Papers served.

On September 17, 2023, Leslie Sutton was served with a copy of the petition, a summons to appear, and a requirement to file pleadings within 30 days. A copy is available below or for download here.

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The perversity of the civil so-called justice system is threefold:

1. It reduces mental, emotional, and social harm to a dollar value thus eliminating what victim-survivors of abuse need for genuine healing.

2. It requires formalistic and formulaic pleadings that strip voices away from victim-survivors, requiring neat and orderly compliance with existing torts and statutory requirements that obscure the true scope of harm done.

3. It is a slow, laborious, cumbersome system designed for the adjudication of commercial disputes that fails to see the intersectional nature of ongoing harms caused by racially and culturally insensitive acts.

If filing a lawsuit is step 0, then serving your alleged abuser is step 1 in a long, drawn-out process. At each step, victim-survivors must wait 30, 60, 90, or sometimes 120 days for something to happen in an opaque black-box system that emphasizes procedural accommodation over justice. The system is designed to funnel pre-determined amounts of information at pre-determined intervals to the parties, with the speed and pace of resolution taken out of the hands of anyone involved.

It has taken immense strength and courage to have taken step 1 in this process and I intend to see it through to the end.