I am a party to the proceeding described in this article, not an observer of it. I am the defendant in Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 25-002441-CZ, and the August 3, 2026 hearing was a show cause proceeding brought against me. Opposing counsel in that case is the attorney whose statements are reported here. I am also the complainant in an open Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission file, No. 25-2363, concerning that same attorney, which was reassigned for investigation in December 2025 and has not been resolved.
Neither the attorney nor his client is named in this article. That is an editorial decision about search visibility, not a legal one. Both are identifiable to any reader who pulls the public docket.
The statements attributed to counsel below were made on the record. The transcript has not yet been produced. Until it is, they rest on my contemporaneous account as a party present in the courtroom, and they should be read that way. This article makes no claim about whether any rule of professional conduct was violated. That question belongs to the Attorney Grievance Commission, and it is already before them.
At an August 3, 2026 show cause hearing in Saginaw County Circuit Court, opposing counsel stated on the record that his client had asked him for filings and records concerning me, that his client was interested, and that he provided them. He separately stated that he was very positive the same client had created the domains, the ones that had been threatened against me and my minor child and never actually used. He had received a written cease and desist and child-safety notice from me on September 10, 2025, roughly eleven months before he said it.
Counsel told the court his client sought filings and records concerning a self-represented opposing party, and that he supplied them. The stated reason was the client’s interest, not a litigation purpose.
Counsel stated he was very positive that the same client created the domains that had been threatened against the opposing party and her minor child. The threat was not carried out. Nothing was ever published on them.
Counsel received written notice on September 10, 2025 that the conduct at issue involved the safety of children, and a further written notice concerning threats on October 23, 2025.
Michigan civil filings routinely carry a self-represented party’s residential address. There is no general shielding mechanism in ordinary civil practice.
Supplying filings to one’s own client is ordinarily permitted and is not misconduct standing alone. The narrow question the record raises is purpose after notice, not the act of transmission.
What did counsel say on the record on August 3, 2026?
According to the author, who was present as a party, counsel told the court that his client had asked him for filings and records concerning her, that the client was interested, and that counsel provided them. Counsel also stated he was very positive that the same client had created domains. Those domains were the subject of a threat and were never used to publish anything. The transcript has not yet been produced.
Is a lawyer allowed to give court filings to his own client?
Ordinarily yes, and Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4 directs a lawyer to keep a client reasonably informed about that client’s matter. That rationale does not reach this situation. The action is counsel’s own lawsuit, brought by him and his firm as plaintiffs, and the man who received the documents is not a party to it. Rule 1.4 governs a client’s own case, not a case in which the recipient has no role.
Why does a residential address inside a court filing matter?
Civil filings routinely contain a self-represented party’s home address, and Michigan civil practice has no general address-shielding mechanism comparable to protections available in some protective order proceedings. When a party is seeking distance from a person she has reported to law enforcement, the filing becomes a delivery mechanism for the exact information she is trying to withhold.
What is the status of the record?
The proceeding was held on the record before Judge Julie Gafkay in Saginaw County Circuit Court. A transcript will be ordered at the conclusion of the show cause proceedings. Until it is produced, every statement attributed to counsel here rests on the author’s contemporaneous account.
What Was Said
I want to be direct about this, because the sentence is going to get softened by everyone who repeats it.
Counsel did not say that documents leaked. He did not say a docket is public and anyone can read it. He did not say his client found the filings on his own. He said his client asked him for filings and records about me, he said his client was interested, and he said he gave them to him. That is a description of a transmission, a request that preceded it, and a motive that was offered voluntarily from the well of a courtroom.
Then he said something else. He said he was very positive that the same client created the domains.
Two things need saying about those domains, and both cut against the version of this story that would travel fastest.
Nothing was ever published on them. I say that because it is true and because I have never needed to inflate any part of this, not because it softens anything. It does not.
A threat that is not carried out is still a threat. Publication was never the point of it. The point of registering domains in someone’s name is to hand that person the knowledge that a thing could go live at any moment, and then to leave her holding it, indefinitely, because a registration does not expire when anyone’s attention does. Something published would at least have been an event, with a date, that then became a thing that had happened. This is a thing that has not happened yet, every single day, for eleven months and counting. My children and I have been living inside that the entire time.
The second thing is stranger, and it is why counsel’s statement registered the way it did. Accusations about who creates websites concerning this family are not new and have never been confined to me. Over a period of years I have watched a rotating cast of people accused of building sites about them, and at least one such accusation became litigation. I was accused at one point as well. In July 2025 the accusations turned toward me in earnest, without evidence then and without evidence since. I have never registered, operated, contributed to, or had any involvement with any website about them, and the accusation persists regardless. That pattern is my own observation across years of watching it happen, not a documented finding, and I am labeling it as such.
Website attribution has functioned throughout these proceedings as a claim that is easy to make and structurally difficult to disprove. A person accused of operating an anonymous site cannot produce evidence of an account she never created. The entire burden falls on the denial, and a denial is not evidence. What made counsel’s statement notable was not that it accused anyone of anything. It was that the attribution pointed, for once, in a direction no one had suggested before, and it came from the person best positioned to know.
The statements above are reported by the author from a proceeding at which she was a party. They have not been verified against a transcript. Counsel’s stated belief about who created the domains is evidence of what counsel believed, not proof of who in fact created them. No finding has been made by any court on that question, and this article does not assert one.
Why Interest Is Not a Litigation Purpose
Here is the thing that took me a while to be able to say cleanly, because when you are the person in the filing it is hard to separate the injury from the analysis.
A lawyer giving documents to his own client is not a scandal. It is Tuesday. Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4 directs a lawyer to keep a client reasonably informed about the status of a matter and to explain matters to the extent reasonably necessary for the client to make informed decisions. If the rule pushed the other way, clients would be strangers to their own cases. Anyone building an accountability argument on the bare fact that a lawyer sent his client a filing has already lost, and deserves to.
That is not what happened here, and the difference is the entire matter.
The Saginaw action is counsel’s own lawsuit. He and his firm are the named plaintiffs. I am the defendant. The man who asked for the documents is not a party to that case, has never been a party to that case, and has no claim, no defense, and no decision to make in it. He is counsel’s client in separate federal litigation, which is a different matter entirely.
Rule 1.4 concerns keeping a client informed about the client’s own matter. It has nothing to say about transmitting documents from a lawsuit the lawyer brought personally, to a person with no role in that lawsuit. The rationale that makes lawyer-to-client transmission unremarkable was never available here, because the ordinary relationship it describes was not the relationship in play.
The load-bearing word is not gave. It is interested.
A party needs filings to make decisions about his case. A man with no case needs nothing. Interest is not a stage of litigation. It has no filing deadline, no responsive pleading, and no adverse party. It is an appetite, and the record now contains a description of an officer of the court feeding one.
The obvious answer is that court filings are generally public, and a lawyer may hand a public document to anyone. That is true, and it is worth stating rather than dodging. But publicity was not the reason given. Nobody testified that these were public records freely available to anybody who asked. The reason given was that a particular man wanted them, about a particular woman, and so they went to him.
What followed is not in dispute either. They were published online, by the recipient, in a form calculated to reach an audience. That is what he had said he would do. The documents did the thing they had been announced in advance as being wanted for.
Strip away everything contested and this remains. A lawyer, personally suing a self-represented woman, transmitted documents from his own lawsuit to a man with no role in it, who had asked for them, while holding written notice that the same man was harassing her minor children and publishing photographs of her family.
And the recipient had not been quiet about what he intended to do with material concerning her. For months before any of this, the threat had been specific and repeated: to publish, and to use what he published against her and her children. The domains registered in September existed to demonstrate the capacity. There was no ambiguity about the intended use, and there was no need to infer it, because it had been stated.
This article does not assert that any rule was violated. It asserts that the transmission has no ordinary professional explanation, because the rule that ordinarily explains such transmissions was never in play, and that the intended use of what was transmitted was not a matter anyone had to guess at.
The Word Itself
Interest is a word you use about somebody else’s hobby. It describes a person following a thing for pleasure, on their own time, because they want to. Nobody is interested in a matter they are a party to. They are worried about it, or invested in it, or ruined by it. Interest is the posture of a spectator.
Applied to a man whose attention had already reached a woman’s children, it is not a neutral word chosen carelessly under pressure. It is an accurate description of what the transmissions were serving, offered from a witness stand by the person best positioned to know what they were serving.
He was asked why the documents kept going, and the answer was that the man wanted them. Not that a case required it. Not that a decision depended on it. That a man who had spent months threatening to publish material about a woman and her children had asked for material about that woman, and so it went to him.
The written notice he held while that continued was not vague and did not describe a difference of opinion. It said that my minor children were being harassed and that photographs of my family were being published on a page controlled by his client. That is what actual notice looked like in this matter. It was not ambiguous, it was not oral, and it was not brief.
He did not appear to regard any of this as an admission. That is the part I keep returning to, and it is the reason this article exists rather than a filing. A filing would ask a court to decide whether a rule was broken. This is asking a smaller and more uncomfortable question, which is what it means that the sentence could be said at all, in that room, in that tone, with the notice sitting in the file.
Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 4.4 addresses the neighboring territory. It provides that in representing a client, a lawyer shall not use means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person. Whether any particular transmission crosses that line is a question of fact, and it is a question for the Attorney Grievance Commission rather than for me. I am pointing at the rule because readers deserve to know the framework exists, not because I am announcing a result under it.
The Notice Chain
Purpose questions in professional responsibility almost always come down to what the lawyer knew and when. That is why the calendar matters more than the outrage.
The client began accusing Williams of involvement with websites concerning his family. Williams states she has never registered, operated, contributed to, or had any involvement with any such site, then or since, and that no evidence of involvement has ever been produced.
Accusations of this kind had been directed at a rotating set of people over a period of years, according to Williams’s own observation, and at least one such accusation became litigation.
Structural noteAnonymous-site attribution is easy to assert and structurally difficult to rebut. A person cannot produce records for an account she never created, so the entire weight falls on her denial, and a denial is not evidence.
Williams filed a report with the Kalamazoo County Sheriff, Case No. 2025-00028333, concerning intimidation and stalking, reflecting conduct occurring August 7 through 11 and a prosecutor warrant request. She had already told the individual not to contact her again.
Why this stage mattersThe report establishes that Williams was seeking law-enforcement separation months before any of the civil litigation that later framed her as the aggressor.
Domains concerning Williams were registered and publicly displayed. Nothing was ever published on them. The threat they represented was never carried out.
At the August 3, 2026 hearing, counsel stated he was very positive that his client had created them. That is a statement of counsel’s belief and not a finding by any court.
Registration is not publicationThe conduct at this stage was the making of a threat, which is its own category and is not the same as a site going live. This article does not blur the two, and readers should not either.
Williams sent a cease and desist to counsel and to his client. It stated that her minor children were being harassed and that photographs of her family were being published on a page controlled by the client, and it asked that her family be left alone. She sent it to counsel specifically because she believed a licensed attorney would be the person in the situation most likely to take a child-safety concern seriously.
Actual noticeFrom this date forward, counsel had written notice that the dispute involved a parent seeking protection for minors, not a critic attacking a client.
A public page operated by the client published mocking commentary that displayed or incorporated part of the email Williams had sent to counsel. The exact transmission path is a discovery question and is not established here.
Pattern, not proofThe appearance of a communication addressed to counsel inside client-controlled public content is a fact. Who transmitted it, when, and by what method requires production of the underlying communications.
Williams notified counsel directly of threats made by his client and demanded the conduct stop. This was an independent notice point after the September cease and desist and after October publications concerning her family.
Cumulative knowledgeBy late October 2025, the notice record was no longer a single email. It was a documented sequence.
Counsel and his firm commenced Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 25-002441-CZ against Williams after receiving the cease and desist, the child-safety notice, and the October threat notice.
Structural effectThe complaint converted the safety complaint and the public criticism into claims against the person who made them, and created a docket that would itself generate filings.
The Attorney Grievance Commission advised that File No. 25-2363 had been reassigned to a Senior Associate Counsel to investigate. Williams has received no closure notice since.
Open matterThe regulatory question was live before the August 2026 hearing and remains live now.
Counsel emailed Williams and copied other counsel stating that his office would assume representation of a party in two Macomb County protective order matters, Case Nos. 25-0006455-PH and 26-000730-PH, that he had spoken with the Macomb County Circuit scheduling clerk, and that the motion to terminate and the show cause had been adjourned to June 8, 2026. Williams objected by return email within the hour and stated she would file opposition.
Williams later withdrew when the cost of continued proceedings became unsustainable. Her motions in Macomb Case No. 2026-000730-PH were struck. In a federal filing in July 2026, counsel asserted that she had not appeared or offered evidence in defense of the order.
Documented, not characterizedThe April 24 email is a primary source. Counsel contacted the clerk and the hearings moved. Williams did not agree in advance, and her objection is in the same thread. The later assertion that she did not defend the order describes a record produced after the day to defend it was moved.
At a show cause hearing before Judge Julie Gafkay in Saginaw County Circuit Court, counsel stated that his client had asked him for filings and records concerning Williams, that his client was interested, and that he provided them. He also stated he was very positive that the same client created the domains that had been threatened against Williams and her minor child and never used.
At the same hearing, the court declined to admit articles published by this outlet as exhibits supporting contempt, and the remaining contested questions were narrowed to email communications.
Transcript pendingReported by the author as a party present in the courtroom. A transcript will be ordered at the conclusion of the show cause proceedings and this article will be updated against it.
Read as a sequence, the notice record is not ambiguous about knowledge. Roughly eleven months separate the September 10, 2025 child-safety notice from the August 3, 2026 statement in open court. That interval is the single most consequential number in this piece, because professional responsibility analysis turns on what a lawyer knew at the time of the conduct, and the answer here is documented in writing rather than inferred from timing.
The Lab holds the free Clutch Justice tools for documenting institutional conduct, including the FOIA generator, decision trees, and the judicial and attorney conduct resources. Notice records are only useful if they exist in writing on the date they happened.
Open The Lab ?The Address Problem Nobody Fixed
There is a reason a filing is different from a docket entry, and it has nothing to do with secrecy.
Michigan civil practice generally requires a self-represented party to put a service address on the papers she files, and for most self-represented people that address is the house they sleep in. Protective order practice recognizes the danger and provides mechanisms for confidential address handling in some circumstances. Ordinary civil litigation supplies no comparable general shield. A person who is a defendant in a civil case and who is simultaneously seeking distance from someone she has reported to law enforcement has no clean way to litigate without her home address traveling with every document she signs.
That is the gap. It is not the fault of any individual lawyer. It is a design feature of a system that assumes the parties on either side of a caption are adversaries in a dispute, not a person and the people she reported.
Keeping a client reasonably informed about the status of a matter, and explaining matters so the client can make informed decisions. MRPC 1.4.
Restricting means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person. MRPC 4.4.
Address confidentiality mechanisms available in some protective order proceedings.
A grievance process that can investigate purpose after the fact, on complaint.
Any general shielding of a self-represented civil party’s residential address in ordinary civil litigation.
Any duty to reassess routine client communication after written notice that a third party fears for a child’s safety.
Any mechanism preventing material transmitted lawfully to a client from being republished to a public audience the next day.
Any coordination between a protective order in one county and a civil docket in another that keeps the two from feeding each other.
Why This Is a Systems Story
I could write the version of this article that is only about one lawyer. It would get more clicks and it would be worth less.
The reason I am not writing that version is that every mechanism described above would function identically with different names in the caption. A parent files a police report. The person she reported has counsel. Counsel receives written notice that children are involved. The civil case proceeds, as it is entitled to. Filings issue, carrying her address, as they are required to. Counsel keeps his client informed, as the rules contemplate. The client publishes. Nothing in that chain requires anyone to have done anything unusual, and the outcome is that a woman’s home address reaches an audience she was trying to escape, by way of a courthouse.
The One Place the System Worked
An accountability publication that only ever finds failure is not doing analysis. It is doing grievance with footnotes. So this belongs in the record alongside everything above.
Michigan Court Rules 2.407 and 2.408 govern videoconferencing in civil proceedings. MCR 2.407(C) supplies the factors a court weighs in deciding whether and how to proceed remotely, including the capabilities of the court and the parties, whether specific articulable prejudice would result, the convenience of the parties and witnesses, the cost of producing a person in the courtroom measured against the importance of the testimony, and the potential to increase access to the courts by permitting parties or counsel to appear by videoconference. MCR 2.408(A) authorizes a court, in its discretion, to permit remote participation in a civil evidentiary proceeding after notice and an opportunity to be heard. MCR 2.407(B)(5) preserves the court’s authority to determine that a case is not suited to videoconferencing and to require any hearing to be held in person.
That is a real framework with enumerated factors, and it places the decision squarely inside judicial discretion. In this matter, the court accommodated a caregiving obligation when a child of mine was injured, and permitted participation without requiring physical presence.
The rule already contains everything necessary to prevent compelled proximity between a party and people she has reported to law enforcement. The access factor in subrule (C) reaches it. The convenience factor reaches it. Nothing needed to be amended, invented, or litigated. A judge read the factors and applied them. The gap this article describes is therefore not a gap in the rule. It is a gap in how consistently the rule gets used.
The accommodation had a reason behind it. One of my children was injured, and the court permitted participation that did not require me to be physically present while that was true. That is precisely the sort of circumstance the access and convenience factors in MCR 2.407(C) exist to reach.
What the accommodation could not control was how the available time got spent. By my account of the hearing, opposing counsel consumed as much of it as he could. The observable consequence, which does not depend on anyone accepting my characterization, is that the proceeding did not reach my testimony. What happened to my children and to me does not go on the record until the matter resumes on Wednesday, August 5, 2026. A court can grant a party relief from travel. It has considerably less control over whether that party gets to speak before the clock runs out.
His client’s mother sat in the gallery for the hearing. She is not a bystander to any of this. She is represented by the same counsel, she is a party to the Macomb protective order matters, she is the person whose contempt proceeding was adjourned in April, and she is a person against whom I obtained a personal protection order in February 2026, entered ex parte and containing an express prohibition on contact through a third party.
That order is no longer in effect. It was terminated, and it was terminated at the end of the sequence described above. The hearing at which I intended to defend it was moved before I agreed to move it. Continued proceedings became financially unsustainable and I withdrew. My motions were struck. The order went with them.
So the arrangement on August 3 was this. A person I had gone to a court to be protected from, and whose protective order had been dissolved through a process in which I was never given the day to defend it, sat in a room I was required to attend in person, while the relief being sought at the front of that room was my silence.
Courtrooms in Michigan are public, and I want to be exact, because the exactness is the point. She was entitled to be there. No order restrained her attendance, and nothing in this article should be read as suggesting she violated anything. That is precisely the difficulty. A personal protection order restrains contact in every place a person goes except the one building where the state decides what the order means. The openness that makes courts legitimate is the same feature guaranteeing that a party seeking distance from a family will find that family seated behind her.
There is no clean rule fix, because the fix is closing courtrooms and closed courtrooms are worse. What is available is writing down what the arrangement costs and who is charged for it. Protection that evaporates at the courthouse door is not protection from the people most likely to bring you to a courthouse.
The Absence, and the Argument Built From It
The April 24, 2026 email is the cleanest document in this entire matter, and it is worth reading for what it does rather than what it says. Counsel wrote to inform me that his office would be assuming representation in the Macomb protective order cases, that he had spoken with the scheduling clerk, and that the motion to terminate and the show cause had been adjourned to June 8. I objected in writing within the hour and said I would file opposition. The hearing had already moved.
What followed is a sequence in which no single step looks like anything. Continued proceedings became financially unsustainable and I withdrew. In Macomb Case No. 2026-000730-PH, my motions were struck. Then, in a federal filing in July 2026, counsel asserted that I had not appeared or offered evidence in defense of the order.
A record can be made to show that a person did not fight, by ensuring there was no day on which she could. The absence is produced first. Then the absence is offered as the finding.
Each component of that is ordinary and defensible on its own terms. Hearings get adjourned. Parties withdraw. Motions get struck. Filings in one forum characterize records made in another. That is precisely why the sequence is worth documenting as a sequence rather than complaining about as a grievance. The individual steps do not require anyone to have done anything improper. The output is a paper record stating that a woman did not defend an order, produced by a process in which she said in writing that she intended to and then was not given the day.
Ending It
Counsel told the court on August 3 that he intended to end this litigation. He also made clear his displeasure that I had taken the story to journalists.
I am not going to characterize either statement. I am going to put them next to the docket and let a reader do the arithmetic.
I obtained personal protection orders in February 2026. The petitions supporting them, which are court records, stated in the paragraph explaining why the orders were needed that I was defending cases in Macomb and a civil action in Saginaw brought by their attorney because they would not leave my family alone. That is what I told a court my situation was, in February, in writing, under signature.
What followed was not a wind-down. There were motions to terminate those orders, filed minutes apart in March. There was a summary disposition filing. There were subpoenas seeking the police reports generated by my attempts to obtain protection. There was a show cause. There was a hearing today that did not finish, and there will be another on Wednesday. A proposed resolution offered in December had required my permanent silence, released his clients and associates from all prior claims, and was not mutual. A second proposal in February would have extended indefinitely, covered a list of relatives, and carried the possibility of jail.
An intention to end litigation is not visible in a statement about intentions. It is visible in a docket. Anyone can check which one of those exists here.
The Proposed Witness
Counsel also sought today to put a journalist on the stand.
That journalist is his disclosed paid media partner. The relationship is not alleged, inferred, or reconstructed from timing. It is stated by the journalist himself, in his own publication, at the bottom of his own articles.
A May 18, 2026 piece on davebondynews.com carrying an interview with counsel closes by stating that the interview and article are a paid partnership with the journalist. The same piece describes the arrangement as continuing, in a monthly segment on legal issues, property rights, and government transparency. A June 16, 2026 piece on the same site, again featuring counsel, closes by stating that the article is a paid partnership between the journalist and counsel. Promotional video for the arrangement has run across Facebook and YouTube, carrying the platform’s own paid partnership label.
Nothing in this section suggests the journalist did anything improper. He disclosed the arrangement, on the record, repeatedly, which is exactly what a journalist is supposed to do, and the disclosure is the reason this can be reported at all. The question is not about him. It is about a litigant, in a civil action against a publisher, proposing his own paid media partner as a witness in that action.
A monthly paid segment is a commercial relationship with an ongoing interest on both sides. Placing the person on the other end of that relationship in the witness box, in your own lawsuit, against a publisher, is not a neutral evidentiary choice. It does not require anyone to have acted in bad faith for it to be worth writing down.
As for the journalists. I am a working journalist, this is my publication, and the events described in this article happened to me. A lawsuit against a publisher, an injunction restricting her speech, a contempt proceeding, a demand for silence broad enough to reach her reporting, and now an objection that other reporters have been contacted. I am not going to argue about what that pattern is for. I am going to note that it is the pattern, and that the objection to press interest was voiced in open court, on a record, which is the one place it was certain to be preserved.
And today, after all of that, counsel was still seeking my silence. That is what these proceedings have been asking for since December: not a correction, not a retraction of anything specific, but silence, in a form broad enough and permanent enough that I would not be able to write the sentence you are currently reading.
The April 24, 2026 correspondence is a primary document and is quoted from directly. The strike order in Macomb Case No. 2026-000730-PH, the withdrawal filing, and the July 2026 federal filing are described from the author’s account of those records and should be read against the orders and filings themselves, which are public. The characterization of what counsel sought at the August 3, 2026 hearing rests on the author’s contemporaneous account and awaits the transcript.
A High Bar Is Not a Shield
Counsel was also keen to extend this hearing across two days. That is the detail I want to sit with, because of what the two days are being spent to establish.
The remaining contested questions in this matter are whether communications I sent were knowingly false, or were made with actual malice. Those are demanding standards, and they are demanding by design. Actual malice means knowledge that a statement was false or reckless disregard for whether it was false, and it is not satisfied by showing that a statement was wrong, or unfair, or that the person who made it disliked the subject. The burden of establishing it does not sit with me. It sits with the party asserting it.
So the substantive law is, on its face, protective. And it protects almost nothing about the experience of being on this end of it.
A high standard of proof determines who wins. It has no effect whatsoever on who pays to find out. Every hearing day, every trip across the state, every hour of lost work accrues to the person defending, in full, on the same schedule, whether the standard is ultimately met or never comes close.
That is why a second day matters more than it sounds like it should. The cost of a second day is not borne equally. For the party asserting knowing falsity, another day is another opportunity to attempt proof. For the party defending, it is another day of childcare, another day of unpaid absence, another day of travel, another day in a building she has asked repeatedly not to be required to enter, and another day of proximity to people she has sought protection from. It is also another opportunity for his client’s mother to be seated in the gallery again. None of that turns on whether the assertion has merit. It is charged either way, and it is charged in advance.
Michigan spent years as one of the last states without an anti-SLAPP statute, and then fixed it. The Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, MCL 691.1851 and following, enacted as 2025 PA 52, took effect March 24, 2026. It is designed for exactly the asymmetry described above. It provides a special motion, a stay of discovery and other time-consuming maneuvers during expedited review, and fee recovery, and its stated purpose is to shift the burden of litigation back onto the party who brought it.
It applies to civil actions filed on or after March 24, 2026. The action described in this article was filed November 3, 2025.
That is not an argument that any particular case would qualify under the statute, and this article does not make one. It is an observation about sequence. Michigan identified this precise gap, legislated a remedy for it, and made the remedy prospective, which means every case already pending on the effective date continues to run on the older arrangement in which process itself is the cost.
I will say the obvious thing plainly, once, and then return to the analysis. The accommodation mattered, and not only for the reason a scheduling clerk would record. Distance from the people on the other side of these captions is the entire thing I have been asking various courts for since August of 2025. On this occasion a court supplied it, under a rule that was always there.
That is also why the pattern in the other direction is worth documenting rather than merely complaining about. A Notice filed December 13, 2025 in the Saginaw matter stated that counsel would appear by videoconference. I appeared in person. My position, and I state it as my position rather than as a finding, is that repeated insistence on in-person appearance by a self-represented party who lives across the state, in proceedings premised on accusations she disputes, produces burden reliably and produces very little else. Travel, lost workdays, childcare, and physical proximity to people she has reported are not incidental costs of that choice. They are the whole of what it delivers.
The Articles
At the same August 3 hearing, the court declined to admit articles published by this outlet as exhibits in support of contempt. By my account of the proceeding, the court observed that one of the articles offered did not name the attorney at all, and addressed the standard applicable to a limited-purpose public figure. The contested questions that remain concern email communications rather than published journalism, specifically whether reports concerning evidence fabrication and false attribution, and communications raising safety concerns, were knowingly false or made with actual malice.
An evidentiary ruling declining to admit exhibits at a show cause hearing is not a merits determination of the defamation claims pleaded in the underlying civil action, and it is not a finding that any published statement was true. It also does not modify, narrow, or dissolve the preliminary injunction entered December 15, 2025, which remains operative according to its own terms until a court orders otherwise. Any publisher reading this for guidance about their own situation should understand the distinction between an exhibit not being admitted in one proceeding and an order no longer applying. Those are different things.
The narrow institutional point is still worth stating. A court asked to treat a journalist’s published work as the basis for a contempt finding looked at the work, applied the standard that governs public criticism of a person who has entered a public controversy, and declined. That is the mechanism functioning as designed. It is also, so far, the only thing in this record that has functioned as designed on the first attempt.
A rule that permits a court to reduce burden also permits a party to argue for maximum burden. Discretion cuts in both directions, and the record of a case is largely a record of which direction it got asked to cut.
What Happens Next
The show cause proceedings continue. A transcript of the August 3, 2026 hearing will be ordered at their conclusion, and this article will be corrected against it if the transcript differs from what is reported here in any respect. That is not a formality. It is the whole reason the statements above are framed as reported rather than established.
The Attorney Grievance Commission file remains open. I am the complainant in it, which is disclosed at the top of this article and is the reason this piece stops where it stops. I am not in a position to tell readers what the outcome should be, and I would not trust a publication that told them.
The claim in this article is not that a lawyer shared documents with his client. It is that a lawyer described the reason for that sharing as the client’s interest in the opposing party, eleven months after receiving written notice that the opposing party was a mother seeking protection for her children. The distinction is small on the page and it is the entire matter.
The Part That Is Not Evidence
There is something I have not written down anywhere in more than a year of documenting this, because it is not evidence and it does not belong in a filing.
You can be living an ordinary life. Working a job. Raising children. Building something small and slow with your own hands, on nights and weekends, the way most people build anything. And people you did not choose, and had no prior quarrel with, can walk into the middle of it and begin taking it apart. The terrifying part is not that it is possible. It is how little is required to start it.
I have never been given a reason. Not in a pleading, not in an email, not from a witness stand, not once in more than a year. I have been given accusations, and I have answered them, and the accusations have been replaced by different accusations. What has never arrived, at any point, from anyone, is an account of what I did to any of these people that caused this to begin.
The cost of that is not abstract and it is not literary. It is workdays I was not paid for. It is money that was meant for something else. It is hours in a car crossing the state, and hours in courthouses, and hours that belonged to my children and went here instead. It is the specific knowledge, carried around during ordinary parts of ordinary days, that a document with my address on it may already be somewhere I cannot reach and cannot call back.
None of that fits in an exhibit. I am putting it here instead, labeled clearly as what it is, which is my own account of what this has been like rather than a finding about anyone.
I sat in that courtroom and heard a man explain, calmly and without apparent difficulty, why my address kept arriving where I did not want it. My skin crawled, and it was not because the sentence was cruel. It was because of how casual it sounded to me. It did not sound like a man who believed he was saying anything remarkable, and I think that is exactly the part worth writing down.
Saginaw County Circuit Court, Case No. 25-002441-CZ. Complaint filed November 3, 2025. Preliminary injunction entered December 15, 2025. Show cause proceedings, hearing held August 3, 2026 before Judge Julie Gafkay.
Macomb County Circuit Court, Case Nos. 25-0006455-PH and 26-000730-PH. Motion to terminate and show cause adjourned to June 8, 2026. Order in 2026-000730-PH subsequently terminated.
Macomb County Circuit Court, Case Nos. 2026-000730-PH and 2026-000735-PH. Personal protection orders entered ex parte February 11, 2026 by Judge Rachel Rancilio, each prohibiting contact through a third party at paragraph 5(e), each effective until August 11, 2026.
Hearing RecordAugust 3, 2026 hearing, Saginaw County Circuit Court. Statements reported by the author as a party present in the courtroom. Transcript to be ordered at the conclusion of the show cause proceedings. Not yet produced.
CorrespondenceCease and desist and child-safety notice transmitted to counsel and his client, September 10, 2025. On file.
Petitions for Personal Protection Order (Nondomestic), SCAO Form CC 377, signed February 10, 2026, Macomb County Circuit Court. Paragraph 4 identifies pending Macomb matters and a Saginaw civil action brought by respondents’ attorney.
Notice to counsel concerning threats, October 23, 2025. On file.
Email, subject “Re: Notice of Adjournment // Case nos 25-0006455-PH and 26-000730-PH,” April 24, 2026, 3:58 p.m. and 4:50 p.m., with author’s 4:39 p.m. objection in the same thread. On file.
Law EnforcementKalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office, Case No. 2025-00028333. Intimidation and stalking report reflecting conduct August 7 through 11, 2025, and prosecutor warrant request.
RegulatoryMichigan Attorney Grievance Commission, File No. 25-2363. Reassigned to Senior Associate Counsel for investigation, December 17, 2025. Open as of publication.
RulesMichigan Rules of Professional Conduct 1.4, Communication.
Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct 4.4, Respect for Rights of Third Persons.
Michigan Court Rule 2.407, subrules (B)(5) and (C).
Michigan Court Rule 2.408(A), remote participation in civil evidentiary proceedings.
Published DisclosuresDave Bondy, interview with counsel, Dave Bondy’s Keeping it Real Newsletter, May 18, 2026, davebondynews.com/p/attorney-philip-ellison-breaks-down. Closing disclosure states the interview and article are a paid partnership. Text describes a continuing monthly segment.
Dave Bondy, second interview with counsel, Dave Bondy’s Keeping it Real Newsletter, June 16, 2026, davebondynews.com/p/michigan-attorney-philip-ellison. Closing disclosure states the article is a paid partnership.
Promotional video posts, Dave Bondy, Facebook and YouTube, May through July 2026, carrying platform paid partnership labeling.
StatuteUniform Public Expression Protection Act, MCL 691.1851 et seq., 2025 PA 52. Effective March 24, 2026, applicable to civil actions filed on or after that date.
Bluebook: Williams, Rita. He Said His Client Was ‘Interested.’ My Skin Crawled, Clutch Justice (Aug. 3, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/03/he-said-his-client-was-interested/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, August 3). He said his client was ‘interested.’ My skin crawled. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/03/he-said-his-client-was-interested/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “He Said His Client Was ‘Interested.’ My Skin Crawled.” Clutch Justice, 3 Aug. 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/08/03/he-said-his-client-was-interested/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “He Said His Client Was ‘Interested.’ My Skin Crawled.” Clutch Justice, August 3, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/03/he-said-his-client-was-interested/.
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