The $30,000 Lawsuit We Decided NOT to File Against Monroe (And Why)
Guess what? As much as we hate AI, we found a use for it—and it's something that can also help keep you safe from fascists & weirdos.
As you know, occasionally The Monroe Gazette has to sue a municipality or state agency to get the documents we requested.
On our docket this year is the New York State Department of Health, which for over two years has withheld documentation of South Blooming Grove’s municipal water infrastructure crisis.
We also have not one but two FOIL lawsuits against the Village of South Blooming Grove that are pending.
The bigger one, Index No. EF012691-2025, is still waiting to be heard. I need that case to be completed before I can file the federal lawsuit against South Blooming Grove.
So, if you’re reading The Monroe Gazette and saying, “B.J., when are you going to file the Ku Klux Klan Act lawsuit against Joel Stern and Isaac Ekstein?”
The answer is: “As soon as Mendelson, B.J. vs. Village of South Blooming Grove et al. is heard.”
Our judge, Mary Anne Scattaretico-Naber, has not yet set a date. We don’t blame her. If you look up this court case, the number of exhibits is kind of wild. It’s going to take any reasonable person time to read through everything we submitted. Of course, if the judge wants to see evidence of South Blooming Grove’s shady, unethical, and unlawful behavior, she could also just take a peek at the other decisions that have been rendered against the Village so far.
If we are successful in court, I believe we will have further evidence to support my claim of a conspiracy. One designed by Stern and Ekstein to deprive citizens of South Blooming Grove of their equal protection under the law by preventing them from voting in a free and fair election in 2024 and 2025.
(As a reminder, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, is well aware of this conspiracy and has, as of this writing, still not done a damn thing about it.)
We also have an incredibly strong case against the Town of Monroe, but I’m going to file that one in small claims court. The reason is a little complicated, so let me explain…
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It’s Small Claims Court For Monroe
FOIL lawsuits cost municipalities money.
So, a responsible journalist like yours truly will make every effort I can to avoid having to sue them. With South Blooming Grove, we’ve—again and again and again—been left with no choice. These lawsuits, in fact, represent some of the (very little) repercussions Stern and Ekstein have faced since taking over the village in another potentially fraudulent election.
If I were to sue the Town of Monroe, that’s easily $30,000—to start—that the Town would then have to come up with to pay for.
Meaning if you live in the Town, you would pay for the lawsuit, which is again another reason to never cheer on convicted felon Tim Mitts when he talks about his lawsuits against the Town.
Let’s be clear: I don’t want to do this.
I just want the money the Town of Monroe demanded we pay, $250 or so, in order for them to have an IT professional gather two years’ worth of Tony Cardone’s Internet search history while using Town computers.
Don’t you want to know what kind of weird old man boomer porn the current interim village manager of Walden was looking at on your dime?
We do!
The Town of Monroe never delivered—and to this day has STILL NOT DELIVERED—these files which it collected a little under a year ago.
Since that time, the Town—despite our best efforts to find resolutions through the Town's new legal counsel, who have adopted the bold strategy of just not replying to emails from attorneys—has been completely and consistently in violation of New York State's FOIL law since August 2025
The Do It Yourself Lawsuit (Thanks to AI)
In my new book, How to Protect Yourself From Fascists and Weirdos — which you can read here for free — I mentioned that you can use LLMs (Large Language Models) like Claude and ChatGPT as a STARTING POINT, but not an end point, in creating and filing lawsuits of your own.
Since I’ve never filed something in small claims court before, and because suing someone in small claims court is one of the ways you can unveil the identity of someone harassing you on the internet, I thought I’d try to do it using Anthropic’s Claude.
This way, I can document the process here on The Monroe Gazette, and if some doofus in the Monroe Matters Facebook Group or Families of Woodbury starts talking shit about you using an anonymous account, for example, you can literally copy and paste what I did and file a small claims court lawsuit against them to get Meta (Facebook’s Parent Company) to cough up their identity.
Or so the hypothesis goes anyway.
Now, if after reading this, the Town of Monroe wants to give the $250 back to The Monroe Gazette, I won’t file the lawsuit in small claims court. I’ll just go through the motions, show you what I did with AI—and more importantly, what you need a professional for, if anything.
I think this is going to be an important skill to have when dealing with fascists & weirdos, because lawyers are expensive, and sometimes you get some crazed Nazi like Jay Westerveld or Convicted Felon Tim Mitts, that are annoying, but prohibitively expensive to sue.
But. There’s nothing saying, in lieu of hiring a fancy attorney, that you couldn’t use AI to generate at least the beginnings of the lawsuit, and maybe even file a few lawsuits after checking your work with some friendly legal professionals. (Because there is no replacing a human.) That would put an end to the anonymous, and not so anonymous, people who think they can say whatever they want without getting (metaphorically) punched in the mouth.
Those days are over, friends.
Won’t you join us as we show you how to do that?