BEST: Addressing Those Who Call Me A “Conspiracy Theorist”

Or Say I’m Exercising a “Jihad”

In various attacks in the New Hampshire media by journalists associated with the Catholic Church, whose law firm, Nixon Peabody, also represents the NHCADSV, I have been called various names and been accused of a “Jihad” against the NHCADSV.  Journalists should look up the meaning of a word before they use it in a headline, especially journalists tied to the Catholic Church.  

“Jihad” -according to the online Encyclopedia Britannica:” in Islam means a ‘meritorious struggle or effort”. It has been erroneously translated in the West as “holy war”. Jihad, particularly in the religious and ethical realm, primarily refers to the human struggle to promote what is right and to prevent what is wrong.”

Journalists such as Damien Fisher erroneously and maliciously used the word against me to mean “holy war”. I don’t have a holy war against anybody, and I find it racist to equate me with some kind of notion of a Middle Eastern terrorist concept he has about me. 

One of the NHCADSV’s followers on social media said I should be prohibited from owning a gun. I don’t own one, and I have no desire to own one either. I’m a pacifist through and through. But I have been very grateful to those who do own them to step up to protect me when I was asked to speak at an event in Concord by invitation from former representative Leah Cushman: an event which the NHCADSV’s director of public affairs wanted to attend. Stalking?

But it is true that I have been trying to promote what is right and prevent what is wrong.  So what is right and what is wrong?

We have a Constitution that has certain provisions and inalienable rights. When I discovered that those have been damaged by a non-profit/ lobbyist that the NH AG’s office can’t demonstrate, and has no paperwork to prove that it is autonomous from their office (per a response to a Right to Know Request, which you can find below), I believe that presents a fundamental problem to the constitution and certain rights. 

These rights include the right to due process, the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, the right to free speech, the right to fair trials, and the right to be free from government interference or snooping. They also include victims’ rights, who also have a right to due process, fair trials, and privacy.  We have seen that destroyed – with the help of the NHCADSV. 

Transparency in New Hampshire and 91A has long been an issue, starting with the quest to get the Laurie List of corrupt police officers exposed in 2018, which is still a battle 8 years later.  Indepth, New Hampshire, continued the battle while other news groups and the ACLU all folded.

Checks and balances can only happen when there is a separation of powers. When that disappears, we are all at risk – whether as citizens or the existence of the very agencies that are there to protect our rights or enforce laws. We can all see the debacle of conflicts of interest in the Barbara Hantz-Marconi and Dianne Martin cases.  These are not separate from what I have been speaking up about and observed with the NHCADSV. It’s all tied into the same mess – a mess that threatens to undo the very principles we are taught exist, but in recent years, we have discovered, do not. Whether in family courts, education, for child services, victims services, or the criminal justice system – we pay expecting certain promises from mission statements of those agencies we finance. Whether it is DCYF, YDC, NHCADSV, or the Family, Civil, or Criminal Courts,  we are not getting what we were promised and what we are constitutionally due. 

I would never have known who the NHCADSV were or what their activities were if it were not for NH v Owen Labrie, which the NHCADSV and its affiliates turned into a national and international media spectacle with over 700,000 search entries showing up on Google per a November 2016 article in the Concord Monitor. That’s multiple times more entries than you can find for anybody else in New Hampshire, including all public officials – no matter how famous or infamous they are. The NHCADSV and its director of public affairs, Amanda Grady Sexton, who saw the trial as an “opportunity,” literally invited attention to the case. In 2015, the Concord Monitor listed her as the Director of Public Policy as well. If the NHCADSV didn’t want the attention, they could have avoided it by not seeking the media attention in 2015. Period. They could have protected the rights to privacy for all parties in the case as well. But they didn’t. It was “an opportunity” that had no regard for constitutional rights. 

Damien Fisher has dismissed me as a self-described producer. 

Actually, that’s not how I describe myself if he bothered to read my bio. I’m primarily a film and TV agent with a background in producing. On occasion, I have produced, most recently, I financed and produced a documentary called “Fist Bump,” which has received multiple awards and prizes for bringing awareness to disabilities. New York Women In Film and Television gave it an award last year at the MUSE awards.

I was inspired to personally finance and make the documentary after I came across the Owen Labrie case, in fact.  Why? I discovered that the Labrie case was related to many cases around the nation that involved students deprived of due process in campus sexual misconduct cases. I was looking for a story that would help illustrate how far off the rails the attacks on due process have gone and how they have harmed the most vulnerable in our society: the students of color and with disabilities, like Marcus Knight, who is bi-racial, born at 26 weeks, and has cerebral palsy and autism.  

Despite his setbacks, he became the lead in high school musicals and homecoming king in front of 3000 students at his high school in Southern California.  Marcus received a full scholarship to Saddleback College, but no sooner had he gotten there than he was reported for sexual misconduct. The crime? A fist bump and selfies. He was suspended from the College and went to federal court to fight his case. The judge ruled in his favor, stating that he had been denied his due process rights.

But the victory was short-lived because the school appealed to a different judge and won. Now, Marcus can’t get a higher education because he has the letters of censure on his record for Title IX violations. You can see a trailer and reviews at the end of this. (Since I personally financed it, it doesn’t look like some glamorous Hollywood production. I paid for it because I passionately believed the story needed to be told.)

What does Marcus Knight’s story have to do with the NHCADSV? Quite a lot:

In 2019 or so, the NHCADSV communicated with the NH AG’s office, decrying the fact that Trump’s (whom I did not vote for) education secretary Betsy DeVos had rescinded the unregulated “Dear Colleague” Title IX federal directive, which had been introduced at UNH in 2011. She was replacing it with regulations that were entered into the federal register in 2020 after the Department of Education had received over 124,000 comments from the public. The NHCADSV had a strategy meeting about it with Senator Shaheen and Senator Hassan, as well as Congresswoman Ann Kuster.  

Whatever you may think about Betsy DeVos, she did it by the book. The department listened to the public, advocates, experts, academics, attorneys, and then it crafted rules that were entered into the federal register, which do protect due process in a way that the 2011 regulations did not. In fact, in emails from 2011 from the Department of Education, it’s apparent that not only did Vice President Joe Biden’s office ask why they were getting rid of due process, but that they used (with the help of the Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women) an absurd argument: that there is legal precedent to get rid of due process because judges don’t use due process in sentencing but rather rely on letters of recommendation, character references etc to determine the sentences for convictions.  

There is literally no mention of the fact that due process is used to determine if a crime happened, what the crime was, who it was committed by, and on whom it was committed.  It took a lawsuit from Professor KC Johnson to get the emails from the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights. Among the emails he was seeking were those to and from Laura L Dunn, who trained Concord PD and Merrimack County Prosecutors for the Labrie trial. She lied about her own alleged sexual assault on NPR in 2010. NPR corrected the record in 2015. Too late. The ship had sailed, and NHPD and Prosecutors were being trained at UNH courtesy of the NHCADSV securing VAWA grant money via the Executive Council. Dunn only graduated law school in 2014. She had no experience in criminal cases whatsoever.

In testimony against HB1740 this year, a former Merrimack assistant county attorney, Steven Endres Esq, testified that there is a “sliding scale of due process”. He had been brought in for the NHCADSV who have been on an increasingly steady path to get rid of due process and to introduce Marsy’s Law, changing the constitution. Once we lose due process, we lose everything. 

My “jihad” is on a system that gets rid of the rights that we are all supposed to have – the right to due process. This is tied to the right to free speech, which universities, schools, and colleges around the country have denied in the years following the introduction of the unregulated “Dear Colleague” Title IX directive introduced in New Hampshire in 2011 – a complete undoing of the 1957 landmark free speech case Sweezy v New Hampshire – also tied to UNH. 

The NHCADSV and its Director of Public Affairs, Amanda Grady Sexton, just happened to be at the epicenter of that effort to get rid of due process.

If a civil or criminal trial’s media is created and controlled by the NHCADSV which is indivisible from the Attorney Generals’ office; if the NHCADSV lobbyists act as the go-betweens for the prosecutor and witnesses for the state against the defendant, if the NHCADSV is approving or creating juror questionnaires (they are) and victim impact statements while also training police and prosecutors and referring victims to their own attorneys, there’s a major problem to the integrity of a system. 

It’s a false promise from the NHCADSV that they can offer confidentiality – they can’t because of the conflicts of interest for their attorneys representing them and the victims and the crisis centers to which they refer the victims. The AG’s office can’t really offer it either because of the extraordinary conflicts of interest. Judge Andrew Schulman pointed out the AG’s conflicts of interest on the YDC cases. Nobody listened, and everyone just carried on. Attorneys made money, judges got paid, victims waited to get paid, indictments were discovered to be faulty, and defendants went to prison. Could anyone say, with these conflicts of interest, that there has been justice as we are taught to understand it?

Is there a problem with fighting to do what’s right and expose it so it can get corrected? 

Is that a “Jihad”? 

Maybe it is a “holy war” because I believe in the Constitution of the United States. The NHCADSV employees and their affiliates have been paid to change the Constitution for Henry T Nicholas III, a California billionaire felon who buys his own way out of justice by giving millions to non-profits that are either drug rehabilitation centers or professing to address victims’ rights.

If there’s a conspiracy theory in what I have just laid out, I’m all ears.

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