24 December 2009

Well Catherine,

This has certainly been an interesting year. First, you refused to vacate your gratuitous legal attack of 2006, then falsely accused me of felony burglary. When the police suggested an expensive mediation to address your fear, you agreed, then failed to appear. When this required much more expensive court action on my part, you contested. But again you failed to show such that, with your appeal, your actions shall have cost me nearly $20,000. Whatever the courts may finally decide, you owe me a significant moral debt, whose cash value is no less than eighteen thousand dollars, incurring annual interest at the federal prime rate plus two, beginning 25 February 2011. Please plan to pay it in full before returning to Oregon or Washington.

In some ways I suppose I should thank you for this odd trial by ordeal. At Republic 361 Glaucon asserts that the most perfect justice is to be just but considered unjust, a situation no sane person would hope for. With no good intent or rational plan, you put me in a crucible which helped prove my temper as a matter of public record. For the rest of my life I may speak of this wrong: sure of what each did and confident of who I was and remained in the face of repeated, provocative insult.

When you left me in February of 1998 there was a clear commitment to remain amicable, to work on things so that both of us could go on to better lives. Such lives presumably did not include legal threats on your part to file for a bogus restraining order, to make up self-serving stories to tell your friends or to repeatedly bring me into court with vague claims that I wanted to hurt you in some way and for reasons you could never specify. Your cartoon narrative never matched the facts and, not well when you left me, I was confused. When I sent you a banal 2003 birthday letter, I was surprised by the force of your irrational response, but naively gave you the benefit of the doubt as you repeatedly invoked the justice system against me in 1999, 2006 and 2008. When I asked you to voluntarily resolve this at no cost to you, you refused, hence my direct legal expenses. After twelve years and thirty-thousand dollars between us, what exactly do you have? You are in precisely the legal position you had in 1998, only older, tattooed, abroad and with fewer prospects. Moral integrity cannot be purchased like a Chinese child, but recompense can be made. Please do so.

I don’t know if you ever graduated from Reed College, Cate, but I do know that you failed to become what you once wanted. How much of this was over-reach and how much moral or mental illness I shall never know. It is not my business. What is mine, though, is to wonder at the nature of your obsession with me. Are you guilty for things you falsely told me about my brother? For having left under the conditions you did? Did these betray the honor you felt you owed your mother’s memory? Have you performed some sort of secret Mormon sealing voodoo, or did you feel at some level that you deserved to die? Did you hope to taunt or frustrate me into killing you, that false  stories of persecution would bring salvation? You are on your fourth lawyer as I write this and, from what I can see, have yet to think this through. You lurch from point to point like a drunken pinball, a disappointment to us both.

The central fact of our current relationship, Catherine, is that you have used the legal system to harass and annoy me, for which you owe me nearly $20,000. Any additional emotional charge or issue you may hold is secondary: Yours entirely. Not my problem. I believe that I have shown compassion over the past fifteen years and shall, upon payment, be open to helping you address your psychological issues as you may wish. If you have a death wish, show up at my house with a weapon and I shall address it logically, lawfully and with mercy. If you do not have a death wish, pay me my money and go in peace. I do not really care much either way, but do not die with this debt unfulfilled. You are stuck, Catherine, and must resolve this.

You have outlived your mother by raw count of years, which is more than I think you ever expected. What good that has done anyone is unclear. Your life could have been so much better, Catherine, and may yet be if you resolve this.

What you did to externalize your guilt and other psychological issues is understandable, but your decision to abuse the legal system was wrong. I can forgive the psychological pain but the moral debt of verifiable legal costs is a just one. Please pay the moral debt made by Cate Carter, to go forward with my blessing.

Happy Christmas, Catherine Lynne, wherever you may be.

- Rory

My assumption for quite a while has been that Catherine Lynne Carter is not mentally well, obsessing on me for reasons that were unclear but presumably related to her own guilt, shame, or desire for attention. In light of seeming inconsistencies in her 1999 testimony and the PDNS name record, what other sort of factually incorrect statements might have been made by Cate before the court?

Looking back at her second stalking petition from March, 2006, filed under ORS 30.866 she claimed

At least two unwanted instances of contact have occurred within the last two years which were alarming or coercive.

The basic problem with this original petition is that it is false in that (A) there were not two instances of contact with her at all, (B) the one contact with her was a letter more than three years old and, although her mental state might be such that she found my existence “alarming,” (C) neither of the incidents she cites was even vaguely coercive in any common or legal sense.

The first “contact” cited was not with her at all, but with Kevin Balmer, who had initially contacted me and made some ambiguous and potentially threatening actions.  The point of this contact was explicitly to avoid her and instead address my concern about (a) what he had been told about me, (b) my actual intentions and (c) subsequent actions of his that might create unnecessary fear or danger.

On 03/17/06 in the parking lot of CNF, NW 21st and Savier, Mr. Bowman (respondent) either followed or was waiting for my boyfriend Kevin D Balmer & attempted to confront Mr. Balmer outside his workplace with questions regarding me and my relationship with Mr. Balmer.

Notes from that meeting were introduced into court and clearly showed Carter’s assertions to be false, as later established by Kevin Balmer’s direct testimony in the matter.

Before that, on February 20, 2003, in Bar Harbor ME, Mr. Bowman sent a series of letters to me via my parents in disregard of a judge’s order. In the feb 20th letter, he used an out of state post mark and admits to ongoing mental health issues and to being off his medication. The Feb 20th letter used a return address of Elinore Friedberg, a business client of mine. the contents of the letter indicate a disturbed mental state.

There was no such “judge’s order,” and what I had done was send her a single birthday letter in 2003, more than three years prior. Before that, the only package I had sent was around the ludicrous “letter bomb” incident. Way back in 1999, I had mailed some personal items of hers in care of her parents near San Diego, as promised over a year before that, in June 1998. One letter and one package over four years three years prior was not a “series” of anything, and her assertion that I claimed to be off my medication was a fanciful reading on her part. That a judge did not question either of these assertions or note the dates still annoys and saddens me.

My assumption at the 2006 hearing was that these false assertions were indicative of her poor mental state and not malicious. Certainly no judge ever looked at them critically, and I did not think it kind to embarrass her in open court. In retrospect, I believe it was unethical for an opportunistic lawyer to have taken such a clearly baseless case, and I naively failed to contest a variety of false, irrelevant and prejudicial things he said of me in open court. She found a lawyer, who danced around the lack of facts. A pro-tem judge failed to notice the absence of facts and played to a colleague, while I was naively willing to take a legal hit in support of a former friend.

Not only had she jumped to conclusions and made false accusations, she had actively sought professional legal help to turn them into a legal attack. Given our class disparity and the law, this was morally suspect. Mental illness is an excuse to a point, but she went beyond her own fear to externalize her anxieties and willfully cause me significant harm. Her basic argument was that she did not want me to exist, so the court system should punish me to help assuage her mental state, because she said so.

The falsehood of these assertions was conclusively established as a matter of fact with a formal “request for admissions” later, so dissecting the rest of that petition isn’t worth the time. The 2006 petition shows, however, the degree of her self-centered conceit and willingness to abuse the legal system.  These false affidavits before the court were clearly wrong, morally. Her decisions around filing and pursuing that petition are clearly indicate an amoral sense of entitlement.

This mental or moral defect on her part would, combined with her irrational fear, end up costing me the better part of $20,000.

Like most modern police deparments, the Portland Police Bureau maintains a series of databases on persons of interest, including criminal complainants. After the partial victory of August 2009, I began to wonder at Carter’s mental competence and veracity more than before and asked a private investigator to check PPB records to find out how often she had contacted the police about things, given her previous sworn testimony about having contacted the police in 1999 when I’d returned her couch and some other online examples of her having claimed to be in contact with the police about supposed dangers. Did she call the police all the time or was I special? To my great astonishment, neither of those alleged interactions were in the basic record. Had she lied about the calls or had PPB just not recorded them? It was an odd development, to be sure. What else should I look at again?

PPDS NAME RECORD
PPDS NUMBER: 1434677
DATE PRINTED: 10/01/09

NAME: CARTER, CATHERINE L
SEX: F RACE: W AGE: 32
HGT: EYES: SKIN:
WGT: HAIR: BIRTH PLACE;
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS-MOST CURRENT FIRST ASSOC DATE
[ADDRESS B REDACTED] PORTLAND 04-09-08
[ADDRESS A REDACTED] PORTLAND 03-31-96

ASSOCIATED VEHICLES: NO ASSOCIATED VEHICLES FOUND

PPDS NAMES ASSOCIATED TO CRN: NO ASSOCIATED CRNS FOUND

ASSOCIATED CASES

CASE NBR 0893047 AGENCY PORTLAND POLICE REPORTED DATE 09-20-08 INVOLVEMENT VICTIM
LOC OF OCCURRENCE [ADDRESS B REDACTED]
OFFENSES 1: BURG -RES -UNK- FORCE ENTRY

CASE NBR 0833252 AGENCY PORTLAND POLICE REPORTED DATE 04-08-08 INVOLVEMENT VICTIM
LOC OF OCCURRENCE [ADDRESS B REDACTED]
OFFENSES 1: STALKING

CASE NBR 9529907 AGENCY PORTLAND POLICE REPORTED DATE 03-05-96 INVOLVEMENT COMPLAINANT
LOC OF OCCURRENCE [ADDRESS A REDACTED] PORTLAND
OFFENSES 1: LARCENY-FRM BUILDINGS

CHARGES: NO CUSTODY INFORMATION FOUND

MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION: NO MISCELLANEOUS NAME INFORMATION FOUND

END OF RECORD T438677
TERMINAL ID X4OZ