Housing Justice Audit   Systems Study & High-Level Intervention

I struggle with PTSD. Certain sounds make my body feel like my skeleton is trying to jump out of my skin. I find myself avoiding certain things like checking email when I really should do it because of something that might trigger a memory that is traumatic. I feel the hard wood floor I slept on for 30 minutes at a time, a couple times a night, five days in a row when my wife and I had to move unexpectedly.

I'm also self-litigating a case against well-funded defendants who are represented by multiple law firms and attorneys. It's difficult here.

Federal law says that PTSD qualifies for ADA accommodations, but I have to drive into dense downtown Charleston, find parking, walk to the clerk of court's office, wait and manually file multiple documents, take them home and scan them, so I can have the stamped copy to manually serve to all counsel in the case. When I later review them when they show up on the docket, I see how bad they look compared to electronically filed defense counsel pleadings.

That's important when you have exhibits that are detailed, colorful and graphic such as screenshots of websites like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com showing images of our private day-to-day family life, with both myself and my wife in casual, "bumming around" clothes and our old, blind dog Rocket in diapers - which he wears in the house because he's incontinent due to age.

These images were on at least 25 websites advertising a house for rent in a hot neighborhood in a hot city with a housing shortage for around 10 weeks before we even knew about them.

We had given no permission and were not even aware that the property management company had possession of the still pictures that were taken when the previous property management company, Roadstead, did an “inspection”. We knew about the virtual tour, but they told my wife they would use AI to remove us and our belongings. That didn't happen.

I suppose that was a big contributing factor to the PTSD that I did not have before this case started, as it gave a sense of the inner sanctuary of your private life being violated. It was retaliatory, I suppose, since there's not a single other unit that this company Meridian Residential Group has advertised - ever - that we've seen with tenants or their belongings in it. And, believe me, I looked.

When I sought explanations for my nervous breakdown of late January 2026, I learned that when traumatic events are negated by coordinated "Didn't Happen" gaslighting by multiple parties, it compounds the harm because you have to continually relive the traumas just to hold your memories straight.

And, as the traumas keep stacking up, so those memories add up as well, including when I also butted heads with their assistant manager, Stephanie Phillips, multiple times when she tried to bully us by misrepresenting landlord-tenant laws. One time was to get immediate access for an inspection with less than 24 hours notice. She stated the law allowed that, but I knew better. She quit asking.

The other time was when she wrote that they didn't have to honor a clause in the lease giving us a certain amount of notification time to terminate, because they didn't have a copy with signatures.

Well, the property management company that they took over from did, and I provided a copy with our signatures. We had asked Roadstead for a copy with their signatures, but had never received it. Kind of like how we had asked for the replacement blinds that the house needed on almost every window, and that were promised when we toured it before signing the lease. We continued asking for those blinds until, a couple years in, we got an email saying that the owner had declined to replace the blinds.

I suppose you could say it's only cosmetic, but it's another privacy violation in that people walking down the road could easily look in the house. I suppose we could have budgeted for that, but since they said they would pay for it, it was a principle thing too.

These are the things I think about sitting in traffic waiting to get to the Clerk of Court's office.

I also think about how an attorney can just press a button to file and not only is it instantly docketed, but all the parties who file electronically are served at the same time.

And the digital uploads make for crisp looking filings, with clean, clear graphics and with all of the text indexable by Google or other search engines, unlike our filings which are scanned in on what seems to be a old Xerox copy machine like I remember from the second grade. The scan removes all detail and turns graphic color images into black and white line drawings with streaks across them.

And the electronically filed legal pleadings have neat blue text on the right showing they were electronically filed, marking them out as “proper”. One could wonder if it's done deliberately so it's easy to ignore self-represented people's filings.

But doesn't the Constitution promise us equal access to justice? Does it? I keep asking myself that and rereading it. Then I read the National Center for Access to Justice report stating that there are 46 states that offer better access to justice by self-represented parties than South Carolina. Can't we do better?

I thought about the constitutional issues when Beth Atkins, who is an admin assistant to Chief Administrative Judge Van Slambrook, mischaracterized an all-parties copied communication (about the need to keep my wife and I safe with certain court actions) as “ex parte”, which means improperly leaving parties out of a communication. Which was most decidedly not the case. Did she think I didn't know what "ex parte" meant? It was chilling as if to say “you aren’t welcome here”, which feels like the overriding theme of how Charleston’s Court of Common Pleas responds to parties who decide to file without an attorney.

Why would we need to be kept safe? We had made filings documenting the "false narrative captured system" we are dealing with, and the growing risk of the whistleblower role I found myself in as the captured or connected systems ensnared by the "didn't happen" false frame narrative revealed themselves one at time to include:

• IPG Insurance
• Phelps Dunbar LLP. a $400M/year law firm,
• Resnick & Louis, P.C., a law firm with 27 offices,
• IPG Insurance Company
• Hiscox Insurance Company
• the SC Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation (so far, we'll see if they take the PMIC license of a property manager who allegedly did these things.
• The Charleston County Sheriff's Office
• Charles S. Altman, Jonathan S. Altman, and the Altman family's various property-holding entities
• The Post and Courier
• The Mayor's Office
• The Peninsula of Charleston luxury senior living community
• (at least some aspects of)The Charleston, SC Court of Common Pleas

And if I thought then that there was a need for change, certainly know it now.

There is no access to justice for the vulnerable because the system is designed to prevent it.

And not only to not give people what they ask for … similar to how the housing situation we were in seemed designed to not give us what we asked for in terms of things we were promised like blinds, or things you would naturally expect, like being treated professionally rather than being lied to about what the law is, or being spoken to like an adult rather than getting a gaslighting email from someone you had never met before, whose husband you just spoken with about air conditioning issues, - an email that stated that I should not talk to Adam about lease obligations because he's “only in maintenance”.

That seemed really odd since I could read for myself on his LinkedIn page and the bio on the Meridian Residential Group website that he's a co-founder with his wife Tara Bayles, and in client acquisition.

Fast forward from that email of September 6, 2024 to just after the forced move.

One of the trauma triggers began when I thought an air conditioner bearing had gone bad in the house we had to move into on short notice - a house that was already furnished, although we already had plenty of our own furniture. We felt we had to pick the first and only house we looked at because our SUV had been in the shop with electrical gremlins until just 10 days before we had to move.

Remember this is an unplanned move we didn't ask for.

Back to that sound: In that overcrowded house, where initially we couldn’t even walk through the living room which was stacked nearly to the ceiling wall-to-wall, what I thought was an air conditioner bearing making this squeaking noise – grating like fingers on a chalkboard - was our poor old blind dog, Rocket, whimpering for hours because in that unfamiliar environment, he had gotten stuck under a couch and was hurt and terrified, unable to move, with this heavy weight pressing on him.

That was not an issue at 181 Gordon Street, where he had gradually grown more blind over the last three and a half years, which is about 24 years in dog years, but was still happy and well-adjusted because we had set up the house to accommodate him. We built routines around his disabilities.

Well, I should state that he was happy and well adjusted before the move, but not so much after.

Other triggers for the PTSD getting so bad was having to relive the trauma of having to move against your will in a heat wave where two dates were 114-degree heat index, without adequate planning, and feeling kind of shit on because we knew that their excuse of “owner wanting renovations” was a lie, since they immediately started showing the house to prospective tenants - before we even moved out.

I remember July 15 because that was the same day they did the virtual tour shoot for which my wife was promised that our images would be removed. It would be natural to ask “If you are renovating the house, why wouldn’t you do an expensive virtual tour shoot AFTER the renovation?” And that same day, they scheduled a tour of the house …. that we had to get out of so they could “do renovations”.

So I wrote an email a couple of days later asking why, adding that we hadn't been late on rent in the five and a half years we've lived there - not one single time.

No answer.

I found out later that just two days after that email of July 17, 2025, they moved the rent price from $3050 a month to $5276 a month. And a week later it was taken off the market - although the ad stayed up with our images in it that I found months later.

So, we moved. Rocket was traumatized, but at least we're getting our deposits back, right? A month comes and goes, but no deposit return. So I email Tara Bayles asking for it. But I don't get the deposit in return. Instead, I get an image of a fake postal stamp as an explanation that they were already sent in time, with “..the checks were mailed August 28, 2025” and “I do not control USPS processing times.”

I should note that the scan of the checks and the envelope Tara attached had an interesting file name: Meridian Scanner_20250905_161321.pdf. As can be seen on Rocket’s Fight, this was attached to an email dated Fri 9/5/2025 4:30 PM. Observant readers might take note of something interesting about that file name and the claim as to when the checks it scanned were mailed.

That's when I made a larger demand, and was told speak to their lawyer. I filed suit. Later that evening I heard from a lawyer - since Tara did not actually give me a lawyer's name, she just gave me a firm. But Eric Pettis really didn't do much, because he disappeared off the scene about a month later after going dark once I filed a motion to disqualify him, because he's representing naturally adverse parties - and that made no sense.

Then things really started. I got to meet Justine Tate, Kevin O'Brien and Alicia Bolyard, all of whom harassed me, gaslit me, misled me, and treated me with a level of contempt as if I were beneath their consideration as a human being. It had nothing to do with professional respect.

I don't know who they thought they were dealing with because I have a skillset of a strategic litigation consultant, through my business consulting work with systems thinking, and I also have the skillset of a PR oriented litigation consultant for controlling public narrative - only really probably even better because I'm the inventor of the platform called Strategic Thought Leadership and the accompanying STL Schema that trains AI in it so that new paradigms naturally propagate.

I was starting to sense that the whole system was against me when I got a letter from Judge Jennifer McCoy telling me to not file any more suggested judge orders, and that the court would ask for them, and that hearings would be set for those three motions.

This is the same Judge McCoy who made sure we didn't have two particular hearings, with continuances made under clearly documented false pretenses. I even documented those false pretenses for her, and made sure she could see them, in a motion that first time it happened, and she ignored that filing and gave the continuance the defense lawyers asked for while lying to her by stated we had consented. We had conditionally consented, but they rejected those conditions, which means there was no consent.

That was a hearing that was going to be December 19. It's now May 19, and we still have not had a hearing. We're supposed to in 10 days. I don't trust it. I've seen how the court works now and not only have I seen it, I've documented it and not only have I documented, I've analyzed it as a system so the world can see that this is a system designed to harm the people it's supposed to serve, the vulnerable. And it makes it a crappy system for everybody to use, because that generates what my friend, the great systems thinker John Seddon, calls “failure demand”, the work you have to do because you didn't do something right to start with.

When the system obstructs innocent people who ask it for simple justice from getting it - so they have to file motions not only overcoming the obstruction, but also motions documenting the harassing and blockading tactics used by court staff themselves, along with these defense lawyers they collude with, to make sure you don't get justice, you get work piled upon work. And the court then blames us for the excessive filings their own system generated.

And there hasn't been a minute of accountability yet.

We'll see what Judge Wheeler does, but I'm not that hopeful given that I asked him a good week and a day ago to do some things ahead of this hearing that should have been done a long time ago. One of them is to grant a motion for leave to file a Second Amended Complaint - the one I had to file after I discovered the image publication after already filing the one Amended Complaint the court grants without having to ask permission. But, per SC law, that permission is “freely given when justice so requires”. Yet, it sat unopposed on the docket for 179 days, at which point defense counsel Kevin O’Brien finally filed an opposition, after I sent a preview version of the Petition for Writ of Mandamus I was filing with the SC Supreme Court, which documented how outlandish that age was in the context of a type of motion that was sometimes granted same-day and almost always within a month. Now it's about 209 days old. Are you going to even take an opposition filed 179 days late seriously? What does that say to even give it any credibility when it's coming from what the court calls “unclean hands”? Defense is clearly documented as such, except they’re court approved unclean hands.

So court approved obstruction is okay, and court approved waste is okay.

We've got a broken system that almost broke me simply for asking it for justice.

I'm very glad I turned it into system study and intervention because if there was ever a system that needed intervening in, this is it.

I'm still wondering when my ADA accommodations are coming. I think it's on day 110 tomorrow, and maybe only eight days since Wheeler knew about it, but that's not something you need a hearing for. It's something mandated by federal law. It’s automatic, but it probably isn't as automatic when by giving it, the court acknowledges it participated in giving you a nervous breakdown for asking for justice - for using it for the purpose for which it was allegedly designed, for expecting there to be the equal access to justice the constitution guarantees.

And there's no excuse because I've removed the variable the culture seems to default to about “pro se” or self-represented parties: disorganized incompetence that creates a hassle the court has to deal with. That’s not the case here - defense must have felt my filings were too good to not be a lawyer because they accused me of using AI immediately, with no evidence, and they made a filing about it that we call the “AI Paranoia Motion I” – a filing that misquoted South Carolina Supreme Court stance on AI and asked the court to force us to arduously document such use at every step..

Of course, there were no repercussions for these lawyers.

Nearly everybody uses AI on some level because you can’t get away from its integration in search engines now … but if they were implying I'm AI dependent, they demonstrated their own lack of competence because a simple docket check would have revealed a demonstration of my litigation competence - using Strategic Thought Leadership then as I do now - from 2020-2021, which is before ChatGPT came out.

That case’s defendants included their own client, SAC 181, the house-holding LLC shell Charles S. Altman is Registered Agent of.

That’s the same Charles S. Altman who is a law and real-estate insider, connected to the local media blackout of this case through his family having a financial relationship to the Peninsula of Charleston multi-billion-dollar luxury senior living project which is owned by a partnership including Evening Post Industries – the parent company of the Post and Courier.

His nephew, Jonathan S. Altman, is a financial beneficiary of the house as well, and Jonathan advises Mayor Cogswell on affordable housing from his seat on the Homeownership Initiative Commission.

That Second Amended Complaint, which has a thorough set of exhibits documenting evidence of misdeeds like the misrepresentation of the reason for the eviction, the mass syndicated distribution of private images without consent, the falsified postmark, the mishandling of corporate records, and the pattern evidence of public reviews of Meridian Residential Group, LLC. That pattern evidence includes the categories of Systematic Financial Exploitation, Communication Failures and Avoidance, Maintenance Neglect Creating Unsafe Conditions, Retaliatory and Punitive Conduct, Corporate Culture Evidence, and Tara Bayles Personal Involvement.

Speaking of pattern evidence, the filing references a 2018 Indeed review stating management “made me feel like it was my job to ‘trick’ the resident so the company could make more money”. Meridian took over from Roadstead - per the January 5 2025 email – in December 2023. That email stated “The owner is aware”.

That “owner”, Charles S. Altman, is added as an individual defendant in the Second Amended Complaint we filed a “freely given when justice so requires” Motion for Leave for on October 24, 2025.

I’ve got a hard, gnawing feeling about this upcoming May 28, 2026 hearing.

How can we even have a meaningful hearing without the Second Amended Complaint in front of the Court?

And how can I be expected to keep participating in a system that creates a nervous breakdown and 76/80 PCL-5 “extreme” PTSD score then refuses to grant the Federally mandated ADA accommodations for the injury they created for over 110 days?

I’m going to keep participating in the system because I’m not just standing up for myself and my family. I’m standing up for everyone in this housing-crisis ridden city who is victimized by a system that has been hijacked for wealthy developers at everyone else’s expense.

And I have the skillset to do a system intervention to change things for the better. Which makes me responsible to do so when I see such injustice and can do something about it. I am.

If you are suffering from the housing crisis, I am here for you. I have to show it can be done, and I have to show the world how this system works so we can fix it together. I’m not stopping, so I just need to survive this until it gets to a jury trial. That sounds crazy, I know, to worry about “surviving” litigation. But I am serious.

But maybe there are a few people on the inside who similarly revere the principles of Justice and Equity at the heart of the legal system. I know of at least one, Judge Van Slambrook, but he’s surrounded by gatekeepers.

Maybe one or two others will see that there’s a better way and that a system designed from the point of view of the Most Vulnerable Member (MVM) is a better system for everyone who participates in it. But how could they partner with me to make change when I’m involved in active litigation?

They can. I am creating a guide for that positive change that enables someone to partner with me in making things better without having to interact with me even once.

It’s called the Housing Justice Audit and Intervention. Maybe Charles S. Altman will read it whenever he’s added as an individual to the case, if the “freely given” leave is ever granted for the Second Amended Complaint.

I'm not holding my breath.