How I endured a gag order and a culture of silencing, then finally broke free

Hi, welcome to Res Ipsa. I'm Melissa J. Hogan, and today is the Res Ipsa Nota edition-- "the thing itself is known." 

This is where we take the topic related to abuse that we've been discussing, in this case, silencing, and we look at it in the context of specific situations. 

This week, I'm actually talking about my own experience with silencing. Specifically, with a gag order that I was under for seven months and a culture of silencing that existed well before that as well. 

This has been a hard process. It has sent me back into some documentation that was really difficult for me to look at. I hope you will be patient and gracious with the things that I have to discuss today because they were in a very difficult period of my life.

Gag orders, protective orders, and sealing files

Let me start with, what is a gag order? I said I was under a gag order for seven months. 

I'll step back and first talk about protective orders. A protective order is something a judge puts into place to protect some of the record that is in the file. Because our courts default to being open courts, transparency instills trust. So generally visiting a courtroom is open. They're open to the public to come sit and witness what's happening. The records of a trial or court proceeding-- motions, things like that, are open to the public and accessible. With the internet, it's gotten easier to access those documents or sometimes trials are televised.

Federal court trials are not televised and they do not allow cameras in the courtroom, but you can go there and watch. There's actually a couple this summer that I will specifically be attending. Connect with me if you're interested.

A protective order protects parts of the record which could be entire filings or portions that have good reason not to be public. That can come in the form of redactions. Whether that is people's names, people's information, their social security numbers, children's names. So a protective order can go into place to require certain types of redactions.

Also, protective orders can forbid you from doing things and could come in the form of what is known as a gag order. A gag order is more than just protecting filings that are made. It is actually restricting people from speaking or communicating about something related to the case.

People might be familiar with the fact that President Trump was under a gag order during some of his cases because he was making statements that actually caused threats to people that were involved in the case and their family members as well. 

There's another concept called sealing. That's kind of like a protective order over the entire case file. 

There are certain thresholds that have to be met and evidence that has to be provided in order to allow a court, or require a court in some cases, to seal a court file, to be able to impose a gag order, or to do a protective order over portions of the file. There's a balancing test because the default is to open court records and open courts.

My story

Let's get into part of my story with a gag order. Here's the background so we can really talk about the context of what happened and what was really harmful and in some cases not legal and what was helpful and well intentioned.

Some of you may or may not know of my divorce from a personality with the Ramsey Solutions company, Dave Ramsey's company. My husband at the time was a personality there and had a book and a second book coming out. 

Things were coming out in my marriage that had existed, some repetitively for a long time. Some I was just realizing how harmful and destructive they were to me and my kids. I had filed for divorce by this point and had realized that there was a lot of harm that had happened to my children and to myself in this relationship. 

At some point in the spring of 2019, my lawyer receives an email with accusations related to emails that were coming to the company saying they were going to go to the press and, you know, different kinds of threats.

They were saying that was me that I was doing that.

I said there are really harmful and abusive ways in which silencing are used usually include power leveraging, ambush, and obfuscation. I'm going to point out some of those ways that they came into play here.

Three red flags of abusive silencing include: (1) power leveraging, (2) ambush, and (3) obfuscation

So it started with this false accusation that I was behind these allegations even though