Judge Kathleen Galen Viewed a Defendant’s Facebook Stories Twice. The Defendant Wants Her Off the Case.

She survived being shot eight times. She told the court she has a brain injury. Now she says her judge has been watching her Facebook, and she is asking for a different one. The hearing is Wednesday morning.

I have spent two months reporting on Judge Kathleen Galen’s courtroom. A Court of Appeals reversal for jailing a pregnant woman over fines. Missing records. A campaign committee staffed by the people who now work for her.

This one is different.

This one has a hearing date.

And a woman who has already survived more than most people ever will is going to walk into that courtroom on Wednesday morning and ask the judge she is afraid of to step aside. She should not have to walk in alone.

Who She Is

In 2016, the defendant, a mother of five, was shot eight times in a domestic violence incident. According to her motion, she has had surgery after surgery in the decade since and still carries two bullets in her body. She is visually impaired. She has PTSD. She has a traumatic brain injury that, in her own sworn words, impairs her ability to receive, process, and understand information.

The attack changed how she earns money, where she lives, and whether she can drive. She relies on other people to get her children to school.

On June 3, 2024, she was charged with truancy, a misdemeanor under Michigan’s compulsory attendance law, MCL 380.1561. Under MCL 380.1599, a parent convicted of that offense faces up to 90 days in jail. She was arraigned on January 13, 2026, before Magistrate Mark Makoski. She pleaded guilty at a pretrial on February 10, 2026, and Galen delayed sentencing under MCL 771.1, which lets a court postpone a sentence for up to one year so a defendant can show she has earned leniency.

Since then, the motion says, she has been sending her son to school out of fear of Galen’s order that he not miss a day. He has chronic asthma. She sends him, and the school calls her to come get him.

She was scheduled for two more surgeries this year after waiting more than a year to get them. She cancelled both. Recovery would have meant bed rest and depending on others to get her children to school, and she was terrified her son might miss a day while she healed.

What She Says Happened in Court

The defendant has appeared before Galen before, in landlord-tenant cases and a civil case in the 38th District Court. She says in her motion that she has never been given a real chance to explain her circumstances.

In the truancy case, she tried. According to the motion, Galen interrupted her by yelling. When she told the judge she has a TBI and that yelling would not help her understand, the motion says Galen told her she was a horrible mother and that her child deserves better. Her sworn affidavit adds what else she was told:

“…having a TBI does not make me slow.”

The motion also says Galen did not allow the defendant’s attorney to speak for her.

A court that is told on the record that a person has a brain injury affecting how she processes information has a choice to make. Slow down. Let counsel speak. Ask what she needs. Courts are public entities under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and accommodation in court is not a favor. The account in this affidavit describes the opposite choice.

Two Story Views

The defendant has been publicly critical of Galen, on her own social media and with people who wanted to hear about her experience in the 38th District Court. She says she tried to file a Judicial Tenure Commission complaint but could not complete it because of her vision and her brain injury. Among her posts was an AI-generated caricature of Galen built around fines. A Facebook group removed it. She kept it on her personal page.

Then, on or about October 3, she checked who had viewed her Facebook story.

The screenshot attached to her motion as Exhibit B shows the viewer list. Between two other names sits “Kathleen G. Galen,” with a small label above it: Non-follower. Exhibit C, from the next day, October 4, shows the same account, the same label, on a different story. Exhibit D is a screenshot of the profile itself: Kathleen G. Galen, Detroit, home listed as Eastpointe, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law. Galen’s own court biography lists a law degree from the University of Detroit School of Law.

Non-follower means the account did not follow her. It reached her stories anyway. Twice, on consecutive days, while the judge had a pending criminal case against her that could still end in jail.

The motion draws the line itself. It says outright that police, probation officers, prosecutors, and human resources departments look at public social media all the time. Its point is that a judge is not any of those things, and that doing it from a personal account, while presiding over the person’s case, is different.

The defendant’s affidavit says she is afraid Galen will retaliate against her for speaking. Her motion says the views triggered her PTSD and that she is now terrified to leave her home.

What Michigan’s Rules Say

No Michigan ethics opinion addresses a judge viewing a litigant’s social media during a pending case. That gap matters, and it does not leave Galen without rules.

The State Bar of Michigan’s judicial social media guidance, last updated in February 2025, ties a judge’s online conduct to the same canons that govern everything else she does. A judge must avoid all impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. A judge must accept restrictions an ordinary citizen would find burdensome, and accept them freely. Under Canon 3(A)(4), a judge may not consider communications made outside the presence of the parties about a pending proceeding. The guidance says the nature of the interaction governs, not the platform, measured by how an objective and reasonable observer would see it.

The American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct goes further in Rule 2.9(C), which tells judges not to investigate the facts of a matter independently. Michigan’s code is older and has no rule worded that plainly. Canon 3(A)(4) is its closest counterpart.

Disqualification itself runs through MCR 2.003(C)(1). A judge must be disqualified if she is biased or prejudiced for or against a party or attorney, or if, based on objective and reasonable perceptions, she has failed to meet the appearance-of-impropriety standard in Canon 2. Michigan’s guidance also puts a duty on the judge herself: under Canon 3, a judge should raise disqualification whenever she has cause to believe grounds may exist. Here, the defense raised it.

Eleven Days and No Answer

The rule tells the challenged judge to decide the motion. It does not say how fast, and it does not require her to tell anyone when.

The motion was filed October 12. By Friday, October 23, defense counsel had called the 38th District Court four times. One call went unanswered. On the others, she asked three things. Is the judge going to sign an order? Is the motion going to be scheduled for a hearing? Is it going to be addressed on the 28th at the review? She also asked whether Wednesday is on Zoom or in person.

No one could tell her. The answer she got was that the judge has the file.

That is what a one-judge court looks like from the defense table. The person deciding whether she should step aside is also the only person who controls when that decision happens, and the staff who answer the phone work for her. Five days before the review, a disabled defendant and her lawyer do not know whether the motion will be heard, ruled on in chambers, or left sitting while the case moves forward in front of the judge it challenges.

The Election in the Room

The motion makes a second argument, and it has nothing to do with Facebook. The defendant’s attorney is Saleema Goodman Sheikh of Goodman Sheikh, P.C., in Mount Clemens. Her son, Richard Goodman, is the only candidate challenging Galen for the 38th District Court on November 3.

That race has not been quiet. Galen’s brother, James L. Galen Jr., and co-plaintiff Cindy Jakubiszen spent months trying to knock Goodman off the ballot over residency, across multiple courts, before an Oakland County judge dismissed Goodman from the case and the Court of Claims dismissed the rest with prejudice on laches. Clutch documented that collapse in Slumbering on Their Rights.

Now the challenger’s mother is standing in Galen’s courtroom, six days before the election, representing a client Galen has already been accused of berating. The motion asks the plain question MCR 2.003(C)(1)(a) asks: is the judge biased against the attorney? An objective observer does not need to answer that to see why it was asked.

A Record That Already Exists

The defendant believes Galen is more interested in punishment and costs people cannot pay than in hearing why they could not meet their obligations. That is her belief, sworn and stated as hers. It also lines up with what an appellate court has already found.

In July, the Michigan Court of Appeals vacated Galen’s 93-day jail sentence for Zsazsa Soward, a woman who had pleaded guilty to driving without a valid license. Galen had acknowledged on the record that Soward’s pregnancy was causing her problems, then treated her having a job as proof she was willfully refusing to pay. The appeals court found the ability-to-pay finding unsupported and called the incarceration an abuse of discretion. Clutch reported the full opinion in Causing Her Problems.

Delayed sentencing exists for exactly this defendant. It is the law’s way of saying the court should look at the person and her circumstances before it decides what she deserves. A woman who cancelled her own surgeries to keep her son in school has been proving what that statute asks her to prove. The question Wednesday is whether the judge who is supposed to weigh that proof is the right one to do it.

How to Show Up Wednesday

Court watching is simple. You sit in a public courtroom and you pay attention. That is all. It matters because people behave differently when the gallery is full, and because a woman who is afraid should be able to look back and see that she is not the only one there.

Here is how to do it well.

Check before you go. As of Friday, the court had not told the defense whether Wednesday is in person or on Zoom. Clutch will post the answer at the top of this article as soon as there is one. Everything below assumes it is in person.

Get there early. The review is set for 8:00 a.m. at the 38th District Court, 16101 E. Nine Mile Road in Eastpointe. Plan to arrive by 7:30 to clear security and find a seat. Bring a photo ID.

Leave the campaign at home. No Goodman shirts, buttons, hats, or stickers. No signs of any kind. The election is six days away, and anything that makes this courtroom look like a rally hurts her, not the judge.

Be quiet and still. Phones off or silent. No recording, photos, or livestreaming. Michigan courts control recording under MCR 8.115, and the judge decides what is allowed. No reactions, no comments, no applause. Observers do not address the court.

You do not need her name. Her identifying details are redacted here on purpose. Sit in the gallery and stay for the session.

Write things down. Courtrooms are presumptively open to the public. If you are asked to wait in the hallway, stay calm, comply, and note the time and what you were told. A notebook and a pen are the court watcher’s only tools.

Dress like it matters. It does.

What Fixing This Would Actually Require

This case exposes three gaps that do not depend on how Wednesday goes.

First, Michigan needs a written answer to the question this motion raises. The State Bar’s Judicial Ethics Committee or the Michigan Supreme Court should state plainly that a judge should not view the personal social media of a party with a pending matter, and that a judge who does must disclose it on the record. Litigants should not have to discover it in their own viewer lists.

Second, single-judge courts need a different first step. Under MCR 2.003(D)(3)(a), the judge being challenged rules on her own disqualification before anyone else looks at it. In a one-judge court, that means every litigant must first ask the only judge in the building to agree she is the problem. The Michigan Supreme Court should amend the rule so that disqualification motions in single-judge courts go directly to an SCAO-assigned judge.

Third, a disclosed disability should change how a hearing runs. When a defendant tells a court on the record that a brain injury affects how she processes information, that disclosure should trigger an accommodation inquiry, not a lecture. Every district court should have a written ADA accommodation process that the bench, not the defendant, is responsible for starting.

I keep thinking about the surgeries.

She waited more than a year for them.

She cancelled both.

Not because she was scared of the operating room. Because she was scared of what would happen in that courtroom if her son missed a day of school while she healed.

And Eastpointe should be ashamed of itself.

The City of Eastpointe funds this court. The city brought the case the Court of Appeals reversed in July. Nearly one in five Eastpointe residents lives below the poverty line, and this is who keeps landing in front of this bench: a pregnant woman with a job she was jailed for having, a disabled mother who has already been shot eight times. People who were victimized once already, now being preyed on by the institution that is supposed to protect them.

That is what this court has come to mean to her. On Wednesday at 8:00 a.m., she has to walk back into it, still not knowing whether anyone will even hear her ask for a different judge. Fill the gallery. Sit quietly. Let her see she is not alone.