Ms. Bickley –

On Friday, November 13th, you personally served TFA with an eviction notice which gave us until Monday, November 16 at 5 PM to vacate. Your four paragraph letter contained many allegations which I will now respond to.

I want to acknowledge that your firm’s expertise seems to be in industry. I did not see that you have any expertise in whistleblowing or nonprofits. In your attached letter, you made a number of truly amazing claims. In the spirit of transparency, I have elected to share this newsworthy information with all of the affected community. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that it was decided prior to receipt of your letter that TFA would move from the 713 Fargo location by December 1 due to your client’s documented unfortunate behavior. Additionally, I want to acknowledge that anything that I refer to in this email is backed up by emails given directly from your client to me at my personal email account.

In your notice, you state:

I have been retained to represent the interest of Ms Cassie
Berwanger in Transgender of Foundation of America’s (“TFA”) wrongful possession
connection with the Property. Ms. Berwanger demands that the TFA and all other
inhabitants and invitees of TFA vacate the Property no later than 5:00 p.m. on
Monday, November 16, 2009. If the TFA fails to vacate the Property, Ms.
Berwanger will take all necessary legal action to forcibly remove TFA and its
invitees from the Property. In addition, if the TFA fails to vacate the Property
before the eleventh day after the date of receipt of the notice, Ms. Berwanger
will be entitled to the recovery of her attorney’s fees, costs and expenses
incurred in connection with TFA’s wrongful failure to vacate the Property. You
are expressly informed that Ms. Berwanger will seek to recover such fees from
TFA through all appropriate legal redress.

On Holloween, your client sent an email stating, “At this time, it is my belief a TFA lease doesn’t even exist.” I’m concluding that your firm wrote the above paragraph because the current lease agreement signed by me and your client states that the organization occupying the space was named “CCF” or, Community Crossroads Foundation.

My first thought when reading this paragraph was that you must be operating under some sort of misunderstanding because back when we signed the agreement, TFA was named CCF. Surely you, as a lawyer, would not purposefully misrepresent the facts in order to seek to disrupt the course of business done at 713 Fargo. However, at this point, I must now conclude that both your firm and your client are acting in bad faith.

The name, “CCF” stands for “Community Crossroads Foundation”. This name was picked by community members on a social networking site for transgender people and was the new name for the 501c3 called “CATS”. However, Cassie didn’t like the name and instead picked “TFA” or Transgender Foundation of America.

Here is a series of emails from Cassie sent to my personal email address:

Note: The following correspondence was attached to the above email given directly from Cassie to me:

You may want to note that both your client and your firm were intimately involved in the naming process of “TFA”. Fortunately, your client gave me a nicely preserved record of your firm’s involvement in the process of the name change to TFA. I, and I am sure many of the others reading this email, will conclude that your firm either knew or should have known the history of the name change when you represented that TFA was not authorized to occupy 713 Fargo.

I also want to point out that your client forfeited attorney/client privileges concerning the above exchange when she knowingly distributed the exchange to a third party.

Let’s move on to the second paragraph in your note:

TFA and its invitees are expressly commanded NOT to remove
or damage any respect either the Property or personal property of Ms. Berwanger
located at the Property. The property of Ms. Berwanger includes, but is not
limited to, all furniture, fixtures and appliances. All items located at the
Property prior to occupation by the TFA and all other items purchased by Ms.
Berwanger for use by the TFA during occupancy shall remain at by the Property.
Any theft of or damage to the Property or Ms. Berwanger’s personal property will
be deemed malicious and accomplished with reckless disregard for Ms. Berwanger’s
rights. Such theft or damage will therefore result in liability of TFA not only
for the costs of the property stolen or damaged, but also punitive or exemplary
damages, for which I have been retained and instructed to pursue recovery from
TFA and all persons responsible. Finally, if Ms. Berwanger or I receive any
indication that the Property or Ms. Berwanger’s personally is at risk for damage
or removal, I have been instructed to solicit the assistance all appropriate law
enforcement judicial officers and judicial officers to restrain and preclude
such malicious conduct by TFA and its conspirators.

In this paragraph, you seem to make several assumptions. I want to acknowledge my utmost willingness to ensure that all items truly belonging to your client is left at the 713 Fargo property. While it was our intention to leave items we do not have receipts and corresponding records for, you can help this process by sending an itemized list of things belonging to your client along with proof of ownership. If during the moving process we inadvertently remove an item proven to belong to your client, I will certainty ensure that it is returned.

Now, I will move on to your next paragraph:

Ms. Berwanger likewise demands that all emails,
correspondence and other confidential information that she shared with Ms.
Cristan Williams and Ms. Berwanger’s personal psychiatrist, Dr. Altschuler, be
delivered to her attorneys. The unauthorized disclosure of medical records
violates HIPAA and repercussions such disclosures are severe. Any dissemination
of such privileged and confidential information as threatened by Mr. Malcolm
Williams in his communication to Ms. Berwanger on October 31, 2009 will result
in immediate legal action to prevent unauthorized publication, for which
all persons participating shall be held responsible. In particular, Mr. Williams
threat in his statement to further disseminate “to the community, supporters and
associated organizations” will be considered the act of the TFA, for which the
TFA and Mr. Williams will be held jointly and severally liable. These emails
were shared in confidence regarding these individuals’ psychiatric treatment.

You are, of course, quite right in that the repercussions for HIPPA violations are severe. Should Cassie’s personal medical professional disclose her personal medical information to a third party without consent, he would certainly be in a lot of trouble.

This paragraph, while expertly constructed, is actually quite confusing to me. Are you suggesting that Mr. Williams is your client’s personal medical professional and therefore her direct correspondence with Mr. Williams is HIPPA protected? Are you suggesting that I am your client’s personal medical professional? Are you actually suggesting that all correspondence that your client just happens to forward to her own personal medical professions is somehow covered by HIPPA? In other words are you, as a lawyer, making the legal assertion that if I, like your client, simply CC’d or forwarded this very email to my personal medical professional, that somehow HIPPA protections would not only prevent my personal medical professional from disclosing the contents of this email, it would also prevent everyone in the world, including you – the very person I’m addressing this email to – from disclosing its contents?

I am completely baffled by the intent of this paragraph. I am tempted to conclude that as a lawyer, you are purposefully misrepresenting and/or misapplying HIPPA protections in an effort to assist your client in halting wistlebowing activities.

To set the record straight, where TFA is concerned, your client has been a donor, is our landlord and was, until recently, was a Board member of TFA. She was removed from her board position for several unethical practices such as threatening that unless she was quietly appointed the “Chairman and CEO” of TFA (thereby subverting the bylaws and purposefully acting to deprive TFA members of their contractual rights) she would administer reprisals. Of course, the letter you refer to was written in response to your client whereby she explicitly states that in her role as our landlord she has a right to monitor which professionals we refer to and threatened that if we do not refer to her personal therapist, she would administer reprisals against TFA.

Of course, you know about some of these unethical practices since she sent both you and me the following email in which she explicitly states that Dr. Altershuler (AKA, “Dr. A”) – the very man you built your HIPPA claim upon – is actually acting in the capacity of a consultant:

I have many emails in which your client admonishes me to not whistleblow. There are many emails that explicitly state the precise repercussions that I and others might suffer should I not keep quiet, circumvent the by-laws, defraud the membership of their contractual rights and knowingly act to jeopardize TFA’s nonprofit status. I suppose that I do not need to remind you of this since she sent both you and me the following email whereby she explicitly recruits your help in calling the very Board meeting in which she would attempt to coerce me into silently acting in bad faith in my role as a Board member and Director in sole service to her personal aspirations:

Perhaps you didn’t know that she threatened to use her role as landlord to “shutdown” the Center unless I kept quiet and allowed myself to be coerced into supporting your client’s agenda. Also, you might not know that she was also the landlord a TFA employee and that she threatened to kick the employee out of the employee’s home if I didn’t keep quiet and knowingly act to support her personal ambitions regardless of my duties. You already know that your client made good with her first threat since you are helping her in her execution of it. However, you may not know that she already made good on her other threat and made her other tenant – the TFA employee – homeless. Your client even went so far as to explicitly state that the reason the employee was being thrown out of her home was because I would not abandon my reluctance to support your client’s personal ambitions over my obligations to our membership, Board and organization.

Of course, I have all of these threats saved as emails and we all know that they are not, in fact, covered by any bogus HIPPA claim.

Now, for your last paragraph:

Finally, it has come to Ms. Berwanger’s attention that a
TFA member, former President, and TFA’s registered agent, Ms. Cristan Williams,
has engaged in cybersquatting by registering the domain name http://cassieberwaneer.com/.
TFA is liable for the tortuous act of its agent. Ms. Berwanger demands that TFA
immediately cease development of such website, which can be done solely for
purposes of defaming Ms. Berwanger, and cause such domain name to be cancelled.
In the event TFA fails to do so, I have been instructed to immediately file suit
against TFA and all others involved in and complicit with such actions.

This paragraph, like your others, immediately raised many red flags for me. First of all, from the context of this paragraph, I’m not very confident that you are using the term “cybersquatting” properly. Had I put up content that attempted to make money off of her name or represented myself to actually be her or pretended to represent your client’s interests, you might be right. You then compound your seemingly erroneous use of terminology by demanding that the domain be “cancelled”. This demand gives me further pause since no domain can be “cancelled” since it just isn’t possible. While domains cannot be cancelled, they can, however, be transferred – which I am absolutely willing to do.

My server records show that other than the generic “Under Construction” page holder, no activity occurred. Since the domain had absolutely no data about your client, I’m not sure how it was “tortuous”. Additionally, you made some rather odious assumptions about my character when you wrote “… which can be done solely for purposes of defaming Ms. Berwanger…” Did you or do you have any proof to substantiate that allegation?

Let me be clear: I own the domains for many of my friends. Should your client want to take possession of that domain, all she needs to do is provide me the necessary information to instigate the transfer… And I’ll do that for free to boot.

I have to say that I am done with your client’s drama and I will likely file a grievance with the State Bar concerning your role in facilitating possible illegal and/or unethical actions. The Transgender Center was the only one of its kind in the world and you assisted your client destroying what it was in what can easily be seen as an act of delivering the very retaliation your client repeatedly
promised by using fallaciously constructed representations of fact and law.

Regards,

Cristan Williams