Four years, one appellate order, and the work that got us here.
Clutch Justice turns four on August 3, 2026. This year alone the site logged 113,712 visitors and 176,900 views by internal count, on top of a Michigan Court of Appeals order this week denying a motion to brand me a vexatious litigant. Here is what four years of this actually add up to, and what is coming next.
Four Years In, and Yesterday Helped
I was not planning to write the anniversary post yet. August 3 is still a few weeks out. But on July 14, a three-judge panel at the Michigan Court of Appeals denied a motion asking the court to formally brand me a vexatious litigant, and I read the order twice before I let myself believe it. Motion to file a reply granted. Motion for vexatious appeal sanctions denied. No qualifiers.
That order does not decide the underlying case. Outside Legal Counsel PLC v. Rita Williams, Case No. 25-002441-CZ, is still being litigated in Saginaw County Circuit Court, and every claim in it remains an allegation until a court says otherwise. What the July 14 order settled is narrower. A panel looked directly at the argument that my conduct in this litigation has been abusive, and said no. Docket No. 380599, if you want to read it yourself.
It landed three weeks before this site turns four, and it felt like the right week to stop and count what four years actually add up to.
What the Numbers Say
Numbers first, because that is the discipline this site is built on. By internal WordPress analytics, Clutch Justice logged 113,712 visitors and 176,900 views this year. That figure is almost certainly low. A chunk of early data did not survive a platform migration, and it does not count newsletter opens or social reach. Four years ago this was a Barry County court records project with an audience of exactly one very stubborn person. It is not that anymore.
The Record on Being First
Being right eventually is not the same as being right first, and this year Clutch was first more than once.
On April 15, a fabricated CNN post about a woman named Rachel Dorn, supposedly fired for secretly working three remote jobs at once, was circulating with tens of thousands of shares. I traced it back to the actual federal case behind it, United States v. Nehemie Almonor, No. 1:26-CR-45 in the Eastern District of Virginia, and published what the plea agreement and statement of facts actually said. Snopes published its own debunk two days later, on April 17, confirming the same core fabrication. The difference was depth. Their piece addressed the viral post. Mine addressed the underlying federal prosecution and the restitution the real defendant owes six real victims.
On July 1, Clutch was first to report that Ionia Township’s former treasurer had been indicted in a $747,000 federal bank fraud case, ahead of the outlets that usually get there first.
Neither piece happened by accident. They happened because the habit here is always the same: go to the primary document before repeating what everyone else is repeating.
Six courses on judicial accountability, FOIA requests, and court literacy, built from four years of doing this work in public.
See the Courses ?What Launched This Year
This was also the year the site stopped being just investigations. Rita Ruins Everything debuted in January, a series built specifically to take true crime’s favorite unsolved mysteries and check them against the actual record instead of the myth. The Lab went live with free tools: a FOIA generator, a Michigan courts glossary, a redaction scanner, built so a reader without a law degree could do real research instead of just reading about it. The Field Kit turned four years of methodology into templates and guides someone else could actually use in their own case. And Clutch Justice Weekly launched in April with more than 300 subscribers on day one, which is still the number I think about when the inbox feels quiet.
What’s Next
The plan for year five is not a pivot. It is the same four things, more deliberately.
Education stays. Courses and the Field Kit printables exist because reading about how a records request works is not the same as knowing how to file one, and this site would rather teach the skill than just describe it.
Court accountability stays. Barry County, the JTC, the Brady, Giglio, and Santobello list. That work does not get lighter because the site got bigger, and this year proved it. A records request to MDOC surfaced documented proof that an incarcerated Michigan defendant’s reply period at the Supreme Court level had run out before the filing it was supposed to respond to ever reached him, a service failure now sitting in front of the Court itself with the mechanics fully documented. The full breakdown is in The Proof of Service Nobody Checked, published July 9.
Ethical true crime stays, and it stays ethical on purpose. Rita Ruins Everything exists because most true crime content treats a dead person’s worst day as content. This site treats it as a record, sourced and attributed, or it does not run.
And the fun stays too. The 2026 Clutch Blanket Mystery crochet-along is still pattern recognition, just with yarn instead of docket numbers. Four years in, I have learned that people will follow an investigation a lot further if you also give them something to make with their hands while they do it.
Clutch Justice publishes its first piece on August 3, 2022, opening with the Barry County court records that would define years of reporting to come.
Year two turns ad hoc research into a repeatable process. FOIA request templates, timeline-building, and the first educational material that would later become the courses and the Field Kit.
The institutional forensics consulting practice formalizes, and the Brady, Giglio, and Santobello list starts growing into what is now a 64-entry tracking document across more than 30 Michigan prosecutors.
Rita Ruins Everything debuts in January. The Lab and the Field Kit go live. Clutch Justice Weekly launches in April with 300-plus day-one subscribers. The Rachel Dorn piece beats Snopes by two days. Clutch is first to the Ionia Township indictment. And on July 14, the Michigan Court of Appeals denies the motion to have me sanctioned as a vexatious litigant.
How You Can Help Keep This Going
None of this runs on ad revenue, because Clutch Justice does not carry ads. It runs on people buying things, tipping what they can, and telling one other person the site exists.
I built this because nobody else was going to. Four years later, that is still the entire plan.
Thank you for reading a website that asks you to sit with docket numbers instead of headlines. Thank you for buying the patterns, forwarding the newsletter, and showing up in the replies with a correction when I got something wrong, because you did, and I fixed it. I will not pretend every one of these four years was easy to get through. Some of the hardest things I have lived through happened while I was building this, and there were days I wanted to close the laptop and stop. I did not, and I am glad. Four years in, the record is still the record because you keep reading it. See you at year five.
Continue Your Investigation
If this reporting raised more questions, use the Clutch Justice ecosystem to keep going.
