He Didn’t Need My Attention. He Needed a Messenger.

A message from a man who has stalked my children and me was sent to Judge Kathleen Galen’s brother, posted publicly by a Galen supporter, and then sent to her opponent’s campaign. Stalking researchers have a name for this. I am far from the first survivor it has happened to.

What Was Sent, and Who Passed It Along

On the morning of September 24, 2026, a message about me was sent to James Galen, Judge Kathleen Galen’s brother. He is the same James Galen who brought the residency lawsuit against her opponent, Richard Goodman, which Clutch Justice covered in “Slumbering on Their Rights.” The message called me a criminal, described my record, and suggested that my reporting on the judge was being done on Goodman’s behalf.

The timing matters. In the days just before, Clutch Justice had begun publishing its reporting on Judge Galen and her race, including “Slumbering on Their Rights,” on the residency suit James Galen and Cindy Jakubiszen brought against Goodman. On the morning of September 24, Clutch Justice published “Off the Record,” on rulings from the judge’s courtroom. The message about my record reached James Galen that same morning.

There is also an irony the record makes hard to ignore. On September 26, Clutch Justice published “Glass Houses,” drawn from Attorney Discipline Board notices that have been public for years. They show three public discipline actions against James Galen Jr., including a 2020 stipulation in which he admitted two findings of criminal contempt and three misdemeanor cocaine-use pleas. The man who received an anonymous message calling me a criminal carries a public record of his own. I reported his because he sued a candidate for judge. Mine came up because I reported on his sister.

At about 9:30 that morning, Mary Hall-Rayford posted the message on her public Facebook page. Hall-Rayford is not a private bystander. The Eastpointe City Council appointed her to the city’s Planning Commission in January 2025, for a term that runs through 2029. She is also a Galen supporter who has appeared at the judge’s campaign fundraisers. She wrote that the message had been sent to “J. Galen” that morning and that she had reworded it to protect the sender’s name. She added that she was “not declaring this for authenticity.” Then she turned off comments.

So the claim went out to the public with a disclaimer from the person posting it that she could not stand behind it, and with no way for anyone to answer it on the page where it appeared. No one associated with Galen’s campaign asked me a single question before it went up.

The record shows the message was sent to James Galen and posted by Hall-Rayford. It does not show how Hall-Rayford obtained it. Her post says she had the original in hand to reword it.

The notice, and the reply

At 12:37 p.m. the same day, I sent Hall-Rayford a written notice. It told her she was free to disagree with my reporting, criticize my work, support Judge Galen, and express her opinions. It asked her to stop publishing false statements of fact about me and not to encourage others to harass me. It said plainly that it did not ask her to stop lawful criticism or political speech.

She replied the following evening, Friday, September 25, at 9:20 p.m. She was not intimidated, she wrote, and I should be ready for “an energy match.”

She did not stop there. She took the notice public, sharing a post to an Eastpointe community discussion group in which she called it nonsense, complained that I was documenting her comments and posts, asked “to what end?” and promised her readers more: “Stay tuned!” In a separate message, she again wrote that she was not intimidated and suggested I find a lawyer. She also posted the notice itself publicly, so anyone can read exactly what it asked of her: no false statements of fact, and nothing more.

Hall-Rayford knows what it means to be shut down. In 2022, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression took her on as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the City of Eastpointe and its then-mayor, after the mayor talked over her and threatened to end a council meeting when she rose to criticize the mayor during public comment. In 2024, the Macomb Daily reported that Eastpointe residents won that free speech case. My notice protected the same right she fought for: her right to criticize me, as loudly as she likes. It asked only that she stop publishing false statements of fact.

“To what end” has an answer. Documenting is what stalking victims are told to do. Guidance from the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center tells victims to save every email, text message, photo, and social media post as evidence. I asked her in writing to stop publishing false claims about me. She responded by ridiculing, in front of her neighbors, the one thing every stalking advocate tells a victim to do, and by promising more.

Whether or not she understood what she had become part of, the effect was the same. A stalking victim who had already been targeted through the people around her was targeted again, this time for protecting herself.

Then the other campaign

On September 29, at 3:19 p.m., the same account messaged Richard Goodman’s campaign. It told the campaign to cut ties with me immediately, called me a fraud, and pointed them to court records. The Goodman campaign shared the message with me rather than acting on it.

That is the detail that answers the claim that I was working for Goodman. The same account went to the Galen side first and to the Goodman side five days later. A person backing a candidate does not try to separate a reporter from both campaigns in the same race. A person trying to isolate the reporter does.

About My Record

My record is not a secret, and it was never hidden. I have written about it publicly for years. I was retaliated against after making Brady/Giglio findings involving the Michigan State Police, and what followed is part of why I do this work. It is in my biography.

It also does not touch a single document I have published about Judge Galen. It does not change a transcript, an appellate decision, a court file, a campaign filing, or an archived web page. Attacking the reporter leaves the evidence exactly where it was.

Stalking Has a Category for This

The Stalking Prevention, Awareness, and Resource Center, a project funded by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, sorts stalking behaviors into four overlapping categories: surveillance, life invasion, intimidation, and interference. Interference is the category where a stalker goes after a victim’s life through other people and institutions, by spreading rumors, damaging her reputation, and harassing her friends, family, and colleagues.

Life invasion is the category for intrusion into the spaces where a victim lives and works. My work is Clutch Justice. Reporting on Judge Galen’s race means dealing with both campaigns, the people around them, and the community that reads the coverage. Messaging those exact people about me is not a stray comment from a stranger. It reaches into the middle of my work and tries to make it impossible to do.

None of it works without surveillance. To send those messages, someone had to be watching my reporting closely enough to know which race I was covering, who was involved on each side, and when. The message reached Judge Galen’s brother the same morning Clutch Justice published “Off the Record.” The next one went to the opposing campaign. That is not a stranger stumbling across a news story. It is someone monitoring my work and using what he learned to pick his targets.

So this hits every category SPARC names. Watching my reporting to choose who to contact is surveillance. Contacting the campaigns I cover is life invasion. Using those contacts to brand me a criminal and a fraud is interference. And on the night of October 10, he emailed me directly, threatening again to have me put in jail and threatening my children. That is intimidation. It has happened so often that I no longer react. I save it for the court file and keep working. SPARC’s training materials also describe proxy stalking, in which friends, family, and colleagues become the channel the stalker works through. Some of those people are recruited knowingly. Many are simply handed a message and choose to pass it on.

SPARC estimates that nearly one in three women and one in six men will be stalked in their lifetimes, and that most stalkers target someone they know. Its training materials note that one in eight employed stalking victims loses time from work. The interference category is how a stalker reaches the parts of a victim’s life that do not show up on a police report: the job offer, the speaking invitation, the professional relationship that quietly goes cold.

I Am Not the First

This is not the first time a message like this has been sent to people in my professional life, and it has cost me opportunities before. The people who received it then did not check the sender’s history, and they did not ask me. They took the word of a man who stalked my children and me.

To be clear about my own situation: the man who has stalked my family was never my partner. I have never even met him. SPARC notes that stalkers can be acquaintances, family members, or strangers, and the tactics do not change with the relationship. The woman in Eastpointe whose case I described above is in a different situation: hers is domestic violence, and the danger to her comes from someone who knows her well. What we share is the pattern that follows, when people around us are handed a story and decide not to ask.

That pattern is not unusual. It is one of the most common ways survivors lose ground.

Survivors with records

The National Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors at the Battered Women’s Justice Project estimates that upwards of 70 percent of incarcerated women have been victims of intimate partner violence. Advocacy groups reporting to the United Nations in 2025 put the figure for histories of intimate partner violence or sexual abuse among incarcerated women as high as 75 percent.

The National Network to End Domestic Violence describes how abusers turn courts into a continuation of the abuse: filing retaliatory protective orders, reporting false accusations, and in some cases wrongfully bringing charges against their victims. NNEDV also notes the consequence that follows a survivor for years afterward. A criminal record or a protective order against her can screen her out of the very services meant to help her.

Washington State’s domestic violence bench guide, drawing on interviews with survivors by the Legal Voice Violence Against Women Workgroup, catalogues the same pattern: false reports, retaliatory lawsuits including defamation claims, and litigation used to force contact and drain a survivor’s money. The Victim Rights Law Center has described a steady rise in retaliatory counter-complaints, defamation suits, and false reports used to intimidate victims.

Turning the record into the story

Once a survivor has a record, a protective order against her, or a pending lawsuit, the person harming her has something to hand to everyone else. The record becomes the headline, and what happened to her becomes the footnote. The people who receive the message rarely ask how the record came to exist, who filed the complaint, or what the survivor would say if asked.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd named one version of this decades ago. She calls it DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The person being held accountable attacks the credibility of whoever is confronting them and recasts that person as the real offender. Freyd’s research with Sarah Harsey found that people shown an account of abuse followed by a DARVO response were less likely to believe the victim. Her research also found something more hopeful: people who understood the tactic were less likely to be moved by it.

The same move, in a courtroom

The court records show the same move from the bench. In August 2023, Consergeria Wilson stood before Judge Galen on two nonserious misdemeanors, offenses Michigan law presumes should not carry jail. Galen spent the sentencing on his driving history. “Sir, your record is atrocious, atrocious,” the record shows her saying, before sentencing him to 60 days in jail. The circuit court vacated the sentence because nothing in the record showed she had recognized the presumption the law required her to address. She recited his record instead of engaging with the law.

In Mark Anthony Clark’s case, the reviewing court reversed a conviction from her courtroom because Clark was not allowed to testify at his own trial. It called the error “egregious.” The person accused never got to speak before the decision was made.

And there is a woman in Eastpointe I will not name, because naming her could help her abuser find her. She is a domestic violence survivor who was shot eight times. While she recovered, her child missed school to help care for her, and she ended up in Judge Galen’s courtroom on a truancy case. She describes a judge who keeps her coming back: more hearings, more fines, more fees she cannot afford, for a mother whose child stayed home because she needed help to get through the day. She lives with a traumatic brain injury. She says Galen has called her “slow” from the bench, and scoffed at her inability to pay: “You can’t even get $20?” A brain injury is a disability, and courts are required to accommodate it, not mock it. This July, the Court of Appeals reversed Galen for jailing a pregnant woman on ability-to-pay reasoning the record did not support. Her case is still pending. She gave me permission to tell this part of it.

A victim of violence, treated as the problem. That is the logic the message about me ran on. A record substituted for the evidence. A label in place of a hearing. The person being judged never asked for their side. Wilson and Clark were defendants in her courtroom. I have never been a party in front of her. The people around her treated me the same way anyway.

What Galen’s Camp Chose

Here is my view, based on the record above. The people around Judge Galen who handled this message, her brother who received it and a campaign supporter who published it, cared more about a smear than about the truth.

They had an anonymous claim about the reporter covering the judge. Nobody asked me about it. The person who posted it wrote that she could not vouch for it, published it anyway, and closed the comments so no one could answer it.

They did not know that the message came from a man who has stalked my children and me, because they never tried to find out. Checking would have taken one message to me. Instead, they took the account of the man harassing me and handed it to the public. In doing that, they did what he could not do on his own: they put his words in front of an audience that trusted them. Whatever they intended, the effect was to extend his campaign against me. That is what further victimization looks like. It does not require the people doing it to know who they are helping. It only requires them not to ask.

The Goodman campaign received a message from the same account five days later. It came to me first. The difference between the two sides was not what they knew. It was the choice to check.

Why I Endorsed Goodman

I have publicly endorsed Richard Goodman, and this is the reason.

What his campaign did is what trauma-informed practice looks like. When someone hands you an accusation about a person who has been targeted, you go to that person first. You do not publish it with a disclaimer and shut off the comments. You do not assume the label tells you everything you need to know.

That is not a small thing in a district court. The 38th District Court is where Eastpointe residents in crisis end up: people living with brain injuries, survivors of violence, parents who cannot come up with $20. A judge’s first instinct when someone in front of them comes with a label attached decides how that person is treated. Both sides of this race were handed the same kind of message about me. One side asked. That is the instinct I want on the bench.

Readers should weigh my reporting on Judge Galen with this endorsement in mind. The court records, archives and filings I rely on stand on their own, and every one of them is linked so you can check it yourself.

What They Say, and What the Record Says

The message about me was not the first time Galen’s camp told the public something the record does not support. Lay the statements side by side and a pattern shows.

• The endorsement page, first version. On September 30, the campaign told the Detroit Free Press that the page listing three dead attorneys came from a previous website and that its current site had not been published. The Internet Archive captured that page on the campaign’s own domain in May 2025, and the site was live when I read it on September 24 (“The Endorsers Who Had Already Died”).
• The endorsement page, second version. On October 11, the campaign said a volunteer made the old page live by mistake and that it was “promptly removed.” That is not true, and the Wayback Machine proves it. The Internet Archive captured the page live on the campaign’s own domain on May 24, 2025. It stayed up until September 30, 2026, more than 16 months later, and came down only after a Free Press reporter asked about it. Anyone can check the capture here.
• “Every” judge. The same October 11 graphic claims the endorsement of every Macomb County district judge. The campaign has not produced the list, and I have found no public confirmation from at least three of those judges.
• Her magistrate’s address. Mark Makoski, Galen’s magistrate and the treasurer of her campaign committee, certified to the Warren assessor under penalty of perjury in 2022 that he no longer lived in his Warren house. The year he became her magistrate, he moved his address to an Eastpointe rental. In 2026, the Warren house he says he left has averaged about 273 gallons of water a day. The Eastpointe address has averaged about 9.5 (“Makoski Told the Assessor He Moved Out of Warren”). Magistrates in Eastpointe’s district generally must be electors of that district.
• The message about me. A planning commissioner and campaign supporter published an anonymous attack she admitted in writing she could not verify, and closed the comments so it could not be answered.

None of these is a court ruling. Each is a public statement from Galen’s campaign or the people closest to it, and each runs straight into a public record that says otherwise. A website page is a small thing. The campaign told voters something about it that a free public archive disproves in one click. If the statements do not hold up even there, voters are entitled to ask what else they have been told that would not survive a check.

My View: Kathleen Galen Is Not Fit to Be a Judge

I will say this plainly, as opinion, and on the record Clutch Justice has documented: I do not believe Kathleen Galen is fit to sit on the bench.

That view does not rest on her brother’s record. Nothing ties Judge Galen to his discipline, and I said so when I published it. It rests on her own record:

• The Court of Appeals found she abused her discretion in jailing Zsazsa Soward, a pregnant defendant, for 93 days on ability-to-pay reasoning the record did not support (“Causing Her Problems”).
• A reviewing court reversed Mark Anthony Clark’s conviction because he was not allowed to testify at his own trial, calling the error “egregious” (“Off the Record”).
• Consergeria Wilson’s 60-day jail sentence for two nonserious misdemeanors was vacated because the record never showed she recognized the presumption against jail. Mazin Hermiz’s judgment carried $505 in costs never stated in court, and the prosecutor stipulated it was wrong.
• A domestic violence survivor who was shot eight times, and who lives with a traumatic brain injury, describes being kept in her courtroom on a truancy case, facing repeated hearings, fines and fees she cannot afford, because her child missed school to help care for her. She says Galen called her “slow” and scoffed, “You can’t even get $20?”
• Attorneys who practice before her describe substance handled at sidebar, hearings logged as status conferences, and transcript requests that come back with no record on file.
• Her campaign endorsement page named three dead attorneys for at least 16 months, and the campaign has offered two explanations that do not fit the archive (“The Endorsers Who Had Already Died”).
• Her campaign claims the endorsement of every Macomb County district judge and has not produced the list.

And my view rests on what happened here. Her family has already gone to court against her opponent over a residency technicality. When the reporter documenting her record was attacked with a stalker’s message, the people around her did not ask whether it was true. Her brother received it. A supporter published it.

A judge is supposed to be the person in the room who asks for the evidence before deciding. The people around this one skipped that step the moment it was convenient, and Judge Galen has not said a word about it. Eastpointe voters can weigh that on November 3.

If Someone Sends You a Message Like This

Most people who pass along a message like this do not think of themselves as part of a stalking campaign. They think they are sharing information. The difference is a few minutes of effort.

It Is OK to Let People Protect You

This weekend, he started disparaging me in a Facebook group in a community where neither of us lives. Word came back to me, the way it always does. But something else came back too: people close to me had already stepped in, in public, to defend me. One of them wrote back to him directly:

Stalking is built to make you feel alone. Every message to a campaign, every post in a group, every email to an organization I work with is meant to leave me standing by myself, with everyone around me wondering whether he might be right. It works only if the people around you stay quiet, or believe him.

For a long time I handled all of it myself: logged it, filed it, kept working. I still do. But I have also learned that it is OK to let people protect you. When the people who know you speak up, the isolation he is trying to build falls apart. That is what the Goodman campaign did when it sent his message to me instead of acting on it. It is what my friends did this weekend. And it is what I want every survivor reading this to know is allowed.

To the woman in Eastpointe who is walking back into that courtroom, and to anyone else who has stood there carrying more than the charge: you are not alone. I see you, other people see you, and I am still reporting.

Judge Galen’s campaign and its supporters are free to criticize my reporting, and I will publish any documented correction. What I will not do is stop reporting because a man who has stalked my family found people willing to carry his message. The work on the 38th District Court continues.