I can't imagine why Scott Hodson wasn't prosecuted

A reader brings this to my attention: Settlement close in police lawsuit over harassment

The lawsuit also alleged that Gallagher was harassed and threatened by Officer Scott Hodson, with whom she had an earlier relationship, and who the complaint said is the father of her second child.

Oh, wait. He's a member of the Foxboro Police Department and they can do whatever the hell they like and their boss, Chief Edward O'Leary will do whatever it takes to cover for them! How could I forget?

Gallagher alleged in the lawsuit that Hodson deflated her car's tires, stood too close to her in an effort to intimidate her, spit on her husband's police cruiser, threatened to attack her husband, yelled at her and called her a "whore" and other terms broadly offensive to women.

That's sounds pretty awful. Worse than anything I was accused of doing. Apparently, anything a woman alleges must be true and must be prosecuted, unless it's being said about a member of the Foxborough Police Department. Those corrupt bastards are on the side of the angels, always. Just ask them. But be careful, they lie a lot. Like this:

Our mission to the residents of Foxborough is as follows: "To provide a safe environment for the citizens of Foxborough, free from crime and disorder, with protection of rights under the Constitution."

That one's a real knee slapper. You know who isn't the least bit surprised to find that Scott Hodson is a pig and a bully? Me.

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Hmmmm.....

This could explain a few things. A pity, that.

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I know who you are, Madam, and I know how you manipulated the system.

“It’s so infuriating to me because there are women who worked very hard for decades to create a system where domestic violence is serious business and people respond to it in a serious way, and when women use it as a weapon not a shield it’s offensive.”

It's also illegal, not that anyone in the Massachusetts system cares what's illegal and what isn't. But with Judge Judy not being part of the MA court system, it's little wonder Cindy declined our invitation to visit her, and tell her tale of woe.

Be sure to watch the post action interviews at the end of part 2. There's something awfully familiar about them. Poor, sweet, innocent, victimized Cindy Ashley. Do shed a tear for her, won't you?

Note: Yes, I've been remiss in finishing my little story. Hey, I told you I'm a procrastinator. It's been a very busy few months, but I'm going to endeavor to finish this thing up when I get back from vacation. See you next week.

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We've Got Mail! (UPDATED)

I know this sort of diverges from the purpose of this blog, but I find it so amusing that I just have to share. I just got home to find the following 5 emails in my inbox, all in rapid succession:

From: Lkestat11@aol.com
To: (ed - my email in the sidebar)
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 11:33 PM
Subject: laughable


We check your site a few times a year, Cindy has better things to do.
I guess being behind bars will keep you out of trouble- rapist
As for Cindy, shes great, best thanksgiving gift she could have got was finding out you about all your arrests
Enjoy your time behing bars, with any hope they will lock away the key. She may have pity for you, we think you are just as sick as always. Now the world nows

and we call her Bugs, not boots you moron. still cant keep your facts straight

Hmmm...well, Boots was the nick she was using when she was trying? pretending? (I honestly don't know what the hell she was doing.) to get me to date her via email on July 25 and 27, 2003. So, you can call her whatever you want, but she'll always be Boots to me. As for me being a rapist, I'm pretty sure that I would know about something like that. Next:

From: Lkestat11@aol.com
To: (Again, see the sidebar)
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 11:35 PM
Subject: (no subject)


Busy in Aug? guess that's why you didn't write more crap so the police could keep track. Guess they give you computers behind bars. Keeps you busy?

Huh. Jail? Police keeping track? Hmmm....

From: Lkestat11@aol.com
To: (Look, over there ---->>>>)
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 11:36 PM
Subject: (no subject)OH so that's why you think that she would bother. She changed to lap top a year ago. We have her computer. You are so stupid!

OK, I don't know what that means. If anyone sees a point in there, please let me know.

From: Lkestat11@aol.com
To: (you know where to find my email adress now, right?)
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 11:48 PM
Subject: (no subject)
BTW your mug shot in Aug looks worse than the one from when you assaulted her( we made a bit of a comparison ), doesn't look like you are holding up there . too much drinking we take it. Couldn't find anyone your own age, so you go after 14 and 17 year olds? Bet your roommates at prison love you!
You think for some reason that you have weird plan, making you look like a sicker person than you are.
We don't want Cindy to get involved, but knowing her, if she can help to keep you in jail, she will.
we'll check in another 4 or 5 months, or maybe not, the police tell her a lot. At this point its not worth the effort, we can get information from them. She has tons of people behind her, we'll make sure you get what is coming to you, the legal way. They check often, they so have you number. What goes around comes around.

WTF with all this jail???? OH! I've had a revelation!

I did a triple take myself on this one when I heard it on the news, but several months ago a guy who is also named Paul McKay got arrested for sexual assault on a minor, or maybe two if I recall correctly. But he's older than I am and lives in Somerset, MA. North Attleborough. [corrected -ed] I'm also guessing his middle name isn't Patrick. He's in jail now apparently, and good for him. He sounds like a quite a dirtbag.

From: JKm825@aol.com
To: (you know the drill)
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:08 AM
Subject: (no subject)
my husband said he just posted on your email. I don't think you can access your email from prison, but just in case you have another inmate that is allowed to. We think that your site would be better named
Mckay Insanity. So much more fitting don't you think? We all do. As disturbed as you are, you show us each time how crazy you are. I guess the rape charges dropped 10 years ago was a big mistake too? What did you dial the wrong number and go to the wrong house? so long, we will miss your blog, good luck with your new roomates, I hear they love boys like you.

Well, I hate to burst your bubble kids, but one, you're not very bright if you're looking at a picture of a completely different person and thinking it's me instead of one of the other several hundred people in America who share my first and last names, and two, I haven't seen the wrong side of a set of bars since July 13, 2003, courtesy of our favorite felon, Cynthia Whelahan. Here's a little something for you to consider:


That is a TV in my office with CNN coverage of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai burning. Which, that whole story is awful, but it's what's on TV right now. Then, there's me, with a big silly grin. And a Sam Adams. And I'm waving to dumb people who think I'm in jail. And McKay is spelled with a capital "K". And "posted on your email" is gobbldeygook. :-)

I swear, if you wrote all this as fiction, it would be rejected as too ridiculous.

I can't help but wonder why my correspondents don't identify herself themselves.

UPDATE: Knock it off, Cindy. If you've got something to say, don't be an anonymous coward. Stand up and spit it out, or just keep it to yourself.

UPDATE 2: This is Paul McKay the accused child molester:



I found that here. That guy is being held without bail and I guarantee you that he isn't spending a lot of time on the internet. Now, here's a close-up of me so that those who don't know me or who were engaged to marry me can do a more detailed comparison than the photo above will allow:



See the difference?

You know what's really amazing? That someone could fail to recognize that a person is not someone they were engaged to marry and slept with for over a year, and then also be excited (in a happy way) about the idea that the guy she had her 2 teenage daughters living with is a serial child molester. Thank you, Cindy, for this window into your psyche. You're making my task here a lot easier, ya whackjob.

This is the sort of insanity I was up against, folks. And for the most part, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (and it's various and sundry agencies) is all too happy to take such nonsensical slander at face value and put the weight of government behind it under color of law. The problem in a nutshell is that they don't care what the facts are and they don't care what the truth is. They know who the victim is by looking for boobs and they simply pretend and proceed from there. They know who they're paid to prosecute and if they forget, they've got Jane Doe, Inc. to remind them. The reality, however, is this: One of us is an abuser. One of us violently attacked the other. One of us is a felon. And it ain't me. If that isn't clear already, it will be by the time I finish telling and documenting this story. And to think I'm only 5 days into it....

I suppose I should be extra glad they've got this other guy because otherwise, she'd probably have them after me.

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Today, I have another hero

From Glenn Sacks: F4J Protester Mark Harris' Daughter: 'I'm Proud of My Dad'

Recently I wrote about UK Fathers 4 Justice's Jolly Stanesby, a divorced father of one, who has carried out numerous daring, creative protests.

...

Stanesby's partner in "crime" was UK fatherhood activist Mark Harris, who went through a terrible ordeal during his divorce. Below we reprint a blog post I wrote about Harris earlier this year.

F4J Protester's Daughter: 'I'm Proud of My Dad'

"Her life has been blighted by years of enforced separation from the father she clearly adores.

"'Most people look back on their childhood and remember family days out at the seaside and birthday parties,' she says. 'My recollections are of Mum, sour-faced in a suit, heading off for yet another court appearance and endless interviews with social workers and child psychologists, all telling me that I didn't have to see my dad if I didn't want to.'"

Glenn then goes on to quote this article in the UK's Daily Mail.

On Sunday morning, just hours before he scrambled on to the roof of Harriet Harman's home dressed as a superhero, Mark Harris kissed and hugged his daughter Lisa and set off from the South Devon home they share.

'I told him I was proud of him,' says Lisa, a 21-year-old wages clerk. 'I said that however long he managed to stay up there, I would be cheering him on and sending him my love.'

In the end, Mark, who staged his weekend protest with fellow Fathers 4 Justice campaigner Jolly Stanesby, stayed on the roof of Ms Harman's elegant period home in Herne Hill, South London, for ten hours - an hour for every year that his own case wasn't resolved by the courts.

When he climbed down on Sunday night, he was immediately arrested and detained by police, leaving Mr Stanesby perched precariously on the slates, stubbornly insisting he wouldn't descend until Mark had been released.

But then as Lisa points out, brushes with the law are nothing new to her 49-year-old father. During the decade he spent fighting for full access to his three daughters after his wife walked out and took them with her, the driving instructor faced 133 court appearances before 33 different judges, two stints in jail and went on a hunger strike.

The irony is that Mark's case is now resolved: Lisa, his eldest, now lives with him. So does his 17-year-old daughter. Another daughter, aged 15, lives nearby with her mother, but visits at least twice a week. He now has everything he fought for.

But he still donned Superman's leotard, tights and cape because while he is free to talk about the horrors he suffered at the hands of the British justice system, other fathers are not.

Last year, the Lord Chancellor ruled that family court proceedings must remain secret and therefore, argue some, unaccountable.

That, my friends, is a winner and one with big brass balls. To put your butt on the line when you've already won the game is courageous and deeply principled. Mark Harris joins his stuntmate Jolly Stanesby in my highest esteem. While these stunts might seem silly on their face, F4J has done a highly effective job of getting the problem with the UK's family courts into the public consciousness. Jolly is a veteran of dozens of these high profile protests, and he's currently serving 2 months in jail for the protest on Harman's roof. He won't be released until mid January, so please keep him in your thoughts over the holidays. I had the distinct honor of picking him up from jail after this stunt. He also once handcuffed himself to the UK's then Childrens Minister Margaret Hodge while she was delivering a speech. He further poked the system in the eye by then legally changing his name to Margaret Hodge and insisting on being addressed as Mrs. Hodge during court proceedings. Jolly was cleared at trial on false imprisonment charges for that one.

These guys have vowed that they will not stop until the custody laws are fixed and kids are guaranteed full access to both of their parents. Non-violent civil rights protest and civil disobedience has a long and distinguished history. Not only is F4J carrying that history on, they're doing it with passion and good humor. And kids love superheroes. I do too.

Keep fighting the good fight, Gentlemen.

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The Documents: Dancing with The Man

In the last post, I left off with a letter I sent to FPD Chief O'Leary on 3/4/04. I received this response, dated 3/5/04 from Sgt Bousquet, the FPD Internal Affairs Officer. It turns out that my lawyer pretty much wanted to strangle me for writing to O'Leary in the first place, so I sent Bousquet this response. Sometime shortly thereafter, I received a call from someone who identified himself as Bousquet and was quite pleasant and understanding. He also wanted to dig in to who and what my others complaints with FPD officers were about, but I declined to get into it with him at that time. He assured me that he'd open an investigation, and we ended the call on a pleasant note agreeing to pick up later, after the trial.

As continuances piled up, and as Cindy started pulling restraining orders out of Barnstable Family and Probate (having moved to Sandwich), I got a little impatient and I also learned a bit more about the probable cause process, so I sent this letter to Bousquet on 8/9/04 asking that the 3/4/04 hearing result be appealed based on my right to attend having been violated by officer Austin. I received this response which sounded a whole lot different from the phone call I'd received from Bousquet. And this one told me that if I had a problem with how Scott Austin handled the hearing, that I should go to Scott Austin to straighten out the mess that Scott Austin made. So I called Bousquet, probably to ask him what he'd been smoking, and I got his voice mail. And I noticed from his outgoing message that while the call I had taken months earlier had been from a man with a smooth, unremarkable voice, Bousquet has a distinctive gravelly old man voice. So, someone had called me, identified himself as Bousquet, and tried to dig into to who else in that department I was going to point a finger at. So, what was I to do? Why, write another letter, of course. And I got another response from Bousquet.

This part of the story will will pick back up shortly, but first I've got the Barnstable restraining order and the Wrentham trial to talk about. Stay tuned.

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The Documents: Charging Cindy

...but not really. On 10/3/2003, a preliminary hearing was held at Wrentham District which yielded nothing more than another date to go back to court. It was an opportunity for both sides to consider a resolution, and my lawyer was trying to get "pre-trial" probation, which would mean that if nothing happened before the period ended, the charges would be dismissed. (This is different than the "continuation without finding" I mentioned earlier, in that no admission is required and if there were an incident, the prosecution would pick up where it left off. With a CWF, if there's an incident, like someone claiming you violated a 209A, you're immediately found guilty on the CWF'd charges) The ADA, Mark Fabiano was willing, but in order to agree to this, he'd have to get the "victim" to agree to it too. So, Cindy had an opportunity to make all this go away and refused to do it. Malicious? You bet she is.

My lawyer had a good rapport with ADA Fabiano (who, last I saw, has crossed over from the Dark Side and is now a public defender), and he had a good handle on the absolute zero of a case he was looking at, as my attorney had made sure he was aware of my side of the story and who attacked who. He recommended to both of us that I should go to the Foxboro Police Station and file an assault and battery complaint against Cindy. My lawyer agreed, and so I left the courthouse and went directly there. Upon arriving there, I spoke with officer Frank Azevedo who wanted nothing to do with taking my complaint. I must have spent 15 minutes arguing with him and insisting that my complaint be taken before he left me standing at the counter with a statement form. I had with me a 3 page statement that I had written right after the incident to record the details while they were fresh in my mind, and I wanted to submit that as part of my statement, but Azevedo wasn't having it. I got one page, hand written, standing at the counter and a whole lot of attitude. When I finished writing, he took the statement and told me to check back in a month, which didn't strike me as proper procedure for handling a criminal complaint. Here's the complaint I filed against Azevedo with Internal Affairs.

A month passed, and nothing had happened, so I asked my lawyer to shake the bushes and find out what was going on. It was clear by that point that we were going to trial so she was also requesting a copy of Cindy's 911 call as evidence. Here's her letter to the FPD. You can see what happened next in my complaint linked above. Long story short, my complaint wasn't processed until 3 months after I had filed it and my lawyer had gotten involved. So, a probable cause hearing was scheduled for Cindy on March 4, 2004. I'll tell the rest of what happened via the letter I wrote to FPD Chief O'Leary later that day. Yes, I, the victim in the case, was barred from the hearing By FPD prosecutor Scott Austin. And then the son of a bitch snuck out the back door of the courtroom hoping to avoid me. And then I found him anyway. The Massachusetts Victim Bill of Rights (M.G.L. c.258B) requires that

You and your family members have the right to be present at all court proceedings unless you are required to testify and the judge determines that your testimony may be influenced by your presence.

and that...

You have the right to confer with the prosecutor before the start of the case, before a case is dismissed, and before a sentence recommendation is made.

and that...

You have the right to be informed of how a criminal case progresses through the system, what your role is in the process, what will be expected of you, and why.

Then there's M.G.L. Chapter 265, Section 37 which states:

No person, whether or not acting under color of law, shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate or interfere with, or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with, or oppress or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth or by the constitution or laws of the United States. Any person convicted of violating this provision shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than one year or both; and if bodily injury results, shall be punished by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars or by imprisonment for not more than ten years, or both.

The law? Victim's rights? Who cares? Lookit! She's got BOOBIES! It's legal insanity, folks. Massachusetts style insanity.

You have to take your satisfaction where you can get it. So, props to J.R. Moore. I wonder how Scott Austin feels about slipping on the gloves.

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