In Part 11, I detailed the black-letter reality of Indiana Trial Rule 9.2 and the deep disconnect between the courtroom record and the final written judgment. But a pro se, self-represented defendant does not simply wake up one morning with clear evidence of an opponent’s contract default. To uncover the fact that Valeo was litigating without a signed contract, I had to build a specific diagnostic mechanism.
And when I deployed it, the firm’s counsel responded by weaponizing a medical crisis.
In Part 10, I described how a “lost” affidavit—a document that was actually a matter of public record—was used by Valeo’s counsel to trigger discovery sanctions that effectively blindfolded my defense. But while the firm was claiming I was withholding an explanation, they were concurrently managing a far more fundamental omission.
They were suing me for over two years based on a contract that did not exist in signed form.
Litigation is often described in terms of numbers and rules, but at its core, it is a battle of attrition and pressure. The past few weeks, the “machinery” of the law provided a jarring example of how that pressure is applied in the present day.
In my prior post, I shared how on Friday morning, April 24th, Valeo’s attorney performed a “gracious” gesture by notifying the court that the hearing regarding my son Ethan’s frozen bank accounts was unnecessary because she was filing a motion to release all our accounts—Ethan’s, our personal accounts, and the business accounts.
We only asked for Ethan’s accounts to be released.
By that same afternoon, any illusion of goodwill was gone, when she filed a Praecipe for Execution.
While I have been sharing the records of a decade-long litigation, the “machinery” of the law continues to grind in the present. The past few weeks have provided a vivid example of the disconnect between a court order and real-world results.
Before we dive into the current update, here is a quick recap of how we got here:
The Claim: Valeo sued me for $33,627.75 over “sub-target” clients they didn’t even want .
The Ghost Contract: They litigated for years on an “Entire Agreement” that their own lead counsel eventually admitted was never signed.
The Blindfold: The court used a “lost” affidavit to bar my evidence and secure a $180,432.71 judgment.
The April 11th freeze of Ethan’s bank accounts is what finally pushed me to give into God’s prompting to document the entire facts of what has transpired for the last 11 years. From Part 1: A Matter of Record:
That restriction included funds earned by my son this past summer for college, because I was apparently a co-owner on his accounts from before he turned 18.
The same court has also ruled that I am not allowed to pay his tuition.
Here’s what it took to restore Ethan’s accounts.
In Part 7, I shared the “Aha!” moment of June 6, 2017: finding the internal 2009 PowerPoint presentations that proved Valeo management had premeditated a system of wage fines months before I joined the firm. I produced those records to Andrew Hull on June 15, 2017, and the tone of the litigation shifted instantly.
But finding the proof was only half the battle. To save their case—and protect their business model—Valeo’s counsel had to ensure that evidence never reached the judge’s desk, or public view. To do that, they relied on a procedural “lost envelope” tactic that had begun nearly a year earlier.
In Part 11 , I detailed the black-letter reality of Indiana Trial Rule 9.2 and the deep disconnect between the courtroom record and the fi...
