Tag Archive | Portfolio Recovery Associates

Judge Lee P. Rudofsky Recused from Portfolio Recovery Associates Case

For once, I won’t bury the lead. Judge Rudofsky filed an order recusing himself from my case against Portfolio Recovery Associates!!!

My regular readers know there are not many exclamation points used on this blog. This is a three exclamation point day.

The order was filed two days ago and sent to me by email yesterday, but I’ve been busy and didn’t check my emails. So, with no further ado…

Thank you, Your Honor.

Chaos, Controversy and Court Corruption

Common people receive no relief from our courts.

The system is perfect. The people involved pervert and destroy.

Here are some of the names of court employees that have turned our court system into a piggy bank for attorneys and Big Business Billionaires.

Judge Susan Weaver, Arkansas State Court

Court Reporter Jana Perry, Arkansas State Court

Judge Lee P. Rudofsky, Federal District Court Eastern Arkansas

Judge Raymond W. Gruender, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals

Judge Ralph R. Erikson, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals

Judge David R. Stras, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals

Judge Todd W. Robinson, Federal District Court, Southern California

Judge Linda Lopez, Federal District Court, Southern California

Judge Janis L. Sammartino, Federal District Court, Southern California

Clerk “Jude” or “JPP” Federal District Court, Southern California

Big Business Billionaires in health insurance, hospitals and debt collection cannot be held accountable for their unethical, often illegal practices if common people cannot access our courts.

This post is conclusionary. But read through the years of documentation I discuss in the hundreds of other posts. Download FREE Docs of the Day. Consult with me; there is a synergy to sharing experience and information.

Solutions? Demand transparency in court proceedings. Shift the focus of law enforcement from victimless crimes to white collar crime, especially honest services fraud. File legitimate complaints with regulatory agencies. Then allow individuals to use the agency findings as evidence in private claims.

My petition for writ of certiorari to SCOTUS focuses attention on these solutions. Read Sup. Ct. 24-6113. Move the court for permission to file an amicus brief or offer to take over the pro se case on contingency.

Portfolio Recovery Associates Continues to Torment Consumer Years After Closing the Account

I filed a lawsuit, pro se, against Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC. The Big Business Billionaire debt collection company set the balance on the account to zero and closed the account, they say, “in light of the ongoing litigation.” Then they threw me a bone, an inadequate settlement offer, and expected me to run off with it.

That was almost four years ago. The case is at the United States Supreme Court on petition for writ of certiorari. (Sup. Ct. No. 24-6113)

It was not enough for PRA to win at the lower courts due to a Pro Big Business Billionaire – Anti-individual judge named Lee P. Rudofsky. The lawyers from Rose Law Firm and Troutman Pepper who represent the PRA Group, Inc. subsidiary came up with a ruse.

There may be a clerk at the Supreme Court of the United States involved. (I informed the clerk of this mistake weeks ago and it has not been corrected.) I filed a motion to file some documents that were sealed by Rudofsky and the Eighth Circuit initially sealed and then immediately unsealed at the Supreme Court. the motion was “Granted”. But it was docketed as filed two weeks before it was filed, when the petition was filed. And the documents were filed under seal the day after the motion was granted and not unsealed.

When I saw “Motion Granted” I posted the documents on this blog. The next day, after talking to a staff member at SCOTUS, I deleted the link from the blog page. But people who received the email copy of the post still had the link and the link still worked.

I’ve heard that just deleting something doesn’t ever really remove it from the internet. It was a mystery and I let PRA know that I didn’t know the magic trick that would make those emailed links quit working.

PRA filed an “emergency” motion on December 20th, 11 days after my post was emailed to them, and asked the court to take down this entire blog “until such time as PRA can be assured its confidential documents are no longer publicly accessible” along with about a year’s worth of my total income.

I worked through Christmas week researching and writing a response to try to save my blog from disappearing. Judge Rudofsky told me in a written docket entry order that he would not give me past December 27th.

Judge Rudofsky gave PRA’s team of attorneys 10 days to reply to my response.

The email you can download below was entered in the reply as an exhibit. It is from WordPress’ parent company and was sent on December 21st. It says, in part, “If the documents are still available, the fastest way to remove them would be for Ms. Hammett to contact wordpress support and they can assist her.”

Wow! PRA must have been really concerned about the confidentiality of the documents. NOT! They probably knew the four clicks I would need to make to break the links to the documents. They definitely knew who I could speak with to find out how it can be done. They knew that taking down my blog was like dropping a nuclear bomb to kill a gnat.

I’m going to file another complaint against PRA and its attorneys for intentional infliction of emotional distress. If the court orders my blog to be “taken down” then I will ask for $1,000,000 per year for all the years I was actively writing. That is about the same as PRA’s risk manager’s base salary.

I would have preferred to spend Christmas as planned, cherishing peaceful moments with my granddaughter and my husband, who is battling stage IV cancer. However, a 6- or 7-million-dollar jury verdict should make PRA think twice before retaliating against a victim of its abusive practices—someone brave enough to challenge a company that files 3,000 lawsuits a week against everyday people.

Portfolio Recovery Associates asks to “take down” this blog, instead of explaining how to remove individual documents.

Judge Lee P. Rudofsky granted a motion to seal anything and everything Big Business Billionaire Portfolio Recovery Associates wants to conceal. I asked the Supreme Court to unseal four documents that I filed for my writ of certiorari. SCOTUS wrote “Motion Granted”. So, I posted the documents.

The next day, someone on the Supreme Court staff returned a call to me. She said the justices only approved the part of my motion to file the sealed documents, not the part about unsealing. I asked for something in writing, which never was done, but I took down the documents to alleviate any strife.

It didn’t work, because I didn’t understand “hosting”. A person could not go to my site and find the document, but if they had a link from before the document was removed from the post, they could pull the document up from my “media library”.

What was happening was that while I removed the link from my blog post, the file itself was still hosted on my WordPress site and accessible to anyone who has the direct URL. Removing the link from the post doesn’t delete or restrict access to the file—it simply removes the clickable path to it from the blog page.

To prevent anyone from accessing the document via the URL, the issue had to be addressed at the hosting level. How is it done? Here’s one way:

Delete the File

  • Log into your WordPress admin dashboard.
  • Go to the Media Library (usually found under “Media” in the menu).
  • Locate the file and delete it.
  • This will make the URL invalid, so anyone clicking on it will receive a “404 Not Found” error.

Here is an easier question to answer. Why didn’t the goliath debt buying company’s IT department or the IT people at Rose Law Firm and Troutman Pepper tell me the four clicks needed to make their super-secret documents disappear? Because they wanted to destroy 15 years of work I have done exposing court corruption and building my audience. They were not acting too concerned about mitigating damages to their confidentiality.

Judge Rudofsky Gives Pro Se 5 Days for ‘Emergency’ Response, Billion-Dollar Firm Gets 10 to Reply

People who read a law blog might be slow at math. At least it seems Judge Lee P. Rudofsky is, so here it is simplified:

Portfolio Recovery Associates filed an “emergency” order asking to “take down” this blog on December 20, 2024 at 2:30 p.m.

Purportedly I filed documents that were ordered under seal and PRA did not get a copy of my motion to SCOTUS asking to file the documents under seal and then unseal them. PRA in fact received the service copy of the motion on October 28, 2024, according to USPS tracking. The motion was granted in full, in writing on December 9, 2024. On December 10th, someone on the SCOTUS staff called me and said the motion I filed was granted only in part, but to date, there is no writing to memorialize that. I deleted the documents anyhow, because I don’t love chaos as much as PRA does.

It took PRA 11 days to file the “emergency” motion. December 20th was the Friday before Christmas week.

PRA served me by email at 2:44 p.m. Judge Rudofsky denied me access to electronic filing, one of my complaints to the Supreme Court. So, I did not certify and was not required to check my emails daily for notifications. I did not see the motion until Sunday afternoon.

At 3:21 p.m. PRA served me a copy of the text entry order Judge Rudofsky wrote on December 20th, at 2:55 p.m. He ordered me to respond by December 27th. He specified that there would be no extension granted. Because Rudofsky denied me electronic filing privileges, I would need to have four printed copies delivered to the courthouse, a 30-minute drive from my home with perfect road conditions, by 5 p.m. That was seven days if I happened to check my emails on the afternoon of a holiday week.

On Monday, December 23rd, at 10:57 a.m. I sent an email to the Judge’s clerk. I explained that while I was typing the email, a process server came to deliver the motion. I asked for an order granting an extension to Monday, December 30th.

There was no response from the court before December 26th. Since I worked through Christmas, I had a response almost ready by then. The response from the clerk said, “‘Judge says you can have until December 30, 2024.  This extension is solely a matter of discretion and not based on any examination of the accuracy of your extension request.'” That was in quotation marks. There was no docket number or indication that this was a signed order. Because the judge has lied before, I did not trust this hearsay, unsigned, unfiled, unserved instruction. (No copy of the permission followed by snail-mail, as is customary. In fact, the court did not send a follow-up paper copy of the December 20th order, either. [UPDATE January 6, 2024: The December 20th order was sent by snail-mail postmarked December 23, 2024. It did not appear on USPS Informed Delivery, which I can prove with screenshots of daily activity. I am just now opening the mail that came after December 22nd that did not seem emergent based on the picture on Informed Delivery, including Christmas cards sent by friends.)

I filed my response at about 3:00 on December 27, 2024. I try to leave my house early, in case of a flat tire, accident, whatever. There were few cars on the road and the street in front of the courthouse had no other parked cars. It felt like the three clerks and four or five guards were there just waiting for me.

Then on January 2, 2025, six days after I filed, and three days after the date the clerk said a judge said I could file the “emergency” motion, Judge Rudofsky wrote a text entry only order on the docket. He told PRA to have its team of attorneys from Rose Law Firm and Troutman Pepper to reply by January 6, 2025.

Are you following the math? The reply was due 10 days after the response to the “emergency” motion was filed.

The “officers of the court” are allowed to file electronically, while sitting at home in their underwear.

Judge Rudofsky effectively gave the billion-dollar company twice as long to reply to the so-called emergency than he gave me to respond.

If Judge Rudofsky, who is not a Christian, had other plans Christmas week that would interfere with making a quick decision…like he made when PRA filed the motion… then why was it so important that I research and write my response during Christmas week?

Answer: He has to keep the Big Business Billionaires happy.

And the Big Business Billionaires are only happy when they can oppress and enslave the commoners.

A Law License Is Not a Free Pass to Defame

James K. Trefil of the law firm Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP wrote a defamatory letter to the company that owns WordPress, this blog’s host. Mr. Trefil’s intent was to scare WordPress into deleting this blog. It was supposedly mailed on December 19, 2024, according to court documents filed by Mr. Trefil.

Thus far, and to the credit of WordPress and Automattic, Inc., you are still able to read my blog.

Here is a copy of the letter:

Here is a letter I just emailed to Mr. Trefil and will put in the mail when it stops raining.

ChatGPT is not an attorney. It is a tool that uses artificial intelligence. It is a good sounding board, that offers avenues to explore with more authoritative sources. Here is what ChatGPT had to say about the defamatory letter and whether an attorney could be found liable for damages caused by a defamatory letter to a non-governmental agency.

Yes, a lawyer can potentially be found guilty of defamation for statements made in a letter to a non-governmental agency, even if those statements are made on behalf of their client. However, whether the lawyer can be held liable depends on several factors:

Key Considerations:

  1. Privilege:
    • Absolute Privilege: Lawyers generally have absolute privilege for statements made in court filings, during litigation, or in other official judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings. This privilege does not extend to communications with non-governmental agencies unless those communications are part of such a proceeding.
    • Qualified Privilege: If the communication is related to a matter of mutual interest or made in good faith, a lawyer may have qualified privilege. However, this can be lost if the statement is made with malice or without a legitimate basis.
  2. Truth as a Defense: Defamation requires the statement to be false. If the statements made in the letter are true, the lawyer cannot be held liable for defamation, regardless of how damaging they are.
  3. Malice: If the lawyer makes statements with actual malice—knowing they are false or with reckless disregard for the truth—they could be held liable for defamation.
  4. Role and Intent:
    • If the lawyer is merely relaying information provided by the client, their liability could depend on whether they exercised reasonable care in verifying the claims before making them.
    • If the lawyer independently makes defamatory statements, they may face greater liability.
  5. Non-Privileged Contexts: Communications with non-governmental agencies, especially those unrelated to litigation, are less likely to be protected by absolute privilege. For instance, a letter to a private organization or regulatory body could expose the lawyer to liability if it contains defamatory remarks and lacks privilege or justification.

Stay tuned.

Judge Lee P. Rudofsky Might Take this Blog Down – Find Me Elsewhere

Dear Readers,

Portfolio Recovery Associates, part of PRA Group Inc, asked -or maybe “instructed”- Judge Lee P. Rudofsky to take this blog down.

I am going to the courthouse to file a response to PRA’s “Emergency” Christmas week motion.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Judge Rudofsky already has his order prepared and takes my blog down before I can get a truly emergency order from a higher court to stop him.

If he does take down this blog, find me on YouTube. @LauraLynnHammett https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pzkjWBLTRfU

I will also start a new blog. It will have a broader subject than corrupt courts. It will ride the wave started by Luigi Mangione to stop accepting the rule of the oligarchy. Of course, I only suggest using peaceful means to bring change.

Here are the documents I am filing today, without the exhibits.

Here are the dire emergency documents PRA filed:

I’ll miss y’all.