keeps objecting to the fact that I wrote about the record, but it does not quote the precise false statement it says gives rise to liability.

Defamation also is not supposed to become a workaround for silencing future reporting. If someone believes a specific statement is false, the legal fight is supposed to be about that statement: what was said, where it was published, why it was false, what privilege applies, and what harm occurred. It is not supposed to become an indefinite speech ban barring a person from reporting on litigation, lawyers, clients, court records, police reports, or conduct involving her own family.

That distinction is the point. I am not asking readers to accept every inference I draw simply because I drew it. I am asking them to look at the records themselves. A defamation claim can test a specific allegedly false statement. It should not be used to erase the underlying documents, stop me from describing what happened to my children and me, or prevent the public from evaluating the conduct of lawyers who brought the lawsuit.

Why the Denial Does More Than Sit There

I already have a motion of my own pending in the Saginaw case, filed May 15, asking the trial court to sanction six of Outside Legal Counsel’s filings under MCR 2.114 and to refer Ellison to the Attorney Grievance Commission, where a file is already open and assigned. One of those six filings is the May 13 motion itself, the one built around the Pung email, the school board letter, and the witness article. I called that motion frivolous when I filed my own. On July 14, a three judge panel agreed with the outcome I asked for, whether or not they explained why. That is not background noise. That is a piece of appellate paper I can now attach to my own motion, showing that the filing I flagged as frivolous failed on review by a higher court.

None of this resolves what the amended complaint actually alleges happened because of those three pieces of writing. That fight is still open in Saginaw County, and every claim in it remains an allegation until a court says otherwise. What is resolved, for now, is narrower and still worth marking down. Someone tried to get an appellate court to punish me for writing them. It did not work.

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.

I have for a long time appreciated Judges Young, Boonstra, and Lievense’s work, and cannot thank them enough for making the time to actually review all of this. Yelling into the void is hard, and it’s so nice to finally be heard. After today, I have a little more faith in the legal system.

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, including the version of that argument built on the Pung email, the school board letter, and the witness article, and rejected it.

Two Days Later, I Asked the Court to End It

On July 16, I filed a motion asking Judge Gafkay to dismiss the entire First Amended Complaint with prejudice. The motion argues, count by count, that Outside Legal Counsel never identifies the actual words it claims are false and defamatory, that my judicial filings, my reports to law enforcement, and my communications to the Attorney Grievance Commission are privileged as a matter of Michigan law, and that the abuse of process count fails because Michigan requires an improper act after process issues, not merely an improper reason for filing it in the first place. The motion also raises unclean hands, built on a documented record: Ellison’s membership in the same Facebook group that has run the harassment campaign against me since 2020, his own acknowledgment that he arranged for a process server to be sent to my home, and a domain registered in my daughter’s name that his office was told about in writing and never reported.

The specificity argument is the backbone of the whole motion, and it lands on the same three pieces of writing this article is about. Outside Legal Counsel’s complaint never quotes the words it calls false. It gestures at broad subjects, fabricated evidence, a ghost witness, fraud on the court, without ever identifying the actual statement, the actual witness, or the actual publication at issue. That is not a technicality. It is the same evasion running underneath the May 13 sanctions motion: characterize what I wrote as harmful in the abstract, and never quote the sentence.

The motion cites the July 14 order too, in a section I titled plainly: the Court of Appeals’ denial further undermines Plaintiffs’ narrative. I am careful in the motion about what that order does and does not do, the same way I have tried to be careful here. It is not an independent ground for dismissal, and I did not offer it as one. It sits in the record as a documented fact working against the idea that defending myself in this litigation has been done in bad faith, which is the idea Paragraphs 1 through 4 of the Amended Complaint are built on. The motion is pending. Judge Gafkay has not ruled on it, and every claim in the underlying case remains an allegation until she does.

The Booth Case I Found Sitting in Plain Sight

Then I found Booth v. Fink et al., Case No. 1:23-cv-758, in the Western District of Michigan. Justia’s docket identifies Earl D. Booth as the plaintiff and Philip Lee Ellison as his lawyer. The August 14, 2024 opinion explains that Booth sued after Scott Fink, an MDOC internal affairs investigator, obtained an ex parte nondomestic PPO that restricted Booth from following, approaching, photographing, videotaping, and posting messages after Booth had filmed Fink at a courthouse and posted about Fink’s criminal proceedings.

Ellison did not merely read about retaliatory PPOs in someone else’s briefing. He personally pleaded that theory as Booth’s lawyer. The federal docket identifies Ellison as Booth’s counsel and shows that he filed the amended complaint. A February 2, 2024 opinion describes Counts IV and V this way: Booth alleged that Fink retaliated against him for protected speech by securing a PPO through false or incomplete statements.

The chronology Ellison presented there could not be clearer. Booth reported and commented on a government employee’s public criminal proceeding. The next day, Fink applied for an ex parte PPO. The PPO restricted Booth’s ability to approach, photograph, record, and post online about Fink. Ellison’s client alleged that the PPO was retaliation for protected expression and was obtained through false or incomplete representations.

The broader theory should sound familiar too. Booth argued that Michigan’s nondomestic PPO statute violated the First Amendment by allowing protected speech to be restrained through an ex parte process, before the restrained person had a chance to present context. Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou did not decide the statute was unconstitutional. But she denied Sheriff Sean Dush’s motion for judgment on the pleadings because Booth had plausibly alleged that the lack of procedural protections deprived him of First Amendment and due-process rights.

The opinion is especially relevant because the court identified the First Amendment concern in concrete terms. The person who sought the PPO appeared to be a government employee attempting to restrict public comment on criminal proceedings against him. The court also recognized that Booth’s video recordings and social media posts plausibly touched on a matter of public concern. That is not my characterization of the constitutional issue. That is the federal court describing why an ex parte speech restraint raised serious concerns.

That history matters now. Ellison already understood that a PPO can be used retaliatorily, that timing after protected reporting matters, that incomplete or misleading allegations matter, that the full context of the speech matters, and that an ex parte process can suppress protected expression before the target gets heard. Yet when I raised the same basic concern, the use of PPO process against a journalist and critic, allegations I say were false, speech restrictions, repeated contempt efforts, and direct attribution evidence that could be tested through Meta, he treated my retaliation theory as something invented to escape accountability.

I have also found the Booth v. Fink order attached in Murray v. Doe. That means Ellison is not distancing himself from the doctrine. He is actively invoking a case he litigated about allegedly retaliatory PPO use while participating in proceedings where I allege the PPO system was used retaliatorily against me. This is not automatic judicial estoppel, because the parties, facts, and exact legal positions differ. The federal court also did not enter a final finding that Fink’s PPO was, in fact, retaliatory, and some of the retaliation claims were against Fink while the published ruling concerned other issues. But as evidence of Ellison’s knowledge and selective framing, it matters.

The clean point is this: Plaintiffs’ counsel is personally familiar with the danger of retaliatory PPO proceedings. In Booth v. Fink, he pleaded that a PPO obtained after protected public commentary, using false or incomplete statements, constituted First Amendment retaliation. That prior position makes it especially important that any court reviewing contempt allegations against me obtain neutral attribution evidence before permitting a contempt proceeding based on disputed inference.

For the disciplinary chronology, the point is just as direct. Ellison did not merely have generalized knowledge that PPOs may be used retaliatorily. He personally litigated that precise theory in federal court, alleging that a PPO secured through false or incomplete statements after protected speech constituted retaliation. He later dismissed my retaliation concerns as tactical while continuing contempt proceedings despite advance notice that the central attribution allegation was disputed and objectively verifiable through Meta.

To be precise, the August 2024 opinion did not give Booth a final win. The court held that Booth could not obtain damages against Dush, raised mootness concerns, and certified the constitutional question to the Michigan Attorney General. But the core point remains: Ellison has already been involved in federal litigation treating Michigan PPO speech restraints as constitutionally suspect when they burden his client’s public commentary. In my case, his firm has sought permanent injunctions against my speech while accusing me of harassment for documenting court records, threats, litigation conduct, and child-safety concerns. That contrast is not subtle.

The Same Playbook, Pointed the Other Way

There is a piece of this that makes the sanctions motion collapse on its own logic. Ellison represents two plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit in the Eastern District of Michigan, before Judge Matthew F. Leitman. On March 19, 2026, he filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on behalf of one of them. Attached to that motion, as exhibits, are the actual petition and the actual order from my own protective order against that same plaintiff. Not a description of it. The filed documents themselves, offered as evidence supporting his client’s argument that Michigan’s PPO framework operates as an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.

The timing sharpens this further. On April 6, 2026, in a different federal proceeding, his client filed an emergency motion attaching a Macomb County show cause matter as an exhibit and asking the court to intervene. Judge Leitman denied it two days later, on April 8. That is the same stretch of weeks in which Ellison was standing in front of a different judge arguing that my own protective order was itself unconstitutional government overreach. He asked one court to treat a Macomb County matter as an emergency deserving federal intervention. He asked another to treat mine as a prior restraint that should not exist. Both of those cannot be argued in good faith by the same person in the same month.

I want to be careful here, because precision matters on this point more than almost anywhere else in this piece. I have the docket entry confirming what was attached to that motion. I have not read the full text of the motion or the reply that followed it, and I am not going to claim I know every argument made inside either one until I have read them myself. What the docket confirms is narrower, and still worth stating plainly. The same attorney who asked the Court of Appeals to find my litigation conduct vexatious and sanctionable has, in a separate federal case, built an argument around the idea that a protective order like mine functions as a tool of government overreach against protected speech. He is willing to call the machinery that produced my own PPO a gag order when it serves his client’s case. He was not willing to extend me the same understanding when I was the one documenting a pattern of harassment and asking a court to look at it.

Outside Legal Counsel’s own public framing backs this up without needing the motion text. In a December 24, 2025 press release announcing the federal lawsuit, the firm described Michigan’s use of PPOs as “criminally enforceable gag orders” and warned that they function as prior restraints on lawful public commentary. That press release is now Exhibit G in my own motion for summary disposition in the Saginaw case, filed specifically to show that Plaintiffs’ request for a sweeping injunction against my future speech asks this court to do to me exactly what Outside Legal Counsel’s own federal complaint says should never be done to anyone.

The case itself did not end where he needed it to. On May 6, 2026, his client’s claims were dismissed with prejudice by stipulated order. Whatever else that case was, using my protective order as Exhibit B did not get him the ruling he was after.

I want to say plainly what I think about this, separate from what the record shows. Whether the rules of civil procedure allow a party to attach a public court filing as an exhibit is a legal question, and I’ve addressed that above. Whether it was appropriate is a different question, and in my opinion it was not. That protective order exists because I went to a court and asked for protection. Using it as a prop in someone else’s federal lawsuit, without asking me first, is not something I think basic decency allows, regardless of what the court rules permit.

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.