November 2022 — The Attorney Who “Helped” Me Changed My Not-Guilty Pleas to Guilty

I was given an apology letter and check, told the case helped set a precedent for transgender rights, and left believing I had won. Years later, I discovered the official record still made me look guilty.

For more than sixteen years, I believed the City of Ames’s apology letter and $1,500 check meant the City had acknowledged that I was treated unfairly after being arrested for using the women’s restroom.

That is what I understood at the time.

I had pleaded not guilty to the charges. Then an attorney came to help me. As I understood it, he arranged for the City of Ames to issue a public apology letter and a $1,500 check. He told me the situation was unprecedented and that the apology letter could help set a precedent so that the next transgender person treated this way would be in a stronger position to sue.

I left believing I had won something important.

I believed the City had acknowledged wrongdoing. I believed the apology letter mattered. I believed the incident had helped move transgender rights forward in Iowa.

Then, in November 2022, I obtained the court dockets.

That is when I discovered that my not-guilty pleas had been changed to guilty as part of a plea arrangement.

I maintain that I did not knowingly authorize or consent to those plea changes. Had I understood that my not-guilty pleas would be changed to guilty, I would not have agreed.

The discovery devastated me.

The official record did not say what I believed had happened. It did not reflect that I had stood my ground, pleaded not guilty, and received an apology and check from the City. Instead, the court record made it look like I had admitted guilt.

That is not what I understood. That is not what I consented to. And that is why this article matters.

 

The Apology Was Not Preserved in the Official Record

After discovering the plea entries in the court dockets, I submitted records requests to Story County and the City of Ames.

I wanted to know whether the government had preserved any record of the apology letter, the $1,500 check, or the contents of the plea arrangement referenced in the court filings.

The responses I received were deeply troubling.

As I understand the records responses, neither Story County nor the City of Ames had records documenting the apology letter, the check, or the underlying terms of the plea arrangement.

That matters because the official court record preserved the guilty pleas, but the government records I requested did not appear to preserve the apology/check context that explained why I believed the matter had been resolved in my favor.

In other words, the record that made me look guilty remained. The records showing why I believed the City had acknowledged wrongdoing were not preserved in the government files I requested.

That is not a small detail.

It made the apology letter and check feel less like accountability and more like temporary paper relief: enough to make me walk away believing I had won, but not enough to correct the official record that followed me for years.

Here are the related records requests and responses:

Records Request to City of Ames

Records Request to Story County

The Complaint I Filed Against the Attorney

After discovering the plea changes, I filed a complaint with the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board.

The Board’s response confirms the central issue I raised: I alleged that attorney Gordon Allen entered guilty pleas without my knowledge or consent and intentionally misgendered me in court filings. The Board also quoted Iowa Rule of Professional Conduct 32:1.2(a), which states that a lawyer must abide by the client’s decisions concerning the objectives of representation and, in a criminal case, must abide by the client’s decision as to the plea to be entered.

The attorney asserted that he had received verbal consent from me.

I dispute that.

The Board dismissed the complaint because the events had happened seventeen years earlier, the attorney had not retained the file, and the Board said there was no independent way to verify what conversation occurred. But the Board also wrote that the attorney’s best practice would have been to have my signature on the document filed in court, or some written documentation of the conversation and consent in the file.

That point is central.

If my signature or written consent would have been the best practice, then the absence of written consent is part of the problem.

I should not have had to discover sixteen years later that my not-guilty pleas had been changed to guilty.