I thanked Gary. I documented the call. I added it to volume two. The newspaper article was a small stone dropped in still water. The ripples moved faster than I expected. By the second week after publication, three separate Maplewood Estates homeowners had contacted Patricia’s office independently. They were not hostile. They were frightened.
They wanted to understand what the lawsuit meant for their property values. They wanted to know if their homes could lose water service. Patricia could not advise them directly. They were not her clients, but she confirmed the lawsuit was real and the documents were public record. One homeowner, a woman named Diane, had lived in Maplewood Estates for eight years.
She told Patricia’s receptionist that she had never been informed about any water-rights issue when she purchased her home. She said her real-estate disclosure documents had made no mention of it. She asked if that was something she should be concerned about. Patricia flagged that call for me immediately because Diane had just introduced a dimension we had not yet fully explored.
If the HOA had known about the water-rights problem for eleven years, as their own board minutes proved, and had failed to disclose it to homeowners during property transactions, that was a separate and serious issue. It potentially implicated the HOA board, the property management company, and possibly individual real-estate transactions. Patricia said she was not going to chase that thread herself. It was outside our case, but she said it was worth noting because it added external pressure on the HOA that we had not created and did not need to manage.
The pressure was building from multiple directions now. The lawsuit was filed. The article had run. Homeowners were asking questions the board could not answer cleanly. And the HOA’s legal costs were accumulating. Calloway was not a cheap attorney. Richard Thorne made his first public mistake in the third week. He posted a lengthy statement on the community’s official HOA website.
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.