I was sent a screenshot by Gary Purcell the morning it went up. Thorne’s statement claimed that Dale Harmon had purchased the neighboring land specifically to target the community. He claimed the lawsuit was a predatory legal strategy designed to extract money from working families. He called it an abuse of the court system. He said the HOA’s legal team was confident the case would be dismissed.
Not one sentence of that statement was accurate, and it was now publicly posted under the official HOA letterhead. I forwarded the screenshot to Patricia. She read it and called me within the hour. She said Thorne had just potentially defamed me in a public statement using the HOA’s official platform. She said we were going to document it, preserve it, and decide later whether to add it to our claims.
She had her paralegal take a full timestamped screenshot with the URL. She sent Calloway a letter that afternoon formally notifying him that his client had made public statements we considered defamatory and that we reserved all rights. Calloway’s response arrived the next morning. It was two sentences. He said the statement reflected his client’s opinion and was protected speech. Patricia filed his response in the binder and said nothing further about it. For now.
The HOA’s annual general meeting was scheduled for the last Saturday of that month. Gary Purcell told me about it in a brief call midweek. He said attendance was going to be unusually high. Homeowners who had never attended a single meeting in years were planning to show up. He said the mood in the community was not good. I did not attend. It was not my meeting, but Gary called me that same evening after it ended.
He spoke for twenty minutes. I listened and took notes. He said over thirty homeowners had shown up. The normal attendance was eight or nine. Thorne had opened the meeting with his prepared talking points. He called the lawsuit baseless. He said Calloway was confident. He said the community’s water access was not at risk. He said everything was under control.
Then a homeowner named Paul stood up. Paul had apparently done his own research. He had pulled the court filing from public records himself and read the full complaint. He stood up and asked Thorne directly to produce the legal documentation proving Maplewood Estates had a recorded easement for the well. Thorne said the documentation was being handled by legal counsel and could not be shared publicly during active litigation.
Paul then read aloud from the HOA’s own board minutes, the entry from eleven years ago showing the tabled easement motion. He had found them in the disclosure documents Patricia had compelled the HOA to produce. He asked Thorne why the board had voted to pursue an easement eleven years ago and never followed through. Thorne said those minutes were being taken out of context.
Three other homeowners stood up and asked variations of the same question. The meeting reportedly became loud, not violent, just loud and uncomfortable. Thorne ended the meeting early. Several homeowners left without the answers they came for. Gary said Sandra Vail, the property manager, had looked deeply uncomfortable throughout. He said even some board members who had previously supported Thorne were visibly unsettled by the questions they could not answer.