A field report from seven years inside Nashua’s Right-to-Know trenches
- The legal office has a funny relationship with the word liability
- The deposition that couldn’t find its own receipts (language warning)
- A deliberate outburst that went viral and blew up in the city’s face
- Corporation Counsel has some explaining to do
- It’s not a legal principle; it is a grudge, worn as policy
- The First Amendment doesn’t come with a decorum clause/conclusion
I’ve filed hundreds of Right-to-Know requests in this city. I’ve sat through more Board of Aldermen meetings than some Aldermen have. I have, at this point, a working knowledge of Nashua’s assessing department, its Trust funds, its Community Development office, the construction and costs of the Nashua Performing Arts Center, and its Downtown barriers project that could probably qualify me for a city job, if the city didn’t seem to regard me as its primary liability instead.
So let’s talk about liability. Because Nashua’s legal office has a funny relationship with the word.
The Office That’s Supposed to Protect the City From Itself
A city’s legal counsel exists, in theory, to keep the city out of court. In Nashua, our Corporation Counsel, Attorney Bolton, has instead spent years personally steering the Board toward the exact constitutional collisions the ACLU and the New England First Amendment Coalition (NEFAC) warned him about in advance.
Exhibit A: the flagpole case. We are now staring down a $250,000 legal bill from the Institute for Free Speech, which represented the citizens who won (‘Grok contributors Beth and Stephen Scaer).
Exhibit B: a fresh constitutional fight over forcing residents, including people who are targets of political or cultural threats, to state their home address before they’re allowed to speak in public comment. Bolton personally advised that a citizen be denied public comment for declining to do so.
Exhibit C is almost funny, if it weren’t costing taxpayers real money: when the public comment ordinance was amended to ban “profane and obscene” language but permit “vulgar and crude,” the distinction confused the Board members who voted for it. Aldermen have repeatedly shut down speakers for using “vulgar” words, which was, per the ordinance they approved, not actually prohibited. At a meeting when the Board was reviewing an ordinance to prohibit banners, flags, and signs, I held up a sign reading “asshat.” The Board chair winced and objected that vulgar language wasn’t allowed. It was. She’d voted for the ordinance that said so. Attorney Bolton, whose entire job is to walk the Board through exactly this kind of landmine, was scheduled to attend and guide them. He didn’t show. The Board tabled the whole thing.
This is not a legal office managing risk. This is a legal office manufacturing it, one ordinance at a time, while the people who wrote the rules don’t understand their own rules.
The Deposition That Couldn’t Find Its Own Receipts
Here’s where it gets personal. In a May 2024 deposition, Bolton testified, under oath, that I had called him, the Mayor, and other city officials slurs and obscenities roughly a dozen times across public meetings, using language like shit, fuck, cunt, and asshole. His recollection was specific on the language.
Funny thing about a dozen documented incidents: nobody could produce a single minute, video, or record of any of them.
When I asked Bolton to produce them, his answer was, essentially, go look yourself. So I did and couldn’t locate any records. I knew his recollections were plainly wrong – blurred and confused. I took it to Court and lost; the court ruled the city only has to make records inspectable, not hand-deliver the specific ones a city attorney claims exist from memory. Then Bolton offered a new explanation which I took to the same court hearing: that the city “softens” vulgar language in meeting minutes using symbols and asterisks. Which raises an obvious question: how exactly am I supposed to search the record for words the record has allegedly been scrubbed of?
So I filed another Right-to-Know request, this time for the policy governing how the city launders swear words out of its own minutes. There isn’t one, again presented in Court. And at a subsequent hearing, the city’s own minute-taker, Donna Graham, testified under oath that she has never modified a word in her life and has always been instructed to transcribe verbatim.
So: no policy, no modified minutes, no witness who ever softened anything, and no video of any of the dozen incidents Bolton swore to under oath. Just a memory. His.
Then I Actually Did It
On July 1, 2026, I figured, since the city’s own Corporation Counsel had already testified I’d been cussing like a sailor at public meetings for years, I might as well earn the reputation. So at a Finance Committee meeting chaired by the Mayor himself, I let loose. Three minutes of caustic, vulgar, entirely unfiltered First Amendment exercise.
The local paper, the one that has never once met a Donchess press release it didn’t like, ran the story with breathless outrage, quoting officials who claimed my language was “distorting communication” and had driven the city, account to the Mayor’s outburst, to bring in trauma counselors for employees. The Mayor, watching it get recorded, reportedly said something like “we have that all on video, right? Good.” He looked delighted. He had his burn notice.
Except it didn’t burn. It went viral. Hundreds of thousands of views. The largest wave of new followers I’ve had in my life. People I expected to be scandalized, older men and women across the state, stopped me to laugh and say thank you for finally not putting up with it. Not one person condemned the language. My kid saw it on Instagram from Europe.
Which raises the question the paper never asked: if I’d really been cursing out city officials at a dozen prior meetings, as sworn testimony claimed, where was that coverage? Where were those viral clips? They don’t exist, because per every actual witness and every actual record, it never happened.
What I Watched at the Podium
I’ll say this plainly, and only as what I personally observed, not as a diagnosis I’m qualified to make: at recent hearings, including one on July 30–31, I watched Attorney Bolton struggle to keep his balance at the podium, unable to steady a pen, arriving with legal pads that were blank when he threw them down to question witnesses he’d told the court he’d need thirty minutes for and finished within about five. With tables pushed close together, I smelled alcohol on his breath. His closing argument notes amounted to three words on the notepad. The other city attorney sat at the table beside him through all of it and did nothing.
Whatever is going on, it has been going on in that courtroom since at least 2021, without anyone in city leadership or on the bench addressing it. Make of that what you will. I’m just someone representing myself as a pro se litigant at the Plaintiff’s table, more than once, watching the person tasked with protecting my city from legal liability struggle to hold a pen and turn a page.
The Quiet Part, Said Out Loud
At a June 2026 hearing, Judge Schulman posed a hypothetical to Bolton: if a citizen gave the city a heads-up before filing a Right-to-Know complaint, wouldn’t that kind of good-faith conversation usually be welcomed?
Bolton’s answer, more or less: if someone has a history of “crude language,” he’d tell them to make an appointment or not to bother showing up at all.
That’s the whole ballgame, isn’t it? Not a legal principle. A grudge, worn as policy. The man swore under oath that I said things nobody can find a record of, and then used that unverifiable memory as a reason to refuse to talk to me. If lawyers are supposed to be thick-skinned, Nashua’s Corporation Counsel might be the most sensitive one I’ve ever encountered offended by language that, under the ordinance he helped write, isn’t even prohibited. It’s all personal with Bolton.
Where This Leaves Us
I’m filing more Right-to-Know lawsuits. I’m still showing up. And something has now shifted. The paper has stopped covering my “bad words,” and the Board has mostly stopped shouting over public comment to shut it down in violation of our Constitutional rights.
Seven years of getting kicked in every body part taught me one thing: the First Amendment doesn’t come with a decorum clause. You don’t lose the right to be furious at your government just because your fury is inconvenient, or crude, or embarrassing to the people it’s aimed at. Nashua’s leadership spent years trying to legislate away language they found distasteful, while the actual liability, the actual risk to this city’s taxpayers was sitting in the Corporation Counsel’s chair the entire time.
Judge Schulman told me recently I need to be more political. Hell yes, Your Honor.
