Starting Over

 

For New Year’s, we had the highest tides I’ve ever seen in Bellingham. For Christmas, we were snowed in by a freak ice storm. For solstice, I was trapped at home with covid. 

 

After a long hard year, Bear and I found ourselves surrounded by gloom and doom. But the end is finally in sight.

 

Hope comes more easily in springtime. Five and a half years ago, in May 2017, I emerged from the fog of PTSD and embarked on a couple of hopeful adventures. 

 

First, I filed a lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace, PLLC. They’re the supposedly “independent” private investigators the State’s lawyers used to justify firing me from my position as general counsel to Western Washington University. Despite the impact of living with PTSD, I thought the Ogden Murphy Wallace lawsuit would let me use my legal skills to clear my professional reputation and protect my family.

 

Second, I started publishing essays on this blog. In Phase I of blogging, covering posts in 2017 and 2018, I took advantage of my newfound freedom from thirty years of writer’s block by exploring a variety of topics and styles. My favorite essays about family were “I Come From Good People” and “Sure of You.” My favorite essay about brains was “Inside Out.” My favourite essay about Showtune Night in Canada was “Six Degrees of Kristin Chenowith.” Thanks to the mysteries of Google’s algorithm, the three most viewed blog posts were “About My Yale Classmate Brett Kavanaugh,” “Thing 1 and Thing 2,” and “Fifty Shades of Green Gables.”

Phase II covered posts in 2019 and 2020. I got more ambitious about extended storytelling and the craft of writing. I published a week of “Rock Bottom Stories,” as well as other connected essays about topics like my dramatically improved mental health, various besetting plagues, and the comforts of dog ownership. For the first time I confronted my experiences as a gay man coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I wrote about the traumas and triggers I’d experienced while trying to shine a spotlight on dishonest government lawyers. 

Frankly I got carried away with that last topic. Sleazy lawyer stories were taking over the blog, like an oversized moon whose gravitational pull turns ordinary tides into tsunamis. When I looked at the statistics for 2020 I was aghast. I vowed I wouldn’t start Phase III until I freed myself from the power of the Lawyer dark side. 

Over the last couple of years, most of my writing ended up in other places besides this blog. But I’m proud of the essays I published here as well, including deeper explorations of community, family, memory, and mental illness. By joining The Narrative Project, I learned about the craft of writing, story-telling through trauma, and finding a writer’s life and community. I assigned myself a graduate reading list in psychology and neuroscience. And I observed my thoughts and feelings through hours of mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. 

 

Along the way, I slowly learned to clear my head. I’m still oblivious to lots of important things, starting with everything social, particularly with the gays. But eventually I learned to think clearly by thinking like a writer, not a lawyer – at least, not like the kind of lawyer Attorney General Bob Ferguson would hire.

In November 2017, King County Superior Court Judge John Ruhl dismissed my claim against Ogden Murphy Wallace on a legal technicality.

 

It was important technicality. Washington law immunizes whistleblowers from liability for claims based on their communications to government agencies. One of the questions before the court in my case was whether whistleblower immunity applies to paid communications by government contractors, like Ogden Murphy Wallace’s supposedly “independent” investigation report attacking my character and competence. In August 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that government contractors can’t be sued for injuries that are “directly based” on communications like the Ogden Murphy investigation report. 

 

Our busy trial judge was so focused on the whistleblower statute that he overlooked my other claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace – the ones that weren’t based on any protected whistleblower communication, such as the investigators’ repeated lies about their contractual assignment. Unfortunately, everyone else in the legal process was also distracted by the shiny statutory construction bauble. I spent the next few years trapped in a Kafka-esque struggle to find a state tribunal that was interested in hearing how the State’s lawyers and investigators colluded in government contract procurement fraud, civil rights violations, and ongoing acts of concealment and obstruction. 

 

After losing my state court claim against the OMW Defendants in the trial court, then winning, then losing, then winning, then losing, I lost my original lawsuit for good in June 2022 when the Washington Supreme Court declined further review.

The most interesting event in my state court lawsuit occurred on October 20, 2017. The day before my response was due to Ogden Murphy Wallace’s whistleblower immunity motion, the defendants produced a suspicious document related to their investigation:  the only surviving copy of the 3/16/16 “Investigation Scope Email” from Ogden Murphy investigator Patrick Pearce to the State’s employment attorneys. This smoking gun email revealed I was the victim of a wrongful termination cover-up scheme involving senior lawyers at the AGO, including some of Bob Ferguson’s top lieutenants.

 

While my original lawsuit against Ogden Murphy wound its way through its doomed appeal, I began tracking down additional incriminating evidence through Public Records Act requests and administrative complaints. Unlike Ogden Murphy, I’m an actual whistleblower. Meanwhile, the State and its co-conspirators continued to execute their strategy of stonewalling, gaslighting, and spoliation.

 

The State refused to respond to my notice of claim and mediation invitation, and threated to sue me instead. So in April 2020, I filed another lawsuit in state court, this one against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, Western Washington University, and their corrupt employees. I was shocked when the State Defendants chose to remove all of my damage claims to federal court. I felt like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Before I tried to repackage myself as an appellate lawyer and judicial candidate a few years ago, I spent two decades managing complex federal litigation at Bogle & Gates, the ACLU, and Davis Wright Tremaine. I’m much more comfortable litigating in federal rather than in state court.

 

However, it turned out removal was just another short-sighted stall tactic by the State’s lawyers. I didn’t realize cases in the Western District of Washington were paralyzed because our court had the most vacancies of any federal court in the country. After the rest of the baby boomer judges all retired, Judge Richard Jones and Judge Ricardo Martinez held down the fort alone for several years. Our Washington senators and the local legal community succeeding in preventing Donald Trump from making any judicial appointments to fill the vacancies. My lawsuit against the State slowed to a crawl as unfortunate collateral damage. We didn’t even have a trial date or a case schedule.

Once several Biden judges were confirmed, however, the federal court finally returned to a normal litigation schedule. The two-year delay gave me enough time to improve my mental health and to gather a mountain of incriminating evidence. On September 23, 2021, Judge Jones denied the State Defendants’ long-delayed motion to dismiss my claims. Instead, the judge granted my motion to file a detailed amended complaint that includes new damage claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace as well as against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, WWU, and their employees. 

 

It’s as if all the frustrations of my original state court lawsuit never happened. Now we’re on a regular federal court litigation schedule. This month we’re waiting for Judge Jones’ rulings on the State Defendants’ frivolous Third Motion to Dismiss (here’s my response and their reply) and the Ogden Murphy Wallace Defendants’ motion to dismiss some of my new claims (here’s my response and their reply). Depositions in the Federal Lawsuit are scheduled to begin in February, with a jury trial set for January 2024 in Seattle.

I billed more hours of legal work in 2022 than any year since I was a young litigation associate – plus walking at least six miles a day with Bear to keep my head clear. I also had oral arguments in at least ten court hearings in 2022, which sets a personal record. The hearings were all in my Public Records Act case in state court, which is set for a bench trial before Judge Mary Sue Wilson on February 6-7, 2023, in Thurston County Superior Court. 

 

In 1972, Washington voters enacted the most transparent government accountability law in the nation. I’ve submitted dozens of requests to state and local agencies under the Public Records Act. With the sole exception of the Office of the Governor, each agency acknowledged my PRA requests within five days as required by the statute. In October 2020, I emailed the three public record requests to the Office of the Governor as directed by its webpage. The State’s email servers diverted my emails as “junk.” About the same time, the same thing happened with my emails to addressees at several other government agencies – apparently someone put my name and website on some kind of internet “no-fly” list. 

 

Sadly for the Governor’s Office, the Assistant Attorney General assigned to communicate with me on behalf of the State has a bad habit of ignoring my emails, regardless of whether they end up in his inbox or his junk folder. By the time his clients and his supervisors realized their lawyer dropped the ball, they’d already incurred millions of dollars in potential statutory penalties by delaying the Governor’s response to my public records requests for over a year.

 

Once again, the State and its lawyers refused to take responsibility, instead blaming me for their communication errors. So I filed a separate Public Records Act lawsuit against the Governor’s Office. We’re scheduled for a two-day bench trial in Olympia in February. Here’s my lawyer’s Opening Trial Brief.

In August 2021, the world seemed to be approaching the end of the covid pandemic. The Canadian border finally reopened, at least to visitors who uploaded their vaccination status and recent negative test results to an app. Vancouver Men’s Chorus began rehearsing, but only masked and in limited numbers. 

 

We also seemed to be approaching the end of my lawsuits against the State and Ogden Murphy Wallace. In the federal lawsuit, Judge Jones recognized my disability and granted the reasonable accommodation I requested. In my original state lawsuit, the Washington Supreme Court rejected Ogden Murphy Wallace’s claim that lawyers are above the law. 

 

However, we were actually far from the end – both with the coronavirus pandemic and with my efforts to hold the State and its lawyers accountable. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. But as Winston Churchill would say, we finally reached the end of the beginning.

In 2021, two longtime members of Vancouver Men’s Chorus commissioned a new work by our resident accompanist and composer Dr. Stephen Smith. They wanted a song that would express the hope and joy the choir felt when we were finally able to sing together again after eighteen months of pandemic isolation and silence. Stephen chose to set to music an 1899 poem by Thomas Hardy. Hardy was one of those gloomy Victorian who looked at the bleak modern world and sighed, yet somehow managed to find hope. 

 

The original title of “The Darkling Thrush” was “The Century’s End.” Stephen arranged the four stanzas as a unison chant, then a two-part duet, then a trio, then with all four sections of the chorus in full harmony. Hardy’s poem begins in desolate twilight, with a storm approaching as “every spirt upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly “a voice arose among the bleak twigs.” An ancient song thrush “chose to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.” In Stephen’s arrangement, the thrush’s song is a fiddler’s reel. In the wild, the male thrush uses his distinctive song to attract a mate in the dark.

 

In the folklore of the English countryside, the thrush is known as the bird who sings in the darkest hour. At the conclusion of Hardy’s poem, the narrator recognizes “there trembled through his happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.” 

 

Even when the days get shorter and the nights get darker, we know the light will return. Let us begin the new year in kindness and hope.

March 2023 litigation update:

My lawsuit asserting claims against the Office of the Governor under the Public Records Act was set for trial on Monday, February 2, 2023. However, on the Friday before trial we learned we'd lost our slot to a three-week jury trial involving bull-goring injuries and cattle prod experts. Instead, we held our two-day bench trial on May 1-2, 2023. Closing arguments are scheduled for May 25, 2023.

SLOW DOWN!!!

I’m frugal with my exclamation marks. Nevertheless, before approaching the lectern to present argument before any court over the last thirty years, I’ve always written “SLOW DOWN!!!” at the top of my notes. Nowadays it’s tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

As I recently wrote in “Snap,” this fall I had a series of epiphanies about my relationship with “Executive Function.” According to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, “Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Just as an air traffic control system at a busy airport safely manages the arrivals and departures of many aircraft on multiple runways, the brain needs this skill set to filter distractions, prioritize tasks, set and achieve goals, and control impulses.”

 

The presenter at a recent legal education webinar explained that many new attorneys struggle “with some type of executive function challenge: focusing, staying on task, organizing, managing time effectively, starting and finishing tasks, keeping a schedule, communicating with others, and more.” The recently evolved neural networks in our prefrontal cortex are particularly vulnerable to physical and psychological assaults. As I listened to the presentation, I realized how easily both ordinary stressors and specific PTSD triggers impair my own Executive Functioning.

During World War I and World War II, the Royal Navy had a slogan:  “A convoy travels at the speed of its slowest ship.”

 

Last August I obtained major victories in two longstanding legal cases. I thought that meant we would soon begin exciting new phases in the litigation. Instead, none of our reboots occurred until January 2022. While the other side’s lawyers stonewalled, I spent a frustrating fall trying in vain to speed things up. 

 

Looking back, I’m grateful for the breathing space provided by our glacial litigation pace during autumn’s blessed post-vaccination window. The kids went back to school, where they wore masks and thrived while doing normal-ish things like choir and theatre. The Canadian border finally opened after eighteen bleak months. Because of room capacity limitations, Vancouver Men’s Chorus divided itself in half for rehearsals before joyously reuniting in December for a successful and revitalizing concert run.

 

Then anti-vaxers gave us the Omicron surge. Real life slowed down again. Nevertheless, hope has returned with the new year. Tomorrow I’m crossing the border to see my brother and to attend VMC’s first in-person rehearsal of the year.

 

Meanwhile, I finally accepted that the pace of litigation pace will always be set by the courts’ judicious and deliberate speed, not the parties and lawyers. More importantly, I realized I need to slow myself way down to compensate for all the stress placed on my Executive Function. I’ve learned to work on one task at a time, avoid toxic encounters, and regularly take healthy breaks with my children or walking the dogs. It turns out the courts’ speed works for me, too.

Like every good Canadian gay boy, all I really need to know I learned from Anne of Green Gables.

 

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel, published in 1908, is the national epic of Prince Edward Island. It tells the story of spunky 11-year old orphan Anne Shirley, who is mistakenly sent to live with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a bachelor farmer and his spinster sister. The Cuthberts asked the Victorian social workers to send a boy to help work the farm. Instead, Anne’s enchanting chatter and vivid imagination quickly brighten the lives of everyone around her. 

A few years later in the story, when Anne was the same age my daughters are now, Marilla was startled to see Anne had grown taller than her. Marilla noticed “there were other changes in Anne no less real than the physical change”: 

For one thing, she became much quieter. Perhaps she thought all the more and dreamed as much as ever, but she certainly talked less. Marilla noticed and commented on this also.

“You don’t chatter half as much as you used to, Anne, nor use half as many big words. What has come over you?”

Anne colored and laughed a little, as she dropped her book and looked dreamily out of the window, where big fat red buds were bursting out on the creeper in response to the lure of the spring sunshine.

“I don’t know—I don’t want to talk as much,” she said, denting her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger. “It’s nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one’s heart, like treasures. I don’t like to have them laughed at or wondered over. And somehow I don’t want to use big words any more. It’s almost a pity, isn’t it, now that I’m really growing big enough to say them if I did want to. It’s fun to be almost grown up in some ways, but it’s not the kind of fun I expected, Marilla. There’s so much to learn and do and think that there isn’t time for big words. Besides, Miss Stacy says the short ones are much stronger and better. She makes us write all our essays as simply as possible. It was hard at first. I was so used to crowding in all the fine big words I could think of—and I thought of any number of them. But I’ve got used to it now and I see it’s so much better.”

 

Alice Flaherty is a neurologist and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Two difficult pregnancies left her with post-partum manic-depression so severe she eventually admitted herself into a mental hospital. In her memoir The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Flaherty wrote about her struggle with excruciating writer’s block, followed by intense hypergraphia (the overwhelming compulsion to write).

 

My own youthful traumas caused three decades of increasing writer’s block. It took a PTSD diagnosis before the fog began to lift. Writing these blog essays, as well as working on my book manuscripts and even countless legal briefs, became both a creative joy and effective Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Like Anne Shirley and Alice Flaherty, my manic early writing was overwhelmingly prolific. The output slowed down as I gained the skills and courage to confront increasingly challenging topics:  exile from my Canadian home, my repressed Mormon youth, finding my gay tribe at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and my recent betrayals by an unjust legal profession. 

 

In 2020, I had the privilege of participating in an extraordinary cohort of writers and coaches working together as part of The Narrative Project. Last weekend I was one of the writers reading from our recent work at the launch of True Stories, a new anthology. The writers in our small group – Jennifer, Kimberly, Patty, and I – would exchange new work and support each other. The larger cohort would gather for sessions about the craft and business of writing, and the elements of a writer’s life. Cami Ostman, founder of The Narrative Project, is an experienced writer, editor, educator, and therapist. In addition to growing through the collaborative writing process, I learned how to write through trauma. 

 

Nowadays I recognize the warning signs of Executive Function overload – including when my work requires me to produce legal writing about triggering issues. Looking back at my court filings over the last five years, I wish I had figured out how to slow down a long time ago. I owe an apology to a few judges for some longwinded briefs, particularly those slightly ranting conclusions. Fortunately, my new slower gear and improved self-editing skills arrived just in time for new briefing before the Washington Supreme Court. 

 

Our group’s coach from The Narrative Project, Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor, is currently working on a science fiction novel. We bonded over The Mandalorian. And over the fundamental patterns and rhythms of the writing process. As Rebecca would say, This is the Way.

I am Karen

Last week one of my healthcare providers and I were chatting about the challenge of explaining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to people, particularly when you don’t seem like a typical victim. 

 

PTSD can happen to anyone. Trauma tangles the neural wiring that connects a wide variety of brain functions, including memory, fear, rage, reason, and motor control. Two people can endure the same traumatic event or experience, but only one might develop PTSD. Days or years later, you might encounter a particular feeling, person, or experience that flips the switches in your brain and triggers a cascading response from your body.

 

One of my friends in Bellingham developed PTSD after serving as an Army Ranger medic in Afghanistan. I told him I feel sheepish sharing the same DSM-5 category as him. He told me not to worry, and that soldiers feel lucky they get so many folks’ respect. They’re more concerned about the many children and women who are scarred by the impact of domestic abuse and do not have access to the help they need. 

In November 2015, my Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic sent me to a specialized PTSD therapist. She helped me identify how my symptoms were rooted in traumatic events I experienced thirty years earlier as an overachieving gay student at Brigham Young University and as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea. 

 

In my recent blog essays “Move On” and “Blink,” I described the Mormon church’s relentless campaign against LGBT dignity and inclusion. Throughout my lifetime, Mormon leaders have insisted on embracing junk science, such as pray-the-gay-away “reparative therapy.” Perhaps most insidiously, the Brethren deny our very existence – refusing to use words like “gay,” “lesbian,” or “transgender,” and instead insisting we’re merely weak sinners who struggle with what they refer to as “same-sex attraction problems.” When you also consider my family’s wrenching move from Vancouver to Utah when I was an adolescent, plus my coming out as a gay man at the height of the AIDS pandemic, it’s no wonder I ended up with PTSD.

 

Because of the nature of my underlying traumas, my most serious individualized PTSD symptoms are triggered when I feel a sense of powerlessness, repression, being silenced, or rendered invisible once again. As result, my disability makes me particularly vulnerable to gaslighting lawyer tactics. 

Looking back at my writing about mental illness over the last four years, I realize I’ve focused primarily on the physical symptoms, such as trichotillomania, insomnia, and bruxism, that emerged after my abusive former employers triggered my body’s response to ancient traumas. Because of Defendants’ and their co-conspirators’ subsequent misconduct and their continued stonewalling delays, I remain trapped in a vicious cycle of stressful triggers, re-traumas, and re-triggers. I’ve written about the resulting plagues of boils, MRSA, auto-immune dysfunction, depression, anxiety, but not frogs yet.

 

I’ve also referred several times to triggers leading to “PTSD episodes,” but I haven’t yet described the mechanics of the experience. In some ways it’s like the arrival of a migraine – you realize it’s happening, but there’s nothing you can to do to stop the buzzing and pressure on your brain. Soon it becomes impossible to think and communicate clearly. 

When I began reporting about life with mental illness, my examples of PTSD episodes all involved wretched customer service. I had a short fuse, and I ran into a lot of bad service. Eventually I learned to modulate my reaction to frustrating encounters. Now I react excessively only to terrible service with a reality-denying totalitarian bent, not your day-to-day consumer abuse. For example, just last week I made an embarrassing scene in a bank lobby. Not my fault.

 

When my disability was still new, I was constantly surprised by the wide variety of triggering events that somehow resonated with my thirty-year old traumas. Things have mellowed since then. My biggest PTSD epiphany this year came when I was playing a family board game at my parents’ house, and I became so frustrated I had to go into the other room and give myself a timeout. (It turns out there are trauma-based reasons I haven’t been able to play chess since I was a child, much to my son’s disappointment.)

 

Despite the progress I’ve made with my disability, I continue to endure another very predictable trigger:  gaslighting lawyers. In May 2017, I filed a lawsuit in state court against the attorney-investigator firm my former employers hired to cover up my wrongful termination. Attorney General Bob Ferguson assigned two lawyers from the Attorney General’s Tort Division, Assistant Attorney General Suzanne LiaBraaten and Assistant Attorney General Janay Ferguson, to represent the State’s interest in the investigator lawsuit. Ferguson and LiaBraaten obstructed discovery, made frivolous privilege assertions, and abused the legal process. In 2019, Ferguson and LiaBraaten violated the Ethics in Public Service Act and the Rules of Professional Responsibility when they made false representations in their co-workers’ lawyer discipline proceeding. Ferguson herself is the subject of a pending ethics complaint, and is a named defendant in my federal lawsuit against the State and its representatives. 

 

Nevertheless, Attorney General Ferguson insisted on assigning Defendant Ferguson as lead counsel on behalf of the other defendants in the federal lawsuit. Her conduct of the litigation has been an outrage. Here’s what I said in a sworn declaration about how it feels when dishonest government lawyers trigger a PTSD episode:

 

Responding to the first motion Defendant Ferguson filed in my federal court case one year ago was one of my most harrowing experiences in years. For every ten minutes I spent working on the brief, I had to spend at least an hour on soothing activities like talking with my children, walking the dogs, meditating, exercising, etc. Now that my kids are back from visiting my ex during the summer, the presence of other observers in the house makes my AGO- triggered PTSD symptoms even more noticeable. Over and over as I was forced to confront the State’s lies, I would read or write a single sentence. Then I would compulsively leap out of my chair and pace ten or twenty laps around the house, grinding my teeth from bruxism and rubbing my scalp raw from trichotillomania. When my teenaged daughter who wants to go to medical school heard my involuntary wheezes and groans, she thought I was having a heart attack. 

 

Every one of Defendant Ferguson’s court filings and each of her communications to me over the past year was triggering. (Fortunately, her good cop co-counsel politely handled all the administrative stuff.) For example, on multiple occasions she took the position on behalf of the State of Washington that for the last six years I’ve been faking a disability to cover up for my professional incompetence and my sexism.

 

I asked the State’s lawyers to accommodate my disability by assigning a lawyer other than Defendant Ferguson to communicate with me. They refused. Eventually I asked the judge to order this reasonable disability accommodation. On September 15, 2021, Judge Jones granted my request. I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders.

Defendant Ferguson’s counterpart in my state court lawsuit against the private investigator firm is Claire Martirosian, a junior partner at the grinding insurance defense firm whose apparent goal is to provoke me into pulling out the last hair on my forehead.

 

Ms. Martirosian has been involved in the case ever since the summer of 2017 when the investigators fired their first, even less smart insurance defense firm. In contrast with the division of labor between the boy-girl legal team in my federal lawsuit against the State, Ms. Martirosian is handling everything solo. That means she plays both the good cop and bad cop roles. In “Secret Agent,” I wrote about how Ms. Martirosian triggered a PTSD episode in the middle of oral argument in the Court of Appeals two years ago when she blatantly lied in response to the key question from the bench.

 

Last Friday two letters from Ms. Martirosian arrived back-to-back in my inbox. The good cop first letter responded to the proposed deposition schedule I had circulated earlier in week. Of course Defendants didn’t agreed to the schedule, or propose an alternative. But the letter wasn’t triggering, merely another round of familiar litigation Kabuki.

 

In contrast, Ms. Martirosian’s bad cop second letter was a tissue of lies. She blatantly mischaracterized the Washington Supreme Court’s recent ruling, and triggered another PTSD episode.  Once again I alarmed the dogs by leaping out of my desk chair and pacing around the house. I lost count after 87 laps. 

If I were a Republican congressman, I could announce “As the father of two daughters, I condemn the Attorney General’s scurrilous accusations of sexism.” But I believe in mindfulness and empathy. When someone else’s model of reality diverges so far from my model (and from reality), I wonder why.

Here is Defendant Ferguson most recent accusation that I am an unrepentant misogynist:

Mr. Leishman elected not to respond to the Defendants’ requests for conferral because it was not made by the male attorney with whom he prefers to communicate…. Defendants will not recount the many, documented instances of Mr. Leishman’s personal attacks on Ms. Ferguson and other women, parties and not, attorneys and not, because that issue is beyond the scope of this motion. When they do, Defendants will submit evidence, not conclusory allegations, proving that Mr. Leishman disproportionately demeans, attacks, and underestimates women – particularly those who disagree with his subjective view of events. Avoidance of female counsel is not a reasonable accommodation.

Washington tax dollars paid for this deranged rant, which appears on page two of the State Defendants’ Reply in support of their Second Motion to Stay Discovery. 

My eyes were drawn to the word “disproportionately.” Perhaps Defendant Ferguson is referring to the fact that woman outnumber men in the captions of my lawsuits. That’s because most of the middle and lower level managers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office and other State agencies are women – but all the top brass are men. The federal defendants include the office of Governor Jay Inslee; the office of Attorney General Bob Ferguson; Bob’s two top lieutenants, the Chief Deputy Attorney General (Defendant Shane Esquibel) and the Solicitor General (Defendant Noah Purcell); and the former president of Western Washington University (Defendant Bruce Shepard). These important gentlemen are joined by seven female underlings who personally interacted with me or were directly involved in misconduct and coverups. Only one defendant is actually named “Karen.” I could have sued two more female defendants, my unprepared novice “Team Leader” and her passive-aggressive supervisor. But I don’t need to make everything personal.

Behind every powerful man is a harem of less powerful women. Look at Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or Andrew Cuomo and Melissa DeRosa. One definition of a “Karen” is someone who is not quite privileged enough to avoid doing the dirty work herself, and takes it out on the unprivileged. Or maybe a Karen is just someone who likes dirty work.

Although Bellingham is blessed with amazing public schools, shepherding three teenagers through Zoom School was a challenge for everyone. At the height of the pandemic I had to deal with one of those bureaucratic tangles that would have been triggering even at the best of times. 

I’ve always been terrible at talking on the telephone with strangers, and PTSD just makes things worse. This phone conversation with an assistant principal was excruciating, a combination of Abbott & Costello & Kafka. The school administration had ignored my communications for weeks, and instead kept asking me to do administrative tasks that made no sense. I tried desperately to remain calm. It was a blunt yet incoherent calm, as I kept flirting with entitled-lawyer global nuclear destruction mode. The bees were buzzing in my head. Late in the phone call we figured out the reason no one had paid attention to my messages was that the school’s spam filter had tweaked itself to eliminate me. Nothing I said was getting through. 

The assistant principal took a deep breath, I sorta de-escalated, and we shared an awkward chuckle. When I finally ended the telephone call, I looked around and realized my son Oliver had been listening. His observation:

“Papa, you sound like a Karen.”

Yep.

Mind the Gap

After a long, exhausting, and surreal week – including vandals sacking the US Capitol – on the first Friday afternoon after New Years I found myself on a Zoom call with one of my children’s teachers. Sadly, it was not Gay Sitcom Dad’s first episode of scholastic triage in 2021. 

At the end of our weary parent-teacher conference, the teacher sighed and revealed what all educators know:  the week after a long break is the toughest part of the school year. If we could make it through the first week of January 2021, we can survive anything.

2020 was extra stressful for everyone. Our covid-amplified background anxiety was scheduled to peak on a definite date:  Tuesday, November 3. Unfortunately, thanks to the worst president in history and his insurrectionist followers, the election was merely the beginning of the end. Still, I can feel a huge improvement in my mood as we finally close a particularly dark chapter in American history. 

 

Nevertheless, my personal anxiety level remains off the charts. As I relate in the tedious legal part of my story, misconduct by my employers triggered midlife PTSD symptoms five years ago that continue today. The State’s lawyers exacerbated my disability by gaslighting and discriminating against me, then proceeded to spend thousands of tax dollars on a clumsy and illegal coverup. Even without the election, the pandemic, the economy, and the Trump legacy, this winter I was already facing mounting anxiety as my two separate legal disputes coincidentally reached major crossroads at the same time. 

 

In a blog post about walking the dogs, “Rescue Me,” I reported that my weekly bout of stress currently spikes every Wednesday at 4 pm. That’s when the Washington Supreme Court announces which opinions are scheduled to be released the following morning. The Court’s ruling on the sleazy private investigator firm’s appeal, which we argued in June, is due any week now. I never expected the process to take this long. Hopefully the Court will do the right thing. After four years of stonewalling, defendants and their insurers might finally come the table before I exhaust my retirement savings and have to move in with my parents. But the longer we wait the higher my anxiety rises.

 

Meanwhile, my efforts to uncover the truth about misconduct by my former employers are on a separate legal track. Five years of misconduct and cover-ups culminated in another high-stakes lawsuit against the State last spring. The parties are currently waiting for United States District Judge Richard Jones to rule on a couple of pivotal motions that have been pending for months. Judge Jones’s decision could come any day. So that particular component of my anxiety peaks every day at 5 pm (except for weekends and federal holidays). As soon as the judge announces his ruling, the pieces of this particular legal puzzle will arrange themselves into a much less anxious picture.

Everything takes longer than you expect.  Especially litigation.  

 

Last year in “Schrödinger’s Summer Vacation,” I wrote about my experience waiting for the Court of Appeals to rule on my appeal from the trial judge’s decision to throw out my damage claims against the investigator firm on an inapplicable technicality. Fortunately the Court of Appeals eventually ruled in my favor – but I ended up waiting an extra three months because the opinion was assigned to the slowest judge on the court. Now I’ve endured another year’s delay because the attorney-investigators from Seattle’s sleaziest law firm sought review by the Washington Supreme Court.

 

My son says I’m a “liar” because I told him I expected a ruling from the Court in November. Based on my years of appellate experience, I made the same prediction publicly in this blog. I was wrong. Between the coronavirus pandemic and the Supreme Court’s cycling through three Chief Justices in one year, the Court is a couple of months behind its usual pace for issuing decisions.

 

Meanwhile, five of the seven federal judge positions in the Western District of Washington are currently vacant. Despite numerous baby boomer retirements from the bench, the Seattle legal community managed to stall long enough to avoid any Trump appointments. As a result, the two remaining judges have fallen way behind. It’s been 159 days since defendants froze progress in my lawsuit by filing a frivolous motion to dismiss. And it’s been 117 days since the parties finished briefing my motion to disqualify defendants’ current lawyers based on their obvious conflicts of interest and other unethical conduct.

Under the local federal rules, motions are “decided as soon as practicable, and normally within thirty days” after briefing is complete. The Court encourages counsel to contact the clerk’s office “to verify that a motion is scheduled for determination if a decision on the motion has not been received within forty-five days.” After exactly 45 days, the State’s lawyers sent the bailiff a polite inquiry. Here’s her response:

 

Counsel,

 

Thank you for your email.  

 

I've had an opportunity to consult with chambers regarding this matter.  As you may be aware, Judge Jones is one of only two non-senior judges remaining on the bench in Seattle. Accordingly, due to this court's tremendously heavy caseload and the volume of motions pending before it, now including urgent matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and additional cases transferred from now-retired Judge Leighton, the court has not been able to provide you with decisions on the pending motions as quickly as it would like. Unfortunately at this time I am unable to provide you with a date by which you can expect rulings, however, please know that Judge Jones will turn his attention to this case just as soon as he is able.

 

Another couple of months have now passed with no word from either court. As with every other 2020 challenge, I’m trying not to take the courts’ delays personally.

Maybe it’s Seattle that’s cursed. In recent years citizens have endured earthquakes, floods, Amazon gentrification, and angry protesters. Each of the last six Seattle mayors left office early for a wide variety of reasons, including lost primaries, riots, and pedophilia accusations.

In December 2020, about the time that I was hoping for rulings in my cases, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced she too would not be seeking reelection. More riots. Not coincidentally, that same week both the Washington Supreme Court and Judge Jones found time to issue decisions that sharply criticized Mayor Durkan’s handling of the police response to protests last summer. 

 

I appreciate each court’s careful consideration of these issues. Black Lives Matter – but so do disabled and LGBT lives. Likewise, police misconduct warrants careful judicial review – but so does undisputed evidence of serious misconduct by government lawyers.

The first book I finished reading in 2021 was The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson’s account of Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. I’d already read numerous Churchill biographies, including his own history of the Battle of Britain. Larson’s fascinating new book traces the daily lives of Churchill’s family and friends during the period beginning in May 1940, when Britain faced Hitler alone and civilization rocked above an abyss. 

 

Reading about German bombers and prowling U-Boats reminded me of a nautical truism from Churchill’s era: “a convey sails at the speed of the slowest ship.” Even with three kids, two dogs, one pandemic, and PTSD, I’m still not as slow as a judge. And that’s a good thing. 

 

All lawyers and litigants are completely obsessed with their own case. We forget the court has a busy docket filled other people’s legal disputes, as well as other demands on limited time and judicial resources. After living and breathing this story for six years, I have the record and the caselaw practically memorized. In contrast, the judges and their law clerks have only been involved for a few months. And they have numerous other cases pending before them, each deserving careful consideration. 

 

As a lawyer, sometimes you have cases where you don’t want the judge to pay close attention, because that’s the only way your client wins. My lawsuits against the State’s lawyers and their sleazy outside investigation firm are not that kind of case. To the contrary, both cases involve complex legal issues and a voluminous evidentiary record. 

 

Our convoy will keep sailing for as long as it takes to get it right.

In 1953, the Swedish Academy honoured Winston Churchill with the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” During his first year as Prime Minister, Churchill’s speeches inspired the world. On June 4, 1940, Churchill thrilled Parliament and the British people with this message:

 

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender….

 

On June 18, 1940, Churchill returned to Parliament to utter this prophecy: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

 

Years ago I memorized Churchill’s inaugural speech as Prime Minister. On May 4, 1940, he warned Parliament “We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering,” with “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Churchill’s answer to the question “what is our aim?” is the same one I would offer in response to a similar question about my aim eighty years later:

 

I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs – victory in spite of all terror – victory, however long and hard the road may be.