SERVED!

Third times the charm!

My friend went to the CHP office on October 31st, young Matthew's first day of work at his office like, blocks from his house. Unfortunately, the subpeona clerk had already left for the day and they couldn't accept it.

Thanks to another ex-cop attorney friend of mine, we checked in with the CHP's main line to see the proper way to serve an officer at work. They said every office has a subpeona clerk to accept this crap.

But she was already gone when we tried on Halloween. (BOO!)

So this morning, my friend went over there again, (THIRD TIME!) and... it was another hassle.

The subpeona clerk said because the lawsuit wasn't against the CHP she didn't know if she could take it. She consulted with someone, and read some of the paperwork, and asked some questions, and my server indicated to her that although the suit wasn't against the CHP that it was arising out of incidents that occured on duty. She said she might be able to accept it (and at this point my server was starting to think they were giving her a hard time for fun) and took it back to a sergant to discuss it with him, leaving my server waiting for like 10 minutes with all the back and forth.

She finally said that yes they could accept it because some of the incidents in the suit happened on duty and it was relating to a internal affairs investigation and citizen's complaint and that "the sergant wanted to look it over anyway."

It's the guy's second day of work. He's had a process server come to his office THREE TIMES looking for him, and at least three people have gotten a good look at what is in those documents.

HELLO OFFICE GOSSIP.

Also, shove it up your tush dirtbag.

So they accepted it.

Next stop, the Post Office.

We had to find an envelope that would fit the materials perfectly.  It was either this one...

Or Snoopy.

We went with the festive christmas paper. It's just what was available. You know, we needed something water proof and this was.

I hope he likes it. I think it's pretty.

He should receive it at home tomorrow. When you don't serve the person directly, you have to also drop a copy in the mail. Next up, I need to file the proof of service with the court. I just hope we didn't serve him too soon. Court date is December 6th. I thought it had to be 30 days if it wasn't personal service, but then on the SC-100 form (the service form) it says in the notes to the defandant that if you didn't receive it at least 15 days in advance.... But I thought 15 days was just for personal, not substituted service. Oh well.

My friend has offered to utilize her media contacts to touch base with a reporter. I am tempted, but I am unsure of the ramifications for myself. I run a small business, I don't want to get bashed or lose work. I've already had enough of that issue without anyone even knowing. Or one person knowing and not understanding and writing a bogus review of me saying I had a "stupid affair with a married man." WHAT?! Don't you actually have to KNOW he's married for it to be an affair? I was a committed, monogomous relationship with a man who had been single for almost 5 years and who wanted to marry me, period. That's all I knew. And that I loved him. So I am concerned. I am also thinking about leverage for settlement offers and if we start blabbing to the press that may be a deterrant from receiving one if we've already told everyone we can tell.

I'd also like to move for school before blowing it out of the water. I haven't taken the GRE yet, nor registered for a test date. I need to do more practice exams. The one I took I got 150 Verbal, 148 Math, and I took it at 3am in my bed without scratch paper, so I think I can do better.

If I were moving, I would care a whole lot less about what turned up on local news. Thoughts?

Do you like his present? I'm terrified of the man, but that doesn't mean I didn't still enjoy myself ever so slightly. Now, to buy more window locks...

Filed and Soon to be Served

I wish it was easier to post on this thing, but I have two accounts on blogger and it's just a big pain. I also wish I could talk out loud in my car and it would automatically write it into my blog. I do all my best writing in my head, in my car.

'Cause that makes a super lot of sense.

Case got re-filed on time, with all of the info and all of the documents. It is a HUGE mo-fo, with the points and authorities (my story) taking up like 20 pages double spaced. Then there is 8 attachments. Fabulous. Will anyone even read this thing?

It was so huge I found I missed at least one grammatically error by my attorney (or something written so sophisticated I can't understand it. One or the other.) that I meant to fix, and missed, and at least two other weird things or typos I did. Also just bad writing. The darn thing was just too big and I didn't have enough time and I didn't know what I was doing.


I did my best.

My friend who volunteered (with glee) to serve him found that he is no longer with the Fairfield office, where he was when we were together. I initially theorhized they had dumped him/gotten rid of him. Sadly this proably isn't the case because while we tracked him down (my friend called like 5 CHP offices trying to find him and he wasn't on any manifest. Finally some helpful lady who actually had been FRIENDS with the douchbag when he worked in SF -- apparently that part of his story was true, he did work in San Fran once-- found him on a transfer manifest for Woodland.... 10 minutes from my house. Great.)

We went to serve his work and they didn't know who he was, and then somebody remembered! Oh! New guy. Starts on on the 31st.

While the Fairfield office said he hadn't worked there in "a long time," he wasn't yet at Woodland, so he was probably on vacation or leave or whatever, so probably not dumped by Fairfield, probably just managed to finally get that transfer he wanted.

We will make sure that much coveted transfer he wanted goes super smoothly and he is oh-so welcomed on his first day of work when we serve him there. Have fun doo-doo head.  I hope your new boss enjoyes reading about how you tackled and handcuffed a cvilian for your own entertainment.

And BY THE WAY. If he gets found liable on the fraud, he won't be able to testify as a police officer. There's some law. I had heard that, but a judge I was talking to at the park this week said she has the thing on her desk right now and she'll bring it to me.

A quote from a tv show.

"If I start taking care of myself, then I'm really admitting that you're never coming back. But I have to move on." GO ON [with Matthew Perry]

That last sentence, gotta tell you. Really uncomfortable for me. So uncomfortable I almost deleted it like 5 times.

But I still like the rest of it.

FYI- Technical Difficulties

If you are trying to go back and access old posts, or use the links on the side or the widgit linkwithin at the bottom of each post, it will re-direct you to the public blog.

Here's what you do:

Look at the address where you go re-directed. Highlight the actual blog address, since you got sent to the public blog, it should look like this:

http://adventuresinemilyland.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-want-them-to-fit.html

The bold and underlined is the address you need to change. You're just going to copy and paste the new address/name into that bold slot.

So, replace "adventuresinemilyland' with "emsadventuresinwonderland"  Don't change anything else.

http://emsadventuresinwonderland.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-want-them-to-fit.html

You can type or copy or paste!

Hope that helps! Since I plan on eliminating the other blog once I go public again, I won't be updating these links- way too much work. But you can still read old posts if you need to this way!

Why I want to go to court.

My new attorney (NA) has been doing legal research on my case, and working with a few other attorneys and came to me a couple of days ago and said, basically, what he did was wrong, unethical and inhumane, but to make a case for it in court would be really hard- I'd probably lose. Why did I want to go to court?

For the record, I've said to her repeatedly I am totally fine with "losing."

Because no matter what the judge decides, I'm not really going to lose. I won the day I got my suit filed. That is the day I won. The day a public record was begun of the things this man has done.

This is why I want to go to court:

1.) I WANT TO TELL MY STORY. 

 I want to stand up and speak in an articulate way and speak about the outrageous things he did. I want to be heard. More specifically, I want to be heard by a person of authority. That is how our society works. The biggest person I can "tell on " him to is a judge. Ta-da! Even if there is limited (or no) case law to back up our biggest torts, someone with authority will know he sucks as a human being. I win again.

2.)  I WANT TO CONFRONT HIM.

I never got the chance in the house, or in the hours leading up to that moment to confront him with all that he had done. By going to court, I get to stand there and talk about all of the crap he did and he can't say a damn thing. NOT ONE THING. The only person who can interrupt me is the judge. Which is fine, because we'll already have my story written out for him ahead of time. But I'll get at least a couple of minutes to stand there, be put together and call him an asshole, in a polite, legalese type of way. (A tortfeasor. THIS MAN IS A TORTFEASOR YOUR HONOR! Okay, I won't, but I'll be thinking it.)

3.) CREATING A DETERRENT

Thus far, Matt has had really no reason to not do this again. He kept his job, his wife decided really this was no big deal (they were pregnant again within 2 months) and basically, he wasn't punished at all. The bottom line is, you can do anything you want to anyone, and you'll suffer no consequences.

Until now.

Matt, you messed with the wrong lady.

Hell hath NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED.

I want to make sure he does not do this again. I want to create a deterrant and a motivator for him to not ever, EVER do this again to any living creature. I want him to recognize in that pea-sized brain of his that what he did was WRONG WRONG WRONG and he cannot do this, and IF he does this, he will regret it. If nothing else, he will suffer the annoyances of arguments with his spouse, the financial burden of hiring an attorney, the pain of driving to court and the humiliation of having his actions listed out in public. Hopefully, this is enough.

If it's not, there's always LIFETIME.  Or, I hear you can publish your own books on Amazon now.

4.) PROTECTING OTHER WOMEN

This is what is most important. I want to create a public record of his actions. Granted, Matt used a fake name with me, but when I looked him up, he was clean as a whistle. Hopefully next time he won't be so dumb as to use a fake name and a fake name tag. If he uses his real name, and tries to victimize another woman, I want her protected him. If she gets on google, I want hell to open up and for him to be swallowed whole. A couple of weeks before I filed my citizen's complaint, someone else apparently filed a federal lawsuit against Matt for violating their civil rights. (It's called a 1983 violation). It's common, I think with police officers, but I think it's less common for someone to actually file the lawsuit. This now comes up as a search result even though the person was not successful because they, too had a loser attorney.  (He had a disciplinary action from the bar on his record- I know, I checked).  But it's there. I want this on there too. If he tries to go after someone else, if she does some digging, I want her to be able to find this. It may not come up easily, but I want it to be there.  I want to protect other women from being harmed like I was.  I may not be able to send him to jail, but maybe I can still do something.  This hurt me so much at first to hear, but it is probably true: I was not the first and I was not the last. He is a sociopath. There will be more. And if I don't speak up, who will?

******************************************************************************

These are the reasons why I want to go to court. If you notice, none of them have anything to do with winning money. That would be nice. And I do believe I have the right to be restored to the position I was in prior to his fraud. However, that's not my primary objective. As long as I get to stand up in court, I'm good. We've got to get him served, and I've got to hold it together in the hallway for probably hours beforehand before our case is called. All cases are set for the same day of the week and the same time, so they'll probably have 20 cases set for the same time, and we'll have to sit there together, and I will have to not freak out. That's going to be hard. So far, my mom has said she would come, my NA has said she would try to take the morning off work. I wish you all would come and be with me too. The more people there, the better. I would give anything for you all to come. ANYTHING. I don't want to be there alone.

My old attorney was a screwball. And my new one made me cry.

So... my old attorney did not work out, and the last couple of months have been extremely stressful. (Hence my absence.)

I will always be grateful to Looney Tunes (her new nn) for giving me a voice when I didn't know how to find mine. She gave me direction and power. She validated the fact that what Matt did to me was wrong, and I was entitled to my day in court. I am so grateful. Unfortunately she was also mental. Such a shame.

She started blowing me off shortly after we sent Matt the demand letter and got the offer. I wanted her to send a rejection letter to them and she did not. According to my new attorney this is going to turn out fine, but this was the beginning of the misccomunication and confusion on my end. She stopped returning my messages nad didn't adhere to the timeline we had previously discussed as to when things would be filed. Everything was pushed until the last minute, she acted like it was no big deal while I was panicking and didn't know what the court rules were and whether this would ultimately work against me in court.

I ended up filing my own suit, (it was a simple one page form, but the atty filed it out- and it was full of mistakes, which I had to correct in white out at the court. Awesome.)  but without additional documents she said she was writing. There was a barrage of text messsages flying back and forth which went something like this:

Emily: "What is the deadline for the amendment to be filed? If we have to file it by tomorrow, why don't we just file everything together tomorrow, rather than me rushing to the court right now? (And filing documents twice and paying filing fees twice.) I'm confused."

Looney Tunes: "It is my legal advice that you to file your simple form today, and if you fail to do so, you are sabotging your case."

E: "But is it due tomorrow? Don't I have to pay a filing fee each time we file? Why aren't we filing it all together?"

LT: "It is my legal advice you file that form today, otherwise you are sabotging your case."

E:" But when is the due date?"

LT:" It is my legal advice that you file today, I really believe you are trying to sabotge your case!"

E" But what is the due date? Is it tomorrow?"

LT:" If you fail to follow my advice, I cannot be held responsible for your sabotge!"

.... I ultimately went tot he court and filed. And what did the clerk tell me? That once I filed, if put a "hold" on that Amendment (super spimlfying here) and it didn't have to be filed for 3 more months.... Meaning my attorney had three more months to write it. She probably hadn't even started it.

When I got home from court and I didn't write her right away and tell her what happened she wrote an emotional plea basically saying she was sure I was going to fire her.

Then she wrote another email two days later (before I could digest what the court had said + her whacked out message) that was even longer saying that she couldn't imagine my clients asking what camera or lenses I use, or what f-stop I was shooting at, so I shouldn't ask her questions about her job/my case.

I wrote her a long email back making parallells between my job and hers stating basically that, YES clients DO ask those questions and it is our job to educate them. Also, the more familiar or interested they are in our field, the more questions they ask. Many photographers post a "What's in our bag" page on their website and list all of their gear. Many photographers who specialize in a different field of photography, ie, studio or landscapes will approach me in a dark reception where i am using no flash and ask what the heck settings I am on and to peer at what lens I'm using because they could never get good results like that. (Different technique- natural light shooters use ambient light and shoot "wide open" aka, big apeture. Totally different style.)  Vice versa aplies too. My landscapes suck. Take a look at ALL of my vacation photos!

Anyway, LT didn't respond, so I gave her three weeks, then wrote her to check in. She wrote a flaming email back to me saying  she had demanded my abusive treatment of her stop or she would be forced to fire me as a client. (WTF?) She said she did not want me to take pictures of her (I had offered as a trade), because her uncomfortable, constipated expression would surely scare clients away (something to that effect) from her website. That for all of her tireless hours of hard work on my case had resulted in nothing but a lesson learned.

....

So my therapist thinks that I fail to recognize red flags in other people.

I still offered to take her pictures. I stand by my word.

My new attorney (NA)is a friend from law school and I never felt so put together as when I met with her. I understood everything she was talking about; it was like being back in law school. We were issue spotting, it was like looking at a law school exam rather than me feeling overwhelmed and emotional and lost while LT bounced around ideas I didn't understand. NA thinks in a linear way that makes sense, and didn't mind at all helping because 1.) it's a situation of injustice, 2.) we're friends, 3.) her name isn't going anywhere on this thing so it really doesn't matter anyway whether she's involved. She has a couple of colleagues from her office helping her, and like I wanted with LT, we are working as a team. She wrote an outline for the Points & Authorities for my Amendment, and provided the law, and I just need to plug in the facts and analysis. She'll fix it after I make a big emotional vomit mess of it, I'm sure, or reign me back in, if necessary.

In the parking lot as we said goodbye, she announced she had had tumors taken out of both her breasts. They had done a double lumpectomy right after she graduated law school and is typical of my friend, she told no one. She is too young to have gone through that and it killed me that once again she had gone through something horriffic by herself. I cried in the parking lot and I cried on the way home and I cried that night.

I am so grateful that she's here to help me!