…with love to Joshua Edwards, who also supported me throughout.
“I’m flexible on timeline. My method of documenting everything wasn’t the best looking back. But whose would have been?
I think big picture though, The Speech-to-Text Institute was this group of powerful corps (Veritext, et al.) that came together to propagandize the field and sell digital reporting. They used an outdated industry forecast (Ducker Report) and pushed out information with no adjustment for current industry initiatives (Project Steno, Open Steno, NCRA A to Z). I published about the fraud they were committing. They got sued (Trey Perez), shut down their website, and never bothered to defend themselves in court. Ultimately the court reporter shortage fraud was a little bit of truth, the retirement cliff and localized shortages, mixed with big lies about not being able to fill the gap with stenographers by corporations that had a financial interest in not filling the gap. To this day the fraud claims have not been seriously disputed by anyone of note. The worst I get is people that clearly haven’t read anything I’ve published who want to school me on how the shortage is real. It’s real, but it was exaggerated and exacerbated by the biggest names in the industry to sell digital. That’s the bottom line.
And beyond my role in it, being willing to document and publish what others couldn’t for whatever reasons, I think the story of the people that supported me really should be told. Because in the end it wasn’t just me. There were others that chose not to be named. There were people like Jackie Mentecky that came right out and vouched for the correctness of what I’d published. I owe them all in a way I’ll never be able to repay. To this day, I have people that were duped into legal transcription or digital reporting that tell me they found my stuff and want to switch over to steno. We have people realizing they’re misclassified employees on a scale never seen in this industry. So our efforts have not been in vain. I suppose from a certain point of view we’re winning because the larger corps can’t dispute anything without calling more attention to it all.
So as I sat there over the years documenting things posted online and representations made by the larger corporations in my field, I was creating a record of what was happening that I could testify about it if it ever became an issue.
So here we are. Statute of limitations in New York defamation law has pretty much lapsed. Meaning that a 14-year “veteran” of the court reporting field came out publicly in his own name and said the largest corporation in court reporting was committing a fraud, and the corporations I wrote about let it happen despite it arguably being defamation per se if it wasn’t true. I presume because they bank on the intense stigma and assumed lack of credibility of someone with admitted illnesses/disabilities like mine.
Engaging in a scheme constituting a systematic course of conduct. Okay. What’s more systematic than a bunch of corporations getting together under a nonprofit to spread misinformation about the field? What about the representations made to attorneys that stenographers can’t be found when in fact corporations involved in the STTI Bloc were not really looking for stenographers? Effectively tricking consumers and jobseekers for years. A trick so effective it continues to this day.
“To defraud more than one person.” Well, there are a lot of consumers of Veritext and other fraudster services. Maybe if we asked a few if they were told stenographers could not be provided, we’d have that part down.
To obtain property from more than one person blah blah blah. Money is property. By taking people’s money, telling them the service they want is unavailable, and providing a subpar service for similar prices — it’s pretty much taking property by false or fraudulent pretenses. Maybe they’d take their business somewhere else if they knew the truth of “we want to cut our expenses and keep yours high.” That’s if it’s even true that digital is cheaper and not just an assumption by the finance gurus.
Penal Law 20.25 in New York provides for the criminal liability of people that commit criminal acts on behalf of corporations. So theoretically, if the persons that ordered this stuff were identified, they could go to jail for up to a year.
So yeah… look, I get that an A misdemeanor is not the crime of the century. But isn’t it at least a little interesting and newsworthy that the shortage that many court reporters and journalists have written about at length is actually a crime being committed?
I’m speaking up because, as I’ve documented before, when the women of this profession speak up, they’re sometimes threatened with a defamation lawsuit. Because anyone can sue anyone for any reason, this scares them into silence. I have pro se experiences, so I could probably defend myself in a bogus lawsuit. But you know what? There are still brave people speaking out like the Protect Your Record Project and Jackie Mentecky. So even if you buy wholeheartedly that I’m an idiot, invalid, or just untrustworthy, I’m not alone in my general message. You have to really look away from the evidence in order to not see it.
And this was all done in a strategic way by me. If the corporations respond to my antics, they give us more information, and information is what helped this come to light in the first place. Information is good.
If the corporations do not respond, they are silenced while I am free to build support and fundraise, as well as rewrite the narrative. This is what I’ve done for a few years now, and it’s working, albeit slower than anyone would’ve liked.
If the corporations respond with a bogus lawsuit, I get more information than I ever would’ve been able to through the discovery process and blow this up Streisand Effect style. They’ll also burn a whole lot of money on something I have an affirmative defense to. I got a buddy whose court case on a trip and fall has dragged out over 6 years. My blog would take hundreds of hours to sort through. We’d be in court forever. Game, set, match. The broken system can be used to our advantage.
And every day that goes by, the strength of a bogus lawsuit gets weaker. There are a number of things in case law that point to the inadmissibility of a case that the plaintiff sits on.
And that’s pretty much it.
The more people that echo my claims and point to my work, the less ignorable it is, and the more people we reach.
P.S.
For one of the first times ever, I took down a blog post. The one I took down shall not be named.
But I pose a question to you, readers.
If you wrote something that hurt someone that you never intended to hurt, what would you do?
Does it matter what their relationship to you is? What if it was a stranger?
These are the kinds of choices my writing has brought me. Things I decide in silence and isolation. Things I rarely share.
I can’t help but wonder what the world would think if it could experience these moments in time with me.
Perhaps that’s why I write at all. Captured moments in time that others can experience with me.
An art that court reporters know well.
But is it dying or evolving?
It brings back memories of a night I got punched in the mouth.
If I could de-escalate that, certainly there are a great many things I can convince people of.
I would like to convince you that you will triumph.
That you are special.
And that if there is a way to heal a hurt soul, we should.
