Part One of the Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. series
Record Retaliation —
How false accusations, a buried record, and years of litigation
kept Iowa's only independent candidate for Iowa governor off the 2026 ballot.

By Sondra Wilson | Currently being updated on August 28, 2026

 

Table of Contents

 

 

I. The State and Federal Civil-Rights Abuses
That Would Repeatedly Impact This Case

 

At a Glance: How the Parallel Civil-Rights Conflict Entered This Case

2019–2022: The Political and Legal Environment Changed Around the Dispute

Fall 2022–2023: The Dispute Expanded Beyond Reliable Street

Spring 2024: The Two Cases Collided Procedurally

Summer 2024: The Docket Itself Began Documenting the Competing Burden

Winter–Spring 2025: A New Civil-Rights Crisis Created Another Set of Obligations

2026: The Accumulated Burden Reached the Ballot-Access Period

Before the Reliable Street Story: Why the State-Level Civil-Rights Conflict Matters

April 2019–March 31, 2022: The State-Level Civil-Rights Conflict That Would Later Intersect With This Case

The Political Message Was Becoming Broader Than Healthcare

Why This History Belongs at the Beginning

 

 

II. Spring 2021–March 31, 2022:
The Community Relationship That Would Later Be Reframed

 

Spring–Fall 2021: I Thought I Had Found a Safe Community

September 14, 2021–March 23, 2022: The Open Mic and Flier Agreement That Would Later Be Reframed

September 2021–March 22: The Garden and Prairie Agreements That Would Later Be Reframed

March 2022: The Unresolved Question Was How to Pay for What the Garden Still Needed

September 2021–March 25, 2022: The Friendship I Was Led to Believe I Had With Later Defendant Willa Colville

December 2021–March 2022: My Interactions With Later Defendant Denise Martinez

Fall 2021–March 2022: My Interactions With Later Defendant Charlie Esker

March 29, 2022: Two Days Before the Rupture, I Told the Community About My Earlier False Assault Case

 

III. March 31, 2022:
The Sudden Rupture

 

The Meeting Was Not About the Garden

The Decision Had Already Been Made

The Harm Did Not End at the Property Line

March 31–April 1: I Immediately Began Questioning Myself

IV. April 1–7, 2022:
I Tried to Understand What I Had Been Accused Of

April 1: The Responses I Received Deepened My Concern

April 1–4: Trying to Understand What I Had Done

Why I Had Not Immediately Contacted Ms. Colville

April 4: I Asked Ms. Colville to Help Me Understand

April 7: Ms. Colville Told Me She Had Complained

V. April 8–22, 2022:
From Self-Doubt to Seeking Civil-Rights Review

Around April 8–10: I Began to Suspect Something Was Fundamentally Wrong With the Story I Was Being Given

Outside Advice Changed How I Understood What Had Happened

What I Was Beginning to Understand About the Harm

On Defamation

Multiple Scenarios Possible That Only Discovery Might Reveal

On Discrimination

On Promissory Estoppel

On Unjust Enrichment

April 12: I Asked Reliable Street and Lockwood Café for Mediation

Why I Could Not Simply Walk Away

This Was Unfolding in the Aftermath of the #MeToo Movement

Judge Bethany Currie Would Later Recognize the Seriousness of the Reputational Harm

 

 

VI. August 3, 2022:
The Preliminary Case Review Escalated Everything

What Had Begun as “You Made People Uncomfortable” Had Become Something Much More Serious

The Preliminary Case Review Did Not Create My Fear — It Gave It Shape

The Agency Said It Was Not Making Credibility Determinations

I Could See Their Narrative — but Not the Evidence Used to Build It

Then I Looked at the Top of the Closure Letter

The Record Had Become More Dangerous Than the Original Accusation

 

 

VII. The Case Record:
How a Civil-Rights Complaint Became Years of Litigation 
and Eventually Collided With an Iowa Election

Part One: Record Retaliation — Where the Record Begins

Part Two: Iowa's Civil-Rights Trap — The Procedural Branch

Part Three: Political Sabotage — The Evidentiary Branch

Part Four: Procedural Bombardment — The Civil-Rights Trap Becomes a Judicial One

Part Five: Sudden Reversal — The Court Invited Evidence, Then Withdrew the Opportunity to Present It

Part Six: Plausible Deniability — A Fragmented Record Passes to a Third Judge

Part Seven: Dangerous Precedent — The Remaining Dispute Becomes a Public Civil-Rights Question

Part Eight: Election Interference — Wilson v. Pate

 

 

Support the Work Behind the Record

 

 

How to Help Without Contributing Money

 

 

Endnotes

 

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I. The State and Federal Civil-Rights Abuses
That Would Repeatedly Impact This Case

The immediate events described in this section occurred primarily at the State level. The federal dimension would emerge later—and it did not arise simply because I decided to take on another lawsuit.

In February 2025, Iowa enacted Senate File 418, removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, with the law scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2025. [10] Before that effective date arrived, I went to federal court seeking prospective relief, including an injunctive protective order, because I believed the impending change threatened rights and protections that directly affected me.

That effort became Wilson v. Trump et al. It therefore added another set of legal obligations during the same period in which the Reliable Street litigation was already demanding substantial time and attention.

That overlap matters later when the accumulated litigation burden is characterized as though it were simply the foreseeable product of lawsuits I voluntarily chose to pursue. The chronology tells a more complicated story: some of those proceedings arose in response to new government actions occurring while this case was already underway—including my 2025 attempt to obtain federal injunctive relief before Iowa's removal of gender-identity protections took effect.

That history, and the concrete ways it affected this case, are documented later in the series.

The following timeline provides a brief roadmap of those intersections. Afterward, I return to the political and civil-rights environment in which the earliest events of this case unfolded.

At a Glance:
How the Parallel Civil-Rights Conflict Entered This Case

 

The events described below did not remain outside the Reliable Street litigation. Over time, they repeatedly entered its procedural history—through overlapping filing deadlines, judicial-assignment and recusal disputes, requests for additional time, later characterizations of those requests as delay, and eventually the ballot-access dispute now before the Iowa Supreme Court.

2019-2022 — The political and legal environment changed around the dispute

 

After the Iowa Supreme Court recognized protections against discriminatory Medicaid exclusions in Good, Iowa enacted a new statutory exclusion. In November 2021, Polk County District Judge William P. Kelly later held that the renewed exclusion was “discriminatory and unconstitutional” and violated both the Iowa Constitution and the Iowa Civil Rights Act. The State appealed while my own medical treatment was being disrupted, and political messaging concerning transgender people was simultaneously broadening beyond healthcare into arguments about women's spaces and social legitimacy.

That environment matters here for two distinct reasons. First, it shaped the social force of an accusation that a transgender woman had “violated a woman's space.” Second, I was already gathering the factual and legal material that would eventually become part of Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa. Whether any undisclosed political pressure, direction, communication, or influence affected the Iowa Civil Rights Commission's handling of my particular complaint is a separate factual question that I do not assume here; later installments examine what the documentary record does—and does not—establish.

Fall 2022-2023 — The dispute expanded beyond Reliable Street

 

As I sought to understand the ICRC process, I also began examining older criminal-court records from 2006–2009 and discovered matters I believed had not been disclosed to me when those proceedings occurred. At the same time, what I understood from the ICRC's public-facing process increasingly conflicted with the procedural barriers and case law I was encountering while trying to obtain and challenge the agency record.

Those two lines of inquiry eventually produced separate legal claims. Because statutes of limitation and filing deadlines were running, I ultimately filed Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. and Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa within a short period of one another. The later series explains why, from my perspective, simply allowing either set of claims to expire was not a realistic or safe option.

2026 — The accumulated burden reached the ballot-access period

 

By the time I was gathering signatures for governor, these were no longer separate historical episodes. The Reliable Street litigation, the unresolved State and federal civil-rights disputes, continuing efforts to reconstruct the record, and mandatory court obligations were consuming the same finite period Iowa law provided for reaching voters and qualifying for the ballot.

That collision became Wilson v. Pate. The district court later characterized the underlying litigation burden as ordinary, foreseeable, and voluntary. [12] This series is intended to test that characterization against the chronology itself.

The recurring question throughout this series is therefore not simply whether I filed lawsuits. It is why each proceeding arose, what outside events required a response, what the contemporaneous filings show I was doing, and whether burdens created by those events can fairly be called voluntary merely because I attempted to preserve my rights—and, in some instances, the rights and safety of other Iowans—in response to them.

 

 

Before the Reliable Street Story:
Why the State-Level Civil-Rights Conflict Matters

 

The Reliable Street and Lockwood Café case did not begin with conflict. It began with months of friendship, trust, collaborative work, and project arrangements that were openly discussed, approved, and carried out with the knowledge of people responsible for the property. 

That history mattered to me for reasons extending far beyond the projects themselves.

As described in my Intersex in Iowa series, I had spent years experiencing homelessness, displacement, harassment, sexual assault, violence, robbery, and other severely traumatic experiences—including being held at gunpoint—as well as public humiliation, arrests, and even an off-the-record warning from an officer to leave the state for my safety on account of being a transgender woman.

Iowa has an extremely disturbing historical record when it comes to severely harming LGBT+ people without substantive due process or any sign of remorse.

And this is not an issue that is merely secluded to the far past. Before the events described in this article unfolded, from Fall 2021 through March 31, 2022—when relationships with the defendants appeared positive, safe, and supportive—recent events happening at the state level had already severely impacted me.

Following seventeen years of homelessness, caused in large part by hostile acts of aggression toward me in direct relation to my transgender status, I was extremely relieved when, in 2019, the Iowa Supreme Court held that Iowa Medicaid could not categorically exclude medically necessary gender-affirming surgery in a manner that violated the Iowa Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against gender-identity discrimination. Good v. Iowa Department of Human Services, 924 N.W.2d 853, 862–63 (Iowa 2019). [7]

Less than two months later, on April 27, 2019, Iowa's Republican-controlled Legislature passed HF766, which included a rider (“Division XX”) creating a new statutory exclusion that effectively violated the Medicaid rights of transgender Iowans. [8] The section reads:

“This section shall not require any state or local government unit or tax-supported district to provide for sex reassignment surgery or any other cosmetic, reconstructive, or plastic surgery procedure related to transsexualism, hermaphroditism, gender identity disorder, or body dysmorphic disorder.”

2019 Iowa Acts ch. 85, § 93 (H.F. 766, div. XX), codified at Iowa Code § 216.7(3).

When I returned to Iowa following years of homelessness, I hoped that the circumstances underlying the officer's 2009 warning had finally passed. I wanted to be closer to my parents in their later years, and returning to college through financial aid gave me a new start in an Iowa that seemed substantially more accepting of transgender people than the one I had left.

As Republican candidates, media pundits, and state officials increasingly used hostile or dismissive rhetoric concerning transgender people, what I had hoped had passed instead began returning to the state and national spotlight.

This prevented me from being able to schedule surgery for years to come. The Good ruling felt like a light at the end of a trauma-inducing tunnel I had been through in relation to the cultural context that existed in Iowa from my early days, and again began to resurface at this time at the state level.

It was also this time that I began gathering research which would later form the basis for the Popularizing Discrimination section of Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa. That research would later become directly relevant at several points in this case because the two histories eventually intersected procedurally.

April 2019–March 31, 2022: 
The State-Level Civil-Rights Conflict That Would Later Intersect With This Case

 

The controversy returned to court in litigation brought by Aiden Vasquez and Mika Covington: Vasquez v. Iowa Department of Human Services, 989 N.W.2d 499 (Iowa 2023).

On November 19, 2021, the Polk County District Court ruled against Iowa's renewed Medicaid exclusion. The court concluded that the statutory provision and continuing Medicaid restriction violated equal protection and ordered the individual coverage denials reversed. 

In his ruling, Judge William P. Kelly found the exclusion “discriminatory and unconstitutional” and concluded that it violated the Iowa Constitution and the Iowa Civil Rights Act. [2]

The State did not simply accept the result.

It pursued appellate review, which directly impacted my own medical treatment.

Shortly afterward, my doctor informed me that my upcoming surgery consultations had to be canceled. She told me that coverage had been halted while the State pursued appellate review and that we would have to await the Iowa Supreme Court's decision. I have not located the administrative directive or other record that would independently establish precisely how that interruption in coverage occurred. What I can independently document is that, on December 17, 2021, the Iowa Attorney General's Office filed DHS's appeal from Judge Kelly's ruling. My July 2024 Amended Petition in Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa also memorialized what my doctor had told me and the resulting cancellation of my consultations.

The Political Message Was Becoming Broader Than Healthcare

 

At the same time, Republican political messaging increasingly presented transgender identity itself—not merely a particular medical expenditure—as something the public should reject or distrust.

On March 3, 2022, Governor Reynolds signed House File 2416, restricting participation by transgender girls and women in female school and college athletics and defining sex for purposes of the Act according to sex at birth.[6]

On the underlying sports-policy question, I do not simply take the standard position associated with the political left. Having gone through male puberty, I recognize that physical differences can matter in competitive athletics, and I have separately explained my more detailed position in my December 2025 transgender policy statement.

But that is not the point at issue here.

The significance of H.F. 2416 in this story is cultural. The political argument was expanding from “Should Medicaid pay for this treatment?” toward a much broader narrative portraying transgender women as men intruding into women's spaces and influencing children.

That distinction is central to this article: disagreement over a particular policy does not require portraying an entire class of people as deceptive, predatory, or inherently threatening.

That broader framing would matter enormously later in this case.

Why This History Belongs at the Beginning

 

None of this is included merely to describe the political climate in which the Reliable Street dispute occurred.

The immediate relevance is that the dispute unfolded during a period in which transgender rights, healthcare, and women's spaces had become increasingly charged political subjects. That context affected how I understood the accusation that I had “violated a woman's space.”

The longer-term relevance is procedural. As the timeline above shows, the same State and later federal civil-rights conflicts would repeatedly intersect with this litigation, consume the same finite time and resources, and eventually become part of the record used to characterize my litigation burden.

That cultural and political context cannot reasonably be extracted from the history of this case without changing the meaning of the events themselves. It helps explain why particular accusations carried the force they did, why I regarded some developments as threatening, why I pursued particular forms of legal relief, why separate proceedings arose when they did, and why those proceedings later competed for the same limited time.

In evidentiary terms, much of this material serves the function commonly described as background evidence: relevant explanatory material that helps complete a sequence of events and reduce speculation about why later actions occurred. [13] It does not, standing alone, prove that any particular defendant acted from political motives, that undisclosed coordination occurred, or that the Iowa Civil Rights Commission was politically influenced. But neither can the documented conduct in this case be fairly evaluated as though it occurred in a political and institutional vacuum.

The political history is therefore neither an aside nor an attempt to attribute motives that the evidence has not established. It is a parallel factual history whose points of intersection with this case can be traced through the record.

With that context established, the Reliable Street story can begin.

The cultural context above explains the environment in which the Reliable Street events occurred. It is not, however, the only reason the State and federal civil-rights history matters to this case. Those parallel proceedings later entered the Reliable Street litigation directly—through judicial assignments, recusal disputes, overlapping filing deadlines, continuance requests, federal stay proceedings, and ultimately the ballot-access dispute in Wilson v. Pate.

Rather than interrupt the beginning of this story with events that had not yet happened, Section VII returns to that parallel chronology and traces, step by step, how those outside developments entered this case’s procedural record.

With the cultural context established, the Reliable Street story can begin.

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II. Spring 2021-March 31, 2022:
The Community Relationship That Would Later Be Reframed

 

And then I met a community in Ames, Iowa, that I thought was different.

Spring-Fall 2021:
I Thought I Had Found a Safe Community

 

For much of my adult life, safety and belonging felt temporary—something that could disappear as soon as another person learned who I was or decided that I did not belong.

Reliable Street and Lockwood Café initially seemed different. They presented themselves as LGBT+-inclusive, community-centered spaces, and the relationships I formed there appeared to confirm that promise.

That impression was consistent with Lockwood Café’s broader public reputation. In February 2023, the Iowa State Daily identified Lockwood Café as one of several Ames establishments regarded by students as LGBTQ+-friendly community spaces, noting its pride flags, welcoming messages, and inclusive media.[3]

The article was published after the events described here, so I do not offer it as proof of what any individual person believed or intended in 2021–22. Its significance is that it independently documents the kind of public identity the space projected—the same identity that had contributed to my understanding that I had found somewhere safe and accepting.

While living only a few blocks away, it was the only café in walking distance, so my boyfriend and I would visit there regularly. The staff was kind and talkative, and my interactions with the people there repeatedly made me feel welcomed and appreciated. As a person living with severe PTSD from the experiences described in the Intersex in Iowa series, finding a community where I felt safe and accepted meant a great deal to me.

Above: Reliable Street and Lockwood Café in Ames, Iowa, the community space at the center of the events that later gave rise to Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al., Story County No. LACV053674. Photograph originally published by the Iowa State University College of Design. Used for commentary and public-interest reporting. [1]

 

September 14, 2021-March 23, 2022:
The Open Mic and Flier Agreement That Would Later Be Reframed

 

One of the clearest ways to understand my relationship with Reliable Street before March 31, 2022 is to follow the contemporaneous communications and events as they occurred.

I attended my first open mic at the property on September 14, 2021. I had heard about the event through Lockwood Café staff, who knew I was an artist and musician. At the time, because the open mic was held in the outdoor dining area and the Reliable Street name had not been announced to me, I initially understood it to be a Lockwood Café event.

That night I met Lyndsay Nissen, who emceed the open mic. During the event, Lyndsay asked whether anyone in the audience would be willing to help set up and tear down future open mics. I volunteered, and she gave me her telephone number so we could coordinate.

For approximately the next six months, I regularly arrived early on Tuesday nights to help set up and stayed afterward to help put things back in order. Another regular attendee, Travis Lala, often helped as well. When Lyndsay could not attend, she sometimes asked us to help run the event in her absence.

The relationship was also friendly. Lyndsay and I would often talk before and after the open mic, and her messages to me repeatedly included expressions of gratitude, enthusiasm, smiley faces, hearts, and other signs of warmth. Over time, I came to believe we were friends.

On September 21, 2021, after attendance at one of the early open mics had been low, I offered another way to help. I wrote:

“YAY open mic!! Lmk of you want help setting up.”

A few minutes later, I added:

“Also I could make a flyer for the open mic if you like. I'm pretty good at that sort of thing.”

Lyndsay responded:

“Awesome!”

In the same conversation, Lyndsay told me that she was sick and would not be able to run the open mic that evening. She then wrote:

“I know! I wish I'd been able to show y'all how to set it up all ready so someone else could just run it”

The exchange is important because it shows both parts of the relationship at the time: I expressly asked whether she wanted me to make a flier, and she welcomed the idea; at the same time, she was discussing teaching other participants and me how to operate the open mic when she could not be there.

On September 29, I sent Lyndsay the first draft and wrote:

“Flyer emailed to you”

She responded four minutes later:

“Yay! Thank you!”

The following day, September 30, I again asked whether she wanted anything changed:

“If you want a simpler flyer without the history stuff just lmk I'll stop bugging you lol just checking in on case you want it changed.”

After she had an opportunity to look at it, Lyndsay replied:

“I like it!”

She then identified a correction:

“The only thing is, it's not Lockwood cafes event”

“It's our non profit”

“Reliable Street Inc”

I made the requested change.

That exchange shows direct review and approval: I submitted the flier to Lyndsay, she reviewed it, approved it, requested a specific correction, and I revised it accordingly.

On October 4, 2021, Reliable Street then posted the promotional flier on its own official Facebook page under the corrected heading, “Reliable Street Inc presents.”

The organization therefore did not merely know that the flier existed. It publicly used the flier to advertise its own event.

The friendliness and appreciation continued.

After the October 12 open mic, Lyndsay wrote:

“Wow. That was something else. So intimate and sweet. Thank you for continuously affirming that we're gonna make this amazing. It's so nice to have another person who believes”

That message reflected the relationship as I understood it at the time. I believed I was helping build something with people I cared about in a community where I increasingly felt welcome.

The next day, October 13, I was still working on the promotional material. I wrote:

“I redid the flyer 8 can send you. Do you want your phone number on the pull tabs or no?”

After I emailed the revision, Lyndsay responded:

“Awesome! Yeah I think people like the pull tabs”

A few minutes later, after reviewing it, she wrote:

“It looks great!”

On October 21 and 22, I then told Lyndsay that I was distributing the fliers around Ames. Her responses included:

“Yes!!!!”

and:

“Awesome!”

On October 22, I specifically wrote:

“Plastered the rest of downtown and Campustown. Got some of west Ames today. Hopefully we get some turnout. Enjoy ur night”

I then added:

“Gave a bunch to students that are going to ‘hang it in their dorm’”

Lyndsay replied:

“Awesome!”

By that point, Lyndsay knew not only that I had created the flier, but that I was distributing it throughout Ames. We had talked about it while I regularly helped set up and clean up after the open mic events. Her messages repeatedly expressed approval and encouragement, consistent with the express encouragement I also remember receiving at the time.

The relationship remained warm after the flier work was finished.

On November 11, I wrote to Lyndsay:

“You're wonderful. I really appreciate the sweet intro you gave me Tuesday. It meant a lot. I forgot to say that.”

She responded:

“Awwwww. I meant it”

These exchanges mattered to me because they did not feel like polite communications between strangers. They reflected appreciation, encouragement, and a relationship I reasonably understood as friendly.

By February 2022, my role in the open mic had also progressed beyond simply arriving early to help move things around.

On February 8, Lyndsay expected to be traveling during the event. She wrote to Willa Colville and me:

“Hey you two! I'll probably be in the air tonight during open mic so I hope it all goes smooth. Thank you again for always being so amazing and helpful!!!”

The following day, after I suggested ways to keep performances moving so that everyone would have an opportunity to play, Lyndsay responded:

“Yeah with more regulars coming we probably have to start making it more structured. Thanks for the feedback and caring about making it a good experience for everyone”

That exchange shows the continuity of the arrangement. Months after the flier was created, Lyndsay was still trusting me to help with the event and thanking me for contributing to its success.

The same tone continued almost until the relationship abruptly ended.

On the night of March 22, 2022, after another open mic, I apologized because I had needed to leave before everything was put away:

“Sorry to slip out when you were somewhere - they said they'd put the rest away. Woke up early and need to wake early tomorrow so going sideways. Thanks for a fun night at always!!”

At 12:51 a.m. on March 23, Lyndsay responded with three heart emojis.

Only days later, everything would change.

By then, the pattern was well established. For approximately six months, my participation had been requested, coordinated, relied upon, and repeatedly met with appreciation.

Nothing in these communications warned me that my participation in the open mic, my assistance with its operation, or my creation and distribution of the flier was being regarded as unwanted.

The contemporaneous communications I received conveyed the opposite.

Read the Source Material — With One Warning

 

Readers who want to examine the underlying communications themselves may read Exhibit B — Open Mic and Flier Agreements.

A note before opening it: Exhibit B was assembled later for the litigation and places these contemporaneous communications alongside a very different later characterization of the same events. Reading the complete exhibit now will therefore reveal part of what happens later in this story.

If you would prefer to encounter the evidence in the same chronological order in which events unfolded, I recommend continuing with the article first. I will return to Exhibit B later, when those later representations can be examined in their proper place in the chronology.

If you would rather examine the documentary evidence immediately, the complete exhibit is available at the link above.

Either way, the important point at this stage of the story is simple:

These are the communications and events that existed before the dispute.

 

 

September 2021-March 22: 
The Garden and Prairie Agreements
That Would Later Be Reframed

 

The collaboration extended beyond the open mic into two related projects: restoring and helping manage the community garden, and developing native tallgrass prairie around it.

As with Exhibit B, Exhibit C — Garden and Prairie Agreements also contains later materials. Readers wishing to follow the chronology without spoilers may prefer to return to it when those events arise below.

My involvement began with the existing community garden.

During my visits to Lockwood Café, I had noticed that the garden needed substantial attention. I told Sharon Stewart that I would be happy to help. She and other people at the property already knew that I had experience with gardening, native plants, ethnobotany, and related work.

According to the firsthand account I later set forth in my June 17, 2024 Amended Petition, Sharon subsequently approached me after speaking with Lyndsay Nissen and asked whether I would help manage the garden alongside the Ames High School group Students Helping to End Poverty and Hunger, or SHEPH. Sharon also offered me a 50% discount at Lockwood Café as part of the arrangement and told me to coordinate with Lyndsay and SHEPH president Emily Poag.

On September 21, 2021, I followed up directly with Lyndsay. I wrote:

“Also Sharon talked to me about gardening. We can talk whenever about that. I'm pretty hopeful about that. I was in the woods all the time in California but haven't had easy access to wilderness/nature time since I got back. If that works out for you I'm actually pretty stoked about adding it to my routine.”

Lyndsay replied:

“That would be amazing”

The exchange is preserved in Exhibit C and documents both Sharon's earlier approach and Lyndsay's express approval of my involvement.

As the garden arrangement developed, a second idea emerged.

The area surrounding the garden contained tall weeds, and I believed replacing some of that growth with native tallgrass prairie could complement the garden, help suppress future weeds, and fit the environmental and community character of the property. Before doing so, I discussed the idea with people involved in the space and prepared a written proposal.

On October 20, 2021, I asked Willa Colville whether she wanted to help research and review it. I wrote:

“Not sure if you want to be a prairie research buddy? No worries if not - I have some great links but want to take relevant DIY info into a Google Doc to make step by step and pricing the seeds easy.”

Willa responded:

“I would love to help!! I am very passionate about the prairie, but I am still learning :)”

Later that evening, after receiving the proposal, she wrote:

“It looks great :)”

That was not merely casual conversation about an idea. Willa agreed to help research the project, received the written proposal, reviewed it, and positively evaluated it before I sought final approval from Lyndsay.

On October 21, I then sent the proposal to Lyndsay:

“Sent you an email about putting prairie next to the garden. It's a Google Doc. Thought it would save time in case you don't have time to meet.”

Lyndsay responded:

“Yay!”

and then:

“I'm pretty free tomorrow?”

The proposal therefore was not something I developed privately and implemented without anyone's knowledge. I sent it directly to Lyndsay for discussion and approval.

My June 2024 Amended Petition recounts that after discussing the proposal, Lyndsay gave me the okay to proceed on October 27. She also sent me older site plans created by SHEPH so that the location of the existing garden and surrounding areas could be properly understood and measured.

That same day, the communications show that I was already asking Lyndsay for clarification before beginning work. I wrote:

“Lmk when you send the file so i can get started.”

After she sent the plans, I replied:

“Thank you! Looks like this red area is the current garden:”

and we exchanged images identifying the areas on the property.

I then told Willa:

“Got a YES on the prairie!!”

She responded:

“Yay, congratulations!! Let me know what all I can help with :)”

When I asked whether she could help determine the square footage of the areas that would be seeded, she replied:

“Oh that is awesome! And I am free tomorrow after 11:30 so we could do it then.”

Willa and I then worked together on measurements. The project therefore moved from proposal, to review, to approval, to collaborative on-site planning.

I also continued asking permission when I was unsure whether a particular action was authorized.

On October 31, for example, I sent Lyndsay a photograph of markers in the project area and asked:

“I assume I can pull these pink flags up?”

Lyndsay responded:

“I think those were my pathway markers but yeah”

That exchange may seem small, but it reflects how I understood my role: I was not treating the property as mine to alter however I wanted. When I encountered something whose purpose I did not know, I asked.

The same was true of my communications.

During the fall, I sent Lyndsay photographs showing the cleanup underway and wrote:

“Getting it cleaned up. Long way to go but having fun.”

I then expressly added:

“Lmk if you want me to stop texting you all this stuff.”

She did not tell me to stop.

She responded:

“Nice!”

and:

“Thank you!”

That mattered to my reliance on the arrangement. I was affirmatively checking whether the project updates themselves were welcome, and the response I received was appreciation.

The work also became increasingly integrated into the activities of other people connected with the property.

Sharon asked me to make signage to help organize the garden. After I sent her a photograph of the completed sign and thanked her for the idea, Sharon responded:

“Perfect!!”

I also researched winter composting at Sharon's request, including contacting an Iowa State University composting specialist and exploring whether a greenhouse arrangement could serve both Lockwood Café's composting needs and SHEPH's spring growing needs.

Other volunteers helped with physical work as well. I coordinated transportation of wood chips and mulch for pathways and weed suppression. Willa, her father, her boyfriend, Travis Lala, and other volunteers assisted at different points. Lyndsay participated in discussions about obtaining a trailer to haul mulch.

I kept a shared project record documenting progress and the contributions of other volunteers and sent it to Lyndsay so she could remain informed and provide direction. At a December meeting involving SHEPH members and other people interested in helping, we discussed creating a shared task system so people could see what needed to be done, claim tasks they had time for, and document their contributions.

By January 2022, the arrangement had become even more explicit.

On January 14, SHEPH president Emily Poag circulated the students' preliminary plans for the coming growing season and expressly invited input from the people involved in the project.

Six days later, on January 20, an Ames High School student contacted Lyndsay about becoming involved in the community garden.

Lyndsay responded:

“Awesome! I'm going to put you in touch with Emily Poag from SHEPH and Sondra Wilson. They are taking the lead on the community garden this upcoming season.”

That statement is significant because it was not made to me. Lyndsay was describing my role to an independent third party.

By that point, she was not merely permitting me to perform occasional volunteer tasks. She was telling another person that Emily and I were “taking the lead” on the garden for the coming season.

The description became even more direct the following month.

On February 18, 2022, another Ames High School student contacted Lyndsay about bringing a group to work with the community garden. Lyndsay forwarded the message to Emily and me and wrote:

“I've forwarded this to the folks in charge of the garden this year. Emily from SHEPH and Sondra our friend and neighbor. I'm sure they would be happy to collaborate with you on the project Elizabeth. Take care!”

In January, I was “taking the lead.”

By February, Lyndsay was telling outside participants that Emily and I were the people “in charge of the garden this year.”

That same day, February 18, another exchange further defined what I understood I was authorized to do for the garden. I told Lyndsay and Willa:

“I ordered seed potatoes and huitlacoche spores for the garden and had them sent to my parents' place in Ankeny. Wondering if I can use Reliable Street or Willa's address in case I order something for the garden in the future.”

Lyndsay responded:

“Yeah 4625 Reliable St Ames, IA 50014”

I replied:

“Wonderful thank you”

That exchange mattered to my reliance on the arrangement. I expressly told Lyndsay that I was purchasing garden materials and asked where future garden orders could be sent. Rather than telling me not to make purchases, she gave me Reliable Street's mailing address for that purpose. This will become very important later.

This occurred on the same day Lyndsay described Emily and me to an outside participant as the people “in charge of the garden this year.”

Again, my reliance was not based on one vague conversation months earlier. The arrangement was continuing through repeated communications about what I was doing, what I could do, where materials could be sent, and who was responsible for the project.

The promised Lockwood Café discount was also still being honored.

On March 4, Austin Stewart contacted me because he realized he had forgotten to apply it:

“So I just realized that I forgot to give you 50% off … Next time you come in let them know that I am buying your meal.”

Later in the same exchange he wrote:

“We appreciate all you do and I feel bad when I forget to enter the discount!”

That communication came from Lockwood Café's co-owner and connected the continuing discount with appreciation for the work I was performing.

The prairie project likewise continued moving toward implementation.

When an unexpected financial problem temporarily affected my ability to cover the prairie seed cost, I told Lyndsay to hold off on ordering the seeds.

She responded:

“Reliable can just pay for the seeds”

I told her that I had not intended to place the cost on her or the organization and explained that others wanted to help contribute.

The following day, March 17, the friendship and the prairie project intersected again.

As described in the previous section, Willa and I were contributing toward the prairie seed purchase. I sent her Lyndsay's Venmo information so she could send her share of the money.

Willa responded:

“Love you <3”

The message caught me somewhat by surprise because it was simply in response to my sending her the payment information. I did not understand it as romantic. I understood it as another affectionate expression from someone I believed was my friend.

The context is important: this was not an isolated personal message detached from everything else we were doing. It occurred while Willa and I were jointly contributing money toward the prairie project we had been working on together.

By then, substantial work had already been performed in reliance on the two arrangements. I had coordinated volunteers, researched prairie safety and maintenance, helped develop plans with SHEPH, created shared systems for organizing tasks, researched composting and greenhouse possibilities, arranged materials, and helped haul and install approximately six truckloads of mulch. Other people participated throughout that process. The work was visible, documented, and repeatedly communicated to people responsible for the property.

In the Amended Petition, I later described these as two oral agreements: the garden agreement, under which I would help restore and manage the community garden alongside SHEPH, and the prairie agreement, under which I would restore native tallgrass prairie around the garden. My understanding was that both were intended to continue through the 2022 growing season, with the possibility that the relationship could continue beyond that period.

Whatever legal label is ultimately applied to those arrangements, my reliance on them did not rest upon one ambiguous conversation.

It accumulated over months.

March 2022: 
The Unresolved Question Was How to Pay for What the Garden Still Needed

 

By March 2022, the garden and prairie projects had developed into an ongoing course of conduct involving express approval, repeated permission-seeking, delegated responsibility, representations to third parties that I was helping lead the garden, collaborative planning and labor, purchases and deliveries made with the organization's knowledge, and shared financial commitments.

What had not been worked out in detail at the beginning was how every supply expense would be paid.

As I later explained in my June 17, 2024 Amended Petition (D0020), Sharon, Lyndsay, and I had not discussed the full range of future supply costs when the garden arrangement began. As spring approached, however, it became clear that the project needed more than the students could reasonably afford: deteriorated hoses and buckets needed replacement, lumber was needed to complete the mulch paths, basic tools were missing, and other materials were needed before spring planting. D0020, filed June 17, 2024, ¶¶50–51.

The immediate problem was timing. SHEPH's ordinary funding process required supplies to be requested well in advance, while some of the work needed to be completed before the students began spring planting. In D0020, I recorded that Emily had told me SHEPH had only about $100 available, and I did not feel comfortable expecting high-school students to cover the additional costs.

Some purchases were already being made openly and with the knowledge of people involved in the project. Lyndsay had previously given me Reliable Street's address after I told her I was purchasing garden materials. Austin Stewart had directed me toward a particular product for the rain-catchment system. Receipts and grant information were being posted to the shared project server, including documentation needed for possible reimbursement through the City of Ames prairie program.

One of the larger immediate expenses involved additional 4-by-4 lumber needed to finish the mulch framework. Willa and her father had previously donated some lumber, but more was needed. I asked the group whether anyone knew of a cheap or free source. When nobody did, I purchased the remaining lumber and kept the receipts, with the understanding that some costs associated with the prairie could potentially be reimbursed through the City grant after installation. In D0020, I explained that I was willing to donate what I had already purchased; the remaining issue was how to handle future needs that I could not continue paying for myself.

By March 25, I was trying to get everyone together to make that decision collectively.

The garden group discussed the supply problem in the shared Discord server. Willa participated in that discussion and suggested that, depending upon what could be reimbursed, Reliable Street might need to cover some expenses or “we will need to have a fundraiser.”

Willa likewise remembered the prairie finances as something that had previously been discussed with Lyndsay:

“When we met with Lyndsay in regards to the prairie, I was under the impression that she would cover expenses. I may have misinterpreted that.”

Whatever the precise financial arrangement ultimately was, that contemporaneous statement is significant: I was not the only participant who understood the prairie project as involving prior discussion with Lyndsay about funding.

That discussion also shows what I was—and was not—asking for. I was not insisting that somebody reimburse every dollar I had already spent. When the group discussed the problem on March 25, I wrote:

“If a fundraiser of sorts could happen I'm happy to pay for some it was just more than I would have like to pay and I outspent my budget. That's on me. The results will be worth it.”

And when Emily confirmed that SHEPH had less than approximately $100 remaining, I later wrote:

“I'd like to get bamboo for the cucumber tipis, but don't want to dip into your funds when you only have $100. Hopefully can figure something out.”

In other words, the immediate problem was not simply recovering my own past spending. The project was approaching spring planting, additional materials were still needed, and I was trying to find a funding plan that did not place those costs on high-school students.

I first raised the problem with Lyndsay. When that did not resolve it, I spoke with Austin. Then, on March 30, I asked Sharon whether we might hold something like a plant sale or donation jar to help SHEPH meet the remaining garden expenses.

Sharon responded by arranging a meeting between herself, Lyndsay, and me for the following day.

In 2024, within my Amended Petition (D0020), I described my understanding this way: Sharon acknowledged that I had done substantial work and arranged the meeting so I could give them a tour of what had been done and show what was still needed. I expected that we would either discuss Reliable Street purchasing some of the remaining materials or brainstorm ways to help the students raise the funds.

I was excited about that meeting.

I thought I was finally going to show Sharon and Lyndsay the work I was proud of, identify what remained unfinished, and make a group decision about how to fund the final push into spring planting.

That financial history will become important later.

At the time, I understood these discussions as an ordinary effort to solve a practical problem inside projects I had been asked to help manage: spring supplies were needed, SHEPH had limited funds, I had already contributed money and labor, other people had contributed materials and money, and we needed to decide collectively what came next.

I did not yet know that these same purchases, funding discussions, and project responsibilities would later be presented to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission in an almost inverted form—as evidence that I had acted without authorization, pushed myself into projects that were not mine, and improperly sought money from other people.

The later characterization will be examined when it enters the chronology. For now, the important question is what the contemporaneous record showed before March 31.

September  2021-March 25, 2022:
The Friendship I Was Led to Believe I Had With Willa Colville

Willa Colville has already appeared in this story because she participated in the garden and prairie projects. But my relationship with her was not, as I understood it at the time, limited to volunteer work.

I believed Willa was my friend.

The contemporaneous communications discussed below are collected in Exhibit D — Correspondence Between Sondra Wilson and Willa Colville. As with the earlier exhibits, readers who want to examine the documentation immediately may do so. But because the exhibit also contains later material that has not yet occurred in this chronology, readers who want to experience the events in the order I did may prefer to continue reading and return to the exhibit later.

I first came to know Willa through Lockwood Café. We had initially interacted while she was working there, but on September 18, 2021, Lyndsay invited me to perform at an LGBT+-friendly event, and Willa and I had an opportunity to talk at length outside the ordinary café setting.

We discovered that we had several interests in common, including gardening, Iowa's native prairie, plants, and music. Willa watched me perform and told me that she liked my music.

After that, we talked regularly when I visited Lockwood Café. She would say hello and come over to talk with me. We occasionally spoke on the phone and exchanged text messages over the following months. That friendship also became intertwined with the garden and prairie projects already described above.

Because of what was happening at the state and national level—the increasingly hostile political discourse surrounding transgender people—I also valued what I understood as Willa's genuine concern for what I was going through. She knew about the political fight over gender-affirming healthcare, how deeply it affected me, and how painful it was that my efforts to obtain surgery kept being delayed or disrupted. Given my earlier experiences and the years I had spent without a stable sense of safety or belonging, that kind of friendship and concern carried real emotional weight.

By November 22, 2021, Willa put that understanding into words herself.

During a personal conversation, she wrote:

“I consider us friends and I wanna be there for you in any way.”

She also explained that she had been going through difficulties of her own and had not been very present, adding that she usually kept things to herself because she did not want to be an emotional burden.

The importance of that message to me was straightforward: I did not merely infer friendship from casual conversation at a café.

Willa expressly told me that she considered us friends.

Around the same time, Willa also invited me to a Friendsgiving potluck at Lockwood Café scheduled for November 29.

It was another interaction that reinforced my understanding that I was not merely someone she tolerated while working. I was being included socially and personally in the community around the café.

On December 17, 2021, Willa initiated another exchange:

“Hey will you be around Lockwood at all today?”

I responded that I had not planned to be there but could come by and asked what was going on.

She replied:

“Haha sorry I just wanted to buy your artwork!”

That mattered to me too. She was not merely responding when I contacted her; she was independently reaching out because she wanted to support something I had created.

The same tone continued into 2022.

On February 15, Willa wrote after hearing one of my songs:

“Oh yes I think I heard you sing that one! I love all your songs Goodnight Sondra”

The following day, while we were talking about music, I was conscious that I had been sending several links and did not want to overwhelm her. I checked whether the communication was welcome.

Rather than asking me to stop, Willa encouraged it:

“Billy Joel is one of my all time favorites! Definitely send me your faves :)”

I sent several songs, and we continued talking about the music.

That detail is important to my understanding of the relationship at the time. I was not simply assuming that repeated messages were welcome; I was checking whether they were welcome, and she encouraged me to keep sharing.

A friend of mine had recently died, and I was grieving. Music was part of how I was processing that loss, and I appreciated what I believed was a reciprocal friendship with Willa.

On February 22, I checked in because I thought she seemed upset. I wrote:

“Hey Willa I hope you're okay. I was hurting today and it felt really bad to see you hurting or upset too. Here of you need to talk or not. Care about my friend.”

Willa responded:

“I appreciate you so much”

She explained that it had been a stressful day but things were improving, and added:

“I'll see you at open mic?”

Again, that communication mattered to how I understood the relationship. I expressed concern for someone I regarded as a friend, and she responded with appreciation and an expectation that we would see each other socially at the open mic.

On March 8, 2022, Willa wrote:

“I don't think I'll make it to open mic tonight. Record your song so I can listen!! Please.”

I replied:

“Okay! Thanks Willa have a delicious evening :)”

That exchange reinforced the same understanding I had from our other communications. She was asking me to share something personal with her—my music—and doing so in a warm, familiar way.

This was happening in March 2022, after months in which she had expressly called me a friend and only weeks after she had encouraged me to keep sending music and told me “I appreciate you so much.”

Then, on March 16, only weeks later, we were still communicating warmly about the garden.

I asked her about cucumber varieties because I was preparing to buy seeds.

Willa responded with the information she could provide, then added:

“I am pretty exhausted tbh, I appreciate you a lot. I'm sorry I've been so distant”

I replied:

“No need to apologize. Thanks for letting me know what's going on.”

That exchange did not read to me as rejection. It read as a friend apologizing for being distant because she was exhausted—and me reassuring her that she did not need to apologize.

The following day, March 17, the friendship and the prairie project intersected again.

As described in the previous section, Willa wanted to contribute toward the prairie seed purchase. I sent her Lyndsay's Venmo information so she could make the payment.

Willa responded:

“Love you <3”

That was the last documented exchange in Exhibit D before the end of this period.

Those communications were not the only signs of warmth. Lockwood Café employees, including Willa, also wrote friendly messages, nicknames, and affirmations on my to-go containers—some of which I cut out and saved because they meant something to me.

Taken individually, any one of these interactions might seem ordinary. Taken together, they formed the relationship I believed I was living inside.

I did not merely assume Willa was my friend. She told me that she considered us friends, and for months afterward her communications and conduct continued to reinforce that understanding.

The significance of these communications is not that friendship prevented Willa from later changing her feelings or setting a boundary. It is that no such change or boundary was communicated to me during the period described here.

 

 

December 2021-March 2022:
My Interactions With Later Defendant Denise Martinez

 

Later defendant Denise Martinez also worked at Lockwood Café and participated, to a lesser extent, in some of the community activities and garden discussions described above.

Our interactions before March 31 were friendly.

On December 29, 2021, Denise initiated a Facebook conversation with me:

“Hi Friend!! I can’t wait for Lockwood to be open again. I miss seeing everyone”

That message reflected the tone of our interactions as I understood them at the time.

On January 10, 2022, another exchange showed the same familiarity. Denise mentioned that she would get something for me when she went to the “Mexican store,” accompanied by heart emojis (oddly enough, this exchange would later be reframed, in case you're wondering why I included it). 

Later that evening, I realized that I had hugged her and worried afterward that, because of the pandemic, I might have made her uncomfortable. I wrote:

“Hey really sorry I hugged you. Forgot we were in a pandemic prolly made you uncomfortable”

Denise responded:

“Don’t worry!! I wasn’t uncomfortable ❤️ I’m ok with hug from people I know!!”

That exchange mattered to me because I had specifically checked whether I had crossed a boundary, and she expressly reassured me that I had not. We had been talking at length, and I had considered our relationship a budding friendship, so that was all it was—just forgetting we were in a pandemic, and reacting to the situation in the way that seemed appropriate. 

Denise had also expressed interest in gardening and related subjects. On January 14, I contacted her because a high-school student involved with the garden wanted help learning about indoor sprouting. I asked whether Denise might be willing to talk with her and sent the student's contact information.

Denise responded:

“Oh shit hey yeah I can help sorry it took me so long to answer. I saw your message when I was at work and I forgot to answer 😂”

and then:

“I’ll message her tomorrow morning!! Hopefully I can help ❤️”

When I told her that Willa was arranging a time for everyone to meet, Denise replied:

“Awesome!! I’m excited to help out”

By the end of January, I was trying to create shared communication spaces so that everyone interested in the garden could participate without information having to be relayed through separate text-message chains.

On January 31, I sent Denise an invitation to a community garden Discord server I created for this purpose:

“Here Denise - this is going to work better for the garden group I think”

Denise responded:

“Awesome I’ll join rn!”

She joined the server and participated in garden discussions there.

That same day, I also invited Denise to a separate Discord server I had created for people interested in helping organize LGBT+ events around Ames. She again responded positively:

“Oh awesome! I’ll join rn”

After she joined, I explained that I had created different server roles, including “LGBT+ Community” and “Community Ally,” and asked whether she wanted either one. We were planning an upcoming Valentine's Day event inside Lockwood Cafe and Reliable Street, so everyone in the community was pretty excited.

Denise asked:

“Uhh idk. Is LGBT+ for people that are part of the community? Cause I’m Bi if that counts!”

I responded:

“that counts. that’s what the B is for!”

Denise replied:

“Oh shit you right I was just confused 💀”

I then wrote:

“np glad ur here. I’m stoked about this cuz there’s SO MANY LGBT+ people around Ames and this could be the beginning of a nexus.”

The garden conversations continued into February.

On February 4, for example, I asked Denise whether her family had experience using soap and water or other methods for controlling garden pests. Denise answered the question and explained what her family generally did with their plants.

On February 17, while discussing plans for corn in the shared garden Discord server, I asked Denise about huitlacoche, an edible fungus that grows naturally on corn and is especially well known as an ingredient in Mexican cuisine.

The question did not arise out of nowhere. About a month earlier, on January 10, Denise herself had casually referred to going to the “Mexican store,” using heart emojis in the exchange. We had also been discussing gardening, plants, food, and cultural traditions. I knew very little about Denise's specific family heritage beyond what she had shared with me, and we had not known each other for very long.

During the February 17 garden discussion, I wrote:

“the best enchilada I ever had was made with huitlacoche. Have you had it or does your family grow it?”

Denise responded:

“I don’t really eat enchiladas 😂 it mainly a food eaten in Mexico. My family is from El Salvador which is in Central America 😂😂”

Her response surprised me somewhat because I had not intended to say that Denise or her family were Mexican.

Although I knew huitlacoche was used in Mexico, I did not understand it only to be used there. She had previously mentioned her indigenous heritage which she didn't know much about, and I assumed that huitlacoche was used by more than one indigenous culture in Mexico and further south. But when Denise explained that her family was from El Salvador and apparently understood my question differently, I responded:

“Ah lol okie. I love them. Sorry I’m white af ... and am still learning 🤖”

Denise replied:

“You’re good lol. Actually my mom thinks they’re gross lol”

Unfortunately, this brief moment of misunderstanding would later become important.

Denise did not have as much time to work physically in the garden as some of the other people involved, and she told me that more than once. I understood that and continued trying to include her in ways that fit her schedule—asking for her input, inviting her to shared discussions, and letting her participate when she had time.

In mid-March, after Lyndsay mentioned generally that Denise had been “feeling unheard” and wanted to be included more, I reached out to Denise again rather than dismissing the concern. I did, however, think this was odd, because she had told me she didn't have time.

But because I wanted to honor what Lyndsay had told me—and certainly did not want Denise to feel excluded—I messaged her:

“Hey Denise how are you? Imma be in the garden this week if you want to help or hang.”

Denise later responded that she would not be able to help much because she had a lot going on and might have to leave the country for a while.

I replied:

“No worries.”

I also asked whether she was okay and made sure she had my telephone number.

From my perspective at the time, that was an ordinary attempt to check in with someone I knew through Lockwood Café and the garden project. This was all the context I had for what was to come.

Read the Source Material

The contemporaneous communications above, together with later materials concerning Denise Martinez, are compiled in Exhibit E — Statements and Submitted Materials Pertaining to Denise Martinez.

One brief warning: the exhibit also contains material from the Iowa Civil Rights Commission record that I would not receive until 2023. Readers who want to experience the events in the same order I did may wish to continue with the article before opening it.

 

 

Fall 2021-March 2022:
My Interactions With Later Defendant Charlie Esker

 

My interactions with later defendant Charlie Esker were less frequent than my interactions with Willa Colville, Denise Martinez, or Lyndsay Nissen, but they were consistently friendly.

I first came to know Charlie through the community surrounding Reliable Street. Charlie was an artist whose work was regularly exhibited in the Reliable Street gallery, and I first remember interacting with them while helping set up art exhibitions there, including events connected with the Transgender Day of Remembrance and the Queer Renaissance show.

Charlie was also a close friend of Willa Colville. I frequently saw Charlie, Willa, and their friend Eli together at Lockwood Café, Reliable Street events, and open mics. They were always friendly toward me, and Charlie and the others occasionally invited me to local drag performances which I never attended, partly due to personal finances.

Our most substantial collaboration came in early 2022, when Charlie, Willa, Eli, and I helped organize a Valentine's Day “Singles Mingle” event at Reliable Street and Lockwood Café. Most of my direct communications with Charlie during this period concerned planning that event. We worked together amicably, and the friendly tone continued afterward.

On March 16, 2022, approximately two weeks before I was barred from the property, Charlie contacted me about a performance they had done with Eli and wrote:

“Yesss! Eli and I performed last week Wana see the vids????”

They then joked with me about another upcoming performance.

It was an ordinary, friendly exchange between people who knew each other through the same community. There was no warning in it that Charlie believed they had personally witnessed serious misconduct by me or regarded my presence around Reliable Street or Lockwood Café as a problem.

That was the relationship as I knew it before March 31.

Read the Source Material

The surviving communications between Charlie and me, together with material Charlie later provided to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, are collected in Exhibit F — Esker's Statement to the ICRC.

As with the previous exhibits, it contains material I would not receive until 2023. Readers who want to follow the events chronologically may wish to continue with the article before opening it.

 

March 29, 2022:
Two Days Before the Rupture, I Told the Community About My Earlier False Assault Case

 

Two days before I was barred from Reliable Street and Lockwood Café, I stood at the Tuesday-night open mic and told an abbreviated version of a painful story from my past.

In 2009, while visiting Ames, I had been arrested after a Culver's manager accused me of pushing and kicking her. I have always maintained that I never touched her. At trial, one of the manager's own witnesses testified that he had seen the incident and that I did not touch her, yet I was convicted.

Afterward, an officer approached me outside the courtroom and warned me “off the record” that, based on what he was hearing “behind the scenes,” I should leave Iowa for my safety. I took the warning seriously and spent years afraid to return. My testimony for that case is being compiled here.

On Tuesday, March 29, 2022, I shared an abbreviated version of that experience at Reliable Street's open mic and performed the same song I had played during the 2009 Culver's incident.

I told that story because I believed I was among friends.

After months of involvement with Reliable Street and Lockwood Café—and in spaces that openly presented themselves as welcoming to LGBT+ people—I believed it was safe to share something deeply personal about the discrimination, false accusation, and criminal record that had affected my life.

I did not yet know everything that the old court files contained. I had not examined those dockets in years, and in some respects I still misunderstood what the official record said.

But people present that evening now knew something important about me:

I already had an assault conviction on my record arising from an incident I maintained had been falsely reported.

Two days later, I was told that women had complained that I made them uncomfortable and that I had “violated a woman's personal space.”

At the time, I did not know whether the timing was related.

But I did not forget it.

On March 30, the day before the meeting, my boyfriend and I moved into a new apartment approximately a block from Reliable Street.

The timing mattered emotionally. We were excited. After a difficult period in my life, I believed I was finally getting on my feet in a community where I belonged. I was helping lead the garden, working on the prairie, participating in open mic and community events, and living close enough to remain deeply involved.

So when I went to meet Sharon and Lyndsay the next afternoon, I was not preparing myself for conflict.

I was proud of what I had done and expecting to talk about what came next.

---

 

 

III. March 31, 2022:
The Sudden Rupture

 

The March 31 meeting was the meeting Sharon had arranged the day before after I asked about ideas for funding the remaining garden supplies.

I went into it believing I was about to give Sharon and Lyndsay a tour of the work, show them what was still needed, and discuss how we would pay for it.

Instead, as we began walking toward the garden, Lyndsay told me that this was a “difficult conversation.”

The meeting took place on March 31, 2022—Transgender Day of Visibility.

I had no idea what was about to happen.

The Meeting Was Not About the Garden

 

As we began walking toward the garden and prairie area, Lyndsay told me that the meeting was not really about giving a tour.

She and Sharon said that complaints had been made about me.

The descriptions I remember being given were broad: that I had been “making people feel uncomfortable” and had “violated a woman's personal space.”

That was essentially all I had to work with.

My later Amended Petition, D0020, memorialized the same account: the accusations were alarming and completely unexpected, and I could not identify anything I had done that matched what was being implied.

I knew only the characterization Sharon and Lyndsay conveyed to me: someone felt unsafe, I had supposedly crossed boundaries, and I had “violated a woman's space.”

Even the number of complainants became unclear during the meeting.

In the Amended Petition I later filed on June 17, 2024 (D0020), I recorded that Sharon and Lyndsay initially referred to protecting “the identity of the person who complained.” When Lyndsay disclosed that one complaint involved “Bombarding people with text messages,” I said that the only people I really texted were Lyndsay or Willa. According to my account in ¶61, after I said Willa's name, Sharon responded: “There was actually more than one person who complained.” I wrote that this struck me as odd because the conversation had initially indicated one complainant and changed to “more than one” only after I mentioned Willa. D0020, Amended Petition, filed June 17, 2024, ¶¶60–61.

At the time, I did not know what to make of that change. I did not know whether there had always been multiple complaints, whether different concerns were being combined together, whether Sharon and Lyndsay were trying to protect particular identities, or whether the explanation I was receiving accurately reflected what had actually been said behind closed doors.

I knew only that I was being punished before I had been told enough to understand the accusation.

The phrase “violated a woman's personal space” struck me as especially serious.

Given the political environment described earlier in this article, I did not hear that simply as, someone found you annoying, or someone wanted more distance. To me, it carried a far more damaging implication: that I, a transgender woman, had somehow acted threateningly or improperly toward another woman.

I immediately tried to understand what they were talking about.

I asked what I had actually done.

I was not given a specific incident.

I was not shown a complaint.

I was not told what words I had supposedly used, what boundary I had supposedly crossed, or what conduct I should have recognized as unwelcome.

I was told, in substance, that giving me more detail might reveal the identity of the person or people who had complained.

But I did not need anyone's identity in order to understand the accusation.

I needed to know what I had supposedly done.

I remember trying to think through my recent interactions on the spot. Nothing came to mind. As the communications in the preceding sections show, the people around me had continued interacting with me warmly almost until the moment everything changed.

The Decision Had Already Been Made

 

Whatever explanation I could offer did not change the result.

I was told that I could no longer participate in the garden or prairie projects and could no longer come to Reliable Street, Lockwood Café, or the events taking place there.

The arrangements I had spent months working under ended immediately.

The distinguishing feature of the meeting, from my perspective, was therefore not merely that someone had complained about me.

It was the order in which things happened:

Punishment came first. Specific explanation never did.

I was removed from the projects and community before I had been told enough to meaningfully understand the accusation, much less respond to it.

Only years later would I see Lyndsay's own description to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission acknowledging that their March 31 explanation had intentionally been “rather broad.” In that later statement, she wrote that she and Sharon had already decided to remove me and were trying to protect the identities of the employees who had spoken to them.

I did not know any of that on March 31.

I only knew that a community where I had been trusted with responsibilities, welcomed socially, thanked repeatedly, and described publicly as one of the people helping lead the garden had abruptly expelled me based on an accusation I could not understand.

I left crying.

The Harm Did Not End at the Property Line

 

Being barred from the property also created an immediate reputational problem.

My involvement there had been visible.

People had seen me at the open mics. They had seen me working in the garden. Students and volunteers had been directed to me because I was helping lead the project. I had been involved in events, promotional work, planning, prairie restoration, and the broader community surrounding Reliable Street and Lockwood Café.

Suddenly, I was gone.

If someone asked why, there was no neutral explanation I could give.

I had been removed because women had allegedly complained that I made them feel unsafe or violated their space—but I had not been told what conduct supposedly justified those conclusions.

That put me in an impossible position.

Remaining silent allowed people to imagine the worst.

Trying to explain what happened risked sounding defensive about an accusation I could not even identify.

My later June 17, 2024 Amended Petition, D0020, described exactly that concern: people familiar with my visible role would naturally notice my disappearance, and I worried that the unexplained removal itself would generate damaging assumptions.

March 31-April 1, 2022:
I Immediately Began Questioning Myself

Only hours after the meeting, I wrote Lyndsay.

My message shows how uncertain I was about what had happened. I told her:

“I am not going to keep texting you, but it's in the back of my head wondering if I texted you too much...”

I even wondered whether I had become overenthusiastic after finally finding people I considered friends:

“I think I got excited about making friends and overwatered the relationship (overtexted).”

And I apologized in case I had unknowingly crossed a line:

“I just want to apologize to you in case I did make you feel uncomfortable or upset or hurt or pushed by me.”

I ended:

“I'm really sad. I feel like I'm losing almost all my friends at once with this.”

Lyndsay responded the next morning. She confirmed that the decision was that I could no longer come onto the property and again recommended that I read about boundaries and active listening. But she also told me:

“I know your intentions are good. Your true friends will still be there for you.”

That exchange matters because it captures my state of mind within hours of the meeting and before I began contacting other people about what had happened. I was not reacting as someone who had already decided that everyone was lying or who was seeking retaliation. I was questioning myself, trying to determine whether I had unknowingly crossed a boundary, expressly saying I would stop contacting Lyndsay, and apologizing in case my communications had been unwelcome.

---

 

 

IV. April 1-7, 2022:
I Tried to Understand What I Had Been Accused Of

April 1, 2022:
The Responses I Received Deepened My Concern

 

During those first days, I also searched online for guidance about what a person should do when confronted with an accusation of harassment they believed might be false or based on a misunderstanding.

I remember consulting an article titled How to Defend Yourself Against False Harassment Charges by David Bloxberg. [4] The article advised someone facing a disputed harassment accusation to remain calm, consider whether they might inadvertently have offended someone, collect their own evidence and notes, identify witnesses, cooperate with any investigation, avoid retaliation, and consider obtaining legal advice.

That advice influenced how I approached the situation. I reviewed my communications. I thought carefully about my recent interactions. I asked people I regarded as friends whether I had unknowingly made them uncomfortable. And because I still did not know who had complained or precisely what I had been accused of, I tried to communicate cautiously rather than confront anyone.

I did not tell people that I knew who was responsible or pretend that I understood the allegations. I told them that I had been barred based on serious accusations that had not been explained to me, and that I was trying to understand what had happened.

One of the most important responses came from Emily Poag, president of SHEPH. She wrote:

“that's very strange because I certainly didn't and I'm fairly sure none of the rest of SHEPH leaders felt uncomfortable with you, we all really appreciated your expertise.”

She then asked whether my exclusion meant that I could not even return to help with the spring planting.

That response mattered because SHEPH had worked directly with me on the garden. My involvement had not been peripheral. If my conduct in the project had broadly become intolerable or made people uncomfortable, Emily's response gave no indication of it. Instead, the president of one of the principal groups involved in the garden appeared surprised by what had happened. Exhibit C-15 preserves that response.

I also contacted Charlie Esker.

Only about two weeks earlier, Charlie had been communicating with me warmly and had enthusiastically offered to send me videos of their performance. When I told Charlie that I had been barred because people allegedly felt “unsafe” and that I had “crossed boundaries,” I also explained that I genuinely did not know who had complained. I said that the only person I could think of was Willa, largely because she had suddenly stopped communicating with me.

Charlie replied in part:

“I am not really involved in any of that, but I also do not know if us having a personal relationship is best right now.”

That response concerned me.

It told me very little about the accusation itself, but it showed something important immediately: even though I still did not know what I had supposedly done, the allegations were already affecting relationships beyond the people who had made the decision to bar me.

Charlie was also a close friend of Willa's. I still had nothing in Willa's own prior communications that had led me to believe she had been uncomfortable with me, but Charlie's sudden hesitation made me wonder whether she might somehow be involved.

So I contacted Willa directly—not to confront her or accuse her of complaining, but to ask whether I had inadvertently made her uncomfortable.

April 1-4:
Trying to Understand What I Had Done

 

In the days after March 31, I was doing two things at once.

I was trying to determine whether I had unknowingly hurt someone, and I was trying to preserve relationships with people I believed were my friends before an unexplained accusation defined me for them.

I did not know what Sharon and Lyndsay had told other people. I did not know what the complainant or complainants had said about me. I did not know whether people were hearing merely that someone felt uncomfortable around me or something much more serious. All I knew was that I had been abruptly removed from a highly visible role after being told that women felt “unsafe” around me and that I had “violated a woman's space.”

My concern about reputation was not something I reconstructed years later. In the June 17, 2024 Amended Petition (D0020) I described what I had been thinking during those first days: people familiar with the garden and prairie projects would inevitably notice my disappearance, and I feared that an explanation for my removal would circulate before I even knew what the accusation was. I also recorded that I contacted friends and acquaintances from the space, explained that I had been barred based on allegations that had not been communicated to me, and let people who still wanted to remain in contact know they were welcome to reach out. D0020, filed June 17, 2024, ¶¶ 88–90.

That was the context in which I wrote Willa.

I was not writing from certainty that she had accused me. I was writing from uncertainty about whether she had, fear about what people might now believe, concern that I might somehow have hurt someone without realizing it, and a desire to preserve a friendship if the situation was capable of being understood or repaired.

 

The Accusation Followed Me Home

 

What happened did not remain an abstract disagreement about whether I could use a garden.

I was devastated and confused.

The words I had been given—unsafe, crossed boundaries, women who were uncomfortable—carried implications far more serious than anything anyone had previously said to me.

Yet I had no concrete act to examine.

No one told me that I had touched someone improperly.

No one identified a threatening statement.

No one told me that someone had asked me to stop contacting them and that I had refused.

No one identified a particular conversation, encounter, message, or boundary that I should have understood I had crossed.

So I did what I think many people would do after being confronted with an accusation they could not understand:

I began going back through my relationships in my head.

I thought about my conversations.

I thought about the people I texted.

I thought about whether I had talked too much, misunderstood someone's friendliness, missed a social cue, or unknowingly made somebody uncomfortable.

The accusation also entered my home.

My boyfriend and I were both distraught. We had moved into our new apartment only the day before, believing we were beginning a hopeful new chapter near this community. Instead, almost immediately, our attention became consumed by trying to understand what had just happened and what people might now believe about me.

I also understood how my sudden disappearance would look.

People knew me there. They had seen me performing, working in the garden, organizing projects, talking with café employees, and participating in events.

Now I had been abruptly barred.

I could imagine the question:

What did Sondra do?

And I had no answer.

 

April 1, 2022:
I Began Asking Whether My Friends Still Felt Safe Around Me

That was the state of mind in which I contacted several people from the community.

I was not telling them that I knew who had complained.

I did not.

I was trying to determine whether I had unknowingly hurt someone—and whether people I considered friends had suddenly become afraid of me.

When I contacted Charlie Esker on April 1, I explained exactly how uncertain I was:

“I was told by Sharon and Lyndsay not to come around Reliable/Lockwood anymore because some people felt ‘unsafe’ and like I'd ‘crossed boundaries’. I really don't know who and the only person I can think of is Willa cuz I texted her quite a bit and haven't heard from her in a week. Just trying to process and find out who still wants me around and who is feeling that way about me.”

I then added:

“If you dint feel that way about me I could really use a phone call but I'll stop contacting you in case.”

That last sentence matters.

I was frightened enough by what I had been told that I was already trying to avoid accidentally making the situation worse. I did not know whether Charlie was uncomfortable with me either, so I expressly offered to stop contacting them.

Charlie responded:

“I am not really involved in any of that, but I also do not know if us having a personal relationship is best right now.”

That answer gave me almost no information about what I had supposedly done.

But it showed me that something was already spreading beyond the March 31 meeting.

Someone with whom I had recently communicated warmly was now uncertain whether even having a personal relationship with me was appropriate.

That frightened me.

And because Charlie was close with Willa, it made me wonder whether Willa might somehow be involved.

Charlie's response did not tell me what I had supposedly done. But it showed me that the accusation was already affecting relationships before I even understood its substance.

That distinction will matter later. I was trying to understand an accusation whose source and substance had been concealed from me. The record would eventually characterize that effort very differently.

Why I had Not Immediately Contacted Willa

 

There was another reason I had not immediately interpreted Willa's silence as rejection.

I knew she was sick.

On March 23, I had written:

“I miss youuuuuuu.”

Willa replied:

“I miss you too, sadly I have pneumonia so I won't be at LW this week :(”

I responded by wishing her well and offering to drop something from the store outside her door if she needed it.

And on March 25—six days before I was barred—Willa was still participating with me in the garden group's discussion about how to fund the remaining spring expenses.

Nothing in those exchanges told me that she wanted me out of her life.

Nothing told me that she believed I had been violating her.

Nothing told me that I should understand her illness or reduced communication as an attempt to escape me.

That is why I did not immediately contact her after March 31.

She had told me she had pneumonia. I knew she was sick. And after what had happened to me, I was frightened that reaching out carelessly could itself be interpreted as another boundary violation.

So I spent several days thinking.

I went back through our interactions.

I thought about what Sharon and Lyndsay had said.

I thought about Charlie's response.

And eventually I decided that the only responsible thing I could do was ask Willa directly—carefully—whether I had misunderstood our relationship or made her uncomfortable.

April 4, 2022:
I Asked Willa to Help Me Understand

On April 4, I sent Willa a Discord message.

It was written before I knew whether she had complained and before she had ever told me that I had violated a boundary.

I began:

“Dear Willa,

As I'm sure you've heard, last Thursday I was told not to return to the Reliable/Lockwood property because ‘multiple people’ feel ‘unsafe’ around me because I ‘crossed boundaries’. It was pretty vague and I really have had no clue who said those things, there were a couple things that made me concerned I may have upset you.”

I explained why I had begun wondering whether she might be involved. Lyndsay had mentioned “bombarding with text messages”, Charlie's response had made me uneasy, and I had not heard from Willa.

But I also told her explicitly that her own messages had not led me to believe she was trying to push me away:

“The only people I really text more than others are Lyndsay and you, but after looking through yours and my texts, your responses didn't indicate it was you (neither do her's).”

I then explained something else that was important to me:

“I've been reluctant to text you because I haven't heard from you and frankly I never wanted to nor want to invade your space or make you or anyone feel that way. It absolutely breaks my heart and just hurts a lot, but I've honestly considered you a real friend and I hope you're open to talking through some of it or at least letting me explain because I believe I honestly misunderstood something you said a couple weeks ago which may have caused the abrasive feelings (if indeed you feel this way, which again I'm speculating).”

I also explained why I had believed the March 31 meeting concerned the garden.

My April 4 message also confirms the expectation described earlier. Referring to the meeting I thought I was attending, I wrote:

“I was really excited showing them what had been done because I'm really proud of it.”

Then I described the moment everything changed:

“We walked about halfway to the garden, however, and I was told this was a ‘difficult conversation’. That is when they described the complaints against me and gave me my art that was hanging in the gallery. I was told not to come back on the property.”

Most importantly, I tried to identify what I might have misunderstood.

I told Willa that I remembered her saying she was overwhelmed and overworked, and I wondered whether I had mistaken that for temporary exhaustion when she had actually been trying to tell me she needed distance.

I wrote:

“Although I continued to message you things about the garden and whatnot, looking back on it I'm wondering if you were trying to tell me that you were stepping back from the garden more long-term … If I was coming in too much or texting too much or you needed space and wanted to keep it in the Discord group—I was not made aware of that and frankly I wish someone(s) had been more straightforward with me about any of this.”

And I apologized in case I had misunderstood:

“I've felt so welcomed and loved when I came in I really had no idea people were feeling this way, and if you were trying to tell me you needed more space than I gave then I sincerely apologize.”

I ended by explaining what frightened me most:

“Although I really don't know who else may have felt this way (Sharon and Lyndsey said ‘multiple people’), I feel really misjudged if people feel unsafe around me. I don't know what to say but that really hurts me and my reputation.”

And then:

“Please help me understand.”

That was my message.

It was not written after Willa instructed me to stop contacting her.

It was not written in defiance of an expressed boundary.

It was written before I knew whether she was even one of the complainants, while I was trying to understand an accusation that Sharon and Lyndsay had deliberately left vague.

Remember that chronology. It will matter later.

April 7: 
Willa's Response Changed What I Understood the Accusation to Be

 

Three days later, Willa responded.

For the first time, I received something approaching an explanation from one of the people involved.

She wrote:

“I am not going into detail because I still do not feel comfortable discussing this with you. For months, you have violated my personal space and not respected my boundaries.”

She continued:

“I did not know what to do because I didn't feel comfortable approaching you. So I said something to Sharon.”

And then she wrote something that immediately stood out to me:

“I admit that the situation could've been handled better. If I had said something sooner, maybe things we be different but it is what it is.”

That was devastating to read.

It also fundamentally changed my understanding of what had happened.

Until that point, I knew only that people supposedly felt “unsafe” and believed I had “crossed boundaries.”

Now someone I had considered a friend was telling me that, for months, I had “violated” her personal space and failed to respect her boundaries.

The distinction mattered enormously to me.

A person can become uncomfortable with a friendship.

A person can want less communication.

A person can decide they no longer want someone in their life.

Willa had every right to do any of those things.

But saying that I had been violating her personal space “for months” characterized my own conduct as repeatedly wrongful.

And I could not reconcile that characterization with the relationship I remembered—or with the contemporaneous communications I had just spent days reviewing.

Only weeks earlier, Willa had told me:

“I appreciate you a lot. I'm sorry I've been so distant.”

She had responded to prairie-payment information with:

“Love you <3”

On March 22, she had continued communicating with me about the prairie.

On March 23:

“I miss you too, sadly I have pneumonia so I won't be at LW this week :(”

And on March 25 she was still participating in the garden group's spring-funding discussion.

None of those communications told me:

I need you to stop contacting me.

I do not want you coming to see me.

You are making me uncomfortable.

Please give me more space.

Do not talk with me about personal matters.

You have crossed a boundary.

And Willa's April 7 message itself acknowledged that she had not approached me about the problem and that

“If I had said something sooner, maybe things [would] be different.”

That became central to how I understood what had happened.

The problem was never that Willa was required to remain my friend. She was not. The problem was that I had already been punished and removed from an entire community for supposedly violating boundaries that, by her own account, she had not told me I was crossing.

That distinction became even more serious because the accusation was no longer private.

By the time I finally learned from Willa what she believed I had done, Sharon and Lyndsay had already acted on it.

Charlie had already become hesitant about continuing a relationship with me.

I had already been removed from the garden, prairie project, café, gallery, open mic, and community.

And I still did not know what specific act or interaction constituted the alleged months of “violations.”

I went back through the messages again.

I questioned myself again.

I tried to locate an encounter that would explain the accusation.

I could not.

What I found was the same contemporaneous record the reader has already seen: no communicated request to stop contacting her, no warning that I was crossing a boundary, and continued friendship and collaboration almost until the rupture.

That did not mean Willa could not privately have become uncomfortable. It meant that I had been punished for repeatedly crossing a boundary that, by her own account, she had not communicated to me.

And there was something else I did not yet know.

The April 4 message I had written from this place of fear, uncertainty, apology, and an attempt to understand would later appear inside a government investigative record.

But it would not be presented there in the sequence in which this exchange actually occurred.

That discovery comes later.

For now, the chronology is simple:

April 4 — I contacted Willa while I still did not know whether she was the complainant, because I was trying to understand what I had supposedly done.

April 7 — Willa responded, disclosed that she had complained to Sharon, and told me for the first time that she believed I had been violating her personal space and boundaries “for months”—while acknowledging, “If I had said something sooner, maybe things [would] be different.”

That order would eventually become one of the central factual disputes in Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al.

Remember it.

---

 

V. April 8-22, 2022:
From Self-Doubt to Seeking Civil-Rights Review

 

Around April 8-10:
I Began to Suspect Something Was Fundamentally Wrong With the Story I Was Being Given

 

In the days after Willa's April 7 response, my thinking began to change.

Up to that point, much of my attention had been directed inward. I had spent days asking myself whether I had talked too much, missed a social cue, misunderstood someone's friendliness, or unknowingly crossed a boundary.

But now I had something concrete to compare against the contemporaneous record.

Willa was telling me that I had “violated [her] personal space” for months. Yet when I went back through our messages and thought carefully about our interactions, I found repeated expressions of friendship, appreciation, affection, invitations to participate together, and ongoing collaboration almost until the day I was barred.

More importantly, Willa's own April 7 response acknowledged that she had not approached me about the concern beforehand.

That was when I began to wonder whether I was being gaslighted—whether I was being told that I should have known something that the contemporaneous communications gave me no reasonable way to know.

I do not mean that I immediately knew who was lying, whether anyone was deliberately manipulating me, or exactly what had been said behind closed doors. I did not.

What changed was that I stopped assuming that the contradiction necessarily existed inside me.

For the first several days I had been asking, “What did I miss?” Now I was beginning to ask, “Why am I being told I should have known something that nobody appears to have told me?”

That question led me to begin looking for outside guidance.

Outside Advice Changed How I Understood What Had Happened

 

At first, I was primarily thinking in terms of reputational harm, false accusation, and basic fairness.

I contacted the Better Business Bureau because I had previously seen it help another business develop a nondiscrimination policy after a bad experience. The BBB intake specialist told me that what I was describing sounded like something I should take to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission.

I also contacted local defamation attorneys. Several similarly directed me toward the ICRC because, in their view, the circumstances I was describing could involve discrimination.

Those conversations caused me to reconsider the March 31 meeting from a different perspective.

The issue was not merely whether someone had complained about me. The issue was how the complaint had been treated.

Sharon and Lyndsay had acted on an accusation serious enough to remove me, terminate the garden and prairie arrangements, exclude me from community events, and damage relationships—before approaching me, before telling me what specific conduct I was accused of, and before giving me any meaningful opportunity to respond.

I began to see that as a question of preferential treatment and presumption of guilt.

The accusation had been treated as sufficient to justify immediate punishment. My account had not been sought before the punishment occurred.

And because I was a transgender woman being accused of “violating a woman's space” during a period when transgender women were increasingly being portrayed politically as men intruding into women's spaces, I began to ask whether gender-identity bias had affected whose account was believed, whose feelings were protected, and whose rights were disregarded.

That was when discrimination stopped being an abstract possibility and became, in my mind, a plausible explanation for what had happened.

What I Was Beginning to Understand About the Harm

The following sections describe how I began understanding the possible legal significance of what had happened. They reflect my lay understanding at the time and the conclusions I was beginning to explore—not findings that had yet been made by a court.

What mattered first was the underlying conduct.

 

On Defamation

 

There is a crucial distinction between the statements “I feel uncomfortable around Sondra” and “Sondra violated my personal space for months.”

The first is primarily a statement about the speaker's own internal experience. A person can feel uncomfortable, anxious, resentful, intimidated, overwhelmed, or simply no longer interested in a friendship without the other person necessarily knowing about it or having committed misconduct.

The second formulation is materially different.

It attributes wrongful conduct to the other person.

That distinction mattered enormously to me because I was never disputing Willa's right to feel however she felt. She may have privately become uncomfortable with me. She may have wanted greater distance. She may have developed resentment that she did not communicate.

What I disputed was the characterization that I had knowingly or repeatedly violated her.

Neither the contemporaneous communications I reviewed nor the firsthand interactions led me to believe or know about a boundary being established or ignored. Immediately before the rupture, those communications continued to include friendship, affection, shared project planning, and participation in the garden and prairie work. Exhibit D preserves examples including “I appreciate you a lot,” “Love you <3,” and other friendly communications shortly before March 31.

Willa's April 7 message itself would later acknowledge that she had not approached me about the concern beforehand.

That distinction is central to my defamation claim as I understood it:

A person's private discomfort is not defamatory merely because I disagree with it. The potential defamatory injury arose from factual descriptions of my behavior communicated to other people—descriptions serious enough that Sharon and Lyndsay removed me from the property before telling me what conduct I had supposedly committed.

At the time, however, I did not know exactly what Willa had told them.

That uncertainty remains important.

I knew the characterization Sharon and Lyndsay conveyed to me: women felt unsafe and I had supposedly “violated a woman's space.” I did not yet know the words used behind closed doors, whether those words came directly from Willa or were amplified or reframed by others, or whether the version given to me accurately reflected the underlying complaint.

Multiple Scenarios Possible That Only Discovery Might Reveal

 

At that stage, several materially different factual scenarios remained possible.

Willa might have expressed genuine discomfort in language that Sharon and Lyndsay later intensified. She might have made a factual accusation that I disputed. Sharon or Lyndsay might have paraphrased what they heard inaccurately. Multiple people's accounts might have been blended together. Or the explanation given to me on March 31 might not have accurately reflected the underlying conversations at all.

I could not determine which scenario was true because the defendants had not told me what had actually been said.

That was one reason discovery later became indispensable: who said what, to whom, when, in what words, and with what documents could not reliably be reconstructed from the vague explanation I was given on March 31.

 

Discrimination

 

The discrimination issue, as I came to understand it, was not simply that a woman had complained about me. It was that her accusation was accepted and acted upon before I was approached, while I was given no comparable opportunity to explain my conduct before punishment occurred.

I was told that women felt unsafe and that I had violated a woman's space. I asked what specific conduct I was accused of so that I could understand it, respond to it, or change anything I was unknowingly doing. I was told it was too late and that the complainant's identity had to be protected.

By then, however, the adverse action had already occurred.

I had been excluded from the property, removed from the projects, and separated from the community before my account was sought.

That was what I came to view as preferential treatment and a presumption of guilt: one person's undisclosed account was treated as sufficient to justify immediate action, while the accused person's account was not obtained until after the decision had already been made.

I did not initially know whether gender-identity bias caused that unequal treatment. But after the BBB and multiple attorneys independently directed me toward the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, I began asking whether the nature of the accusation mattered: I was a transgender woman being accused of violating a woman's space at a time when transgender women were increasingly being publicly portrayed as men intruding into women's spaces.

That did not prove discrimination. It was the factual basis for why I believed discrimination needed to be investigated.

My concern was therefore not that Willa should have been disbelieved because she was a woman. It was that neither party should have been presumed correct before the facts were examined.

Promissory Estoppel

Promissory estoppel is not a term most people encounter outside contract law.

In simple terms, it concerns a situation in which one person makes a sufficiently definite promise, reasonably expects another person to rely upon it, and the other person actually changes their position in reliance on that promise—such that allowing the promisor simply to walk away would create an injustice.

Black's Law Dictionary Tenth Ed. describes it as:

The principle that a promise made without consideration may nonetheless be enforced to prevent injustice if the promisor should have reasonably expected the promisee to rely on the promise and if the promisee did actually rely on the promise to his or her detriment. [5]

That concept mattered here because my claim was not based upon one casual statement that I misunderstood as permission.

My reliance accumulated over months.

Lyndsay approved my participation in the garden. She later represented to outsiders that I was “taking the lead” and that Emily and I were “in charge of the garden this year.”

She gave me Reliable Street's mailing address after I told her I was ordering garden materials. Austin Stewart continued honoring the 50-percent café discount associated with my work and expressly thanked me for what I was doing. Reliable Street offered to pay for prairie seeds. Willa and I each contributed toward those seeds. And throughout that period, I continued performing labor, coordinating volunteers, purchasing materials, and preparing for the 2022 growing season.

By the time I was barred on March 31, I had already changed my position substantially in reliance on those arrangements.

I had invested months of labor.

I had spent money.

I had built relationships with volunteers and students.

I had documented the restoration with the expectation that the completed work could become part of a professional portfolio.

And I had structured my spring around projects that I understood I had permission—and responsibility—to continue.

In my June 17, 2024 Amended Petition, D0020, I described that reliance directly. I wrote that I would not have performed the labor had I known the agreements would be breached and explained that I had intended to use before-and-after photographs of the restoration to demonstrate my abilities to prospective landowners and possibly obtain similar paid work. D0020, filed June 17, 2024, ¶62.

That is why the abrupt exclusion mattered independently of the later defamatory accusations.

Even if no formal written contract existed, I had spent months acting in reliance upon repeated permissions, representations, delegated responsibilities, and ongoing conduct by the people responsible for the property.

That is the factual basis from which my promissory-estoppel claim arose.

Exhibit C

Unjust Enrichment

There was also a separate question concerning the value that remained after I was excluded.

At the time, I sometimes described myself as a “volunteer.” I used that word to mean that I was not receiving ordinary wages. But the factual relationship I was describing was more specific: the work followed requests, approvals, assigned responsibilities, repeated representations about my role, and continuing conduct by people responsible for the projects.

My June 17, 2024 Amended Petition stated the reliance directly:

“I would never have performed the labor associated with the agreements had I known the agreements were going to be breached.”

and:

“I would not have performed the labor had Sharon not made me that offer.”

Those statements capture the distinction between the two equitable theories:

Promissory estoppel asks why I acted.

Unjust enrichment asks who retained the resulting benefit after I was excluded.

By March 31, much of the benefit had already been created.

The garden had been restored and prepared for spring.

Paths and other physical improvements remained.

Planning and project-development work had already been performed.

Materials I purchased or helped obtain remained associated with the projects.

Portions of the property had already been prepared for the prairie restoration.

And only after my exclusion did I discover that a separate entity I had not previously understood to own the property—Love Club LLC—was the registered owner of the land upon which much of that work had been performed.

My June 17, 2024 Amended Petition explained that I had understood myself to be working through Reliable Street and Lockwood Café and had believed Lyndsay owned the property. After I was barred, I searched the county assessor's records, discovered Love Club LLC, and wrote:

“I had never heard of this organization before.”

Love Club therefore presented a different equitable question from the people with whom I had directly communicated: if lasting improvements had been made to land it owned, what benefit had the property owner received from work induced through arrangements made by the people operating the space?

Whether these facts ultimately satisfy promissory estoppel, unjust enrichment, an implied contractual relationship, or another available remedy is a legal question for a developed record.

The underlying factual point is simpler:

I did not perform months of substantial work in a vacuum. I performed it because arrangements were offered, accepted, repeatedly confirmed, and acted upon. When I was abruptly excluded, the work and much of the value it created remained behind.

April 12:
I Asked Reliable Street and Lockwood Café for Mediation

 

I still did not want a lawsuit.

I wanted to talk.

On April 12, 2022, I sent a written request for mediation to Lockwood Café and Reliable Street, directed to Sharon and Lyndsay.

The letter laid out my understanding of the garden arrangement, the work I had performed, the abrupt manner in which I had been removed, Willa's subsequent disclosure that she had complained, the messages that appeared inconsistent with what I had been told, the effect on my reputation, and my concern about the way complaints were being handled.

Most importantly, I proposed a way forward.

I wrote:

“Looking back I cannot think of a single instance where I violated anyone's space there, including Willa's, but I assure you if I was ever told anything I would have backed off immediately and stopped doing whatever she or others didn't feel comfortable with.”

I pointed to the contradiction I was struggling to understand:

“The problem isn't that I didn't listen; the problem is I was not communicated with. I was then talked about instead of with.”

I also explained why the consequences extended beyond hurt feelings:

“I have worked diligently, volunteering countless hours for Reliable and Lockwood.”

I had hoped the garden and prairie work could become part of a portfolio showing prospective employers or landowners the kind of restoration work I was capable of doing. Instead, I wrote that I was leaving the situation with my reputation attached to the statement:

“I was asked to leave because women complained I made them feel unsafe and I was violating their space.”

Then I proposed mediation:

“If you want to talk through any of this, I would like at least 2 community members who are mutual friends to be present so that things can be talked through and all sides are heard, and resolution can be fair.”

I also asked them to develop a fairer protocol for handling serious complaints in the future.

I attached contemporaneous evidence, including Emily's response and some of Willa's recent messages, because I wanted Sharon and Lyndsay to see why I genuinely did not understand how the situation they described could be reconciled with the communications I had received.

They did not respond.

The documentary record collected in Exhibit A shows the April 12 mediation request, a final follow-up on April 18, and then my April 22 complaint to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission.

Why I Could Not Simply Walk Away

 

At that point, this was already more than the loss of a place I cared about.

My role at Reliable Street and Lockwood Café had been visible throughout the community. I had helped with open mics and events, worked openly on the garden and prairie, coordinated with students and volunteers, and been identified by Reliable Street's own president to outsiders as someone “taking the lead” and later as one of the people “in charge of the garden this year.”

Then, suddenly, I was gone.

I knew why: I had been removed after being told that women had complained that I made them feel unsafe and that I had “violated a woman's space.”

What I did not know was what other people had been told.

That uncertainty itself caused reputational harm. Anyone familiar with my role could see that something serious had happened. Friends and acquaintances would naturally wonder why someone who had been publicly welcomed, entrusted with responsibility, and seen constantly working on community projects was abruptly prohibited from returning.

And I was already seeing the social effects.

Emily Poag—someone directly involved in the garden—was surprised by the decision and told me that SHEPH's leadership had appreciated my expertise.

Charlie Esker, who only about two weeks earlier had been communicating with me warmly, suddenly told me that although they were “not really involved in any of that,” they were unsure whether continuing a personal relationship with me was best.

I also began receiving indications that some version of the story was circulating beyond the people directly involved. People I had known for years became hesitant to discuss what had happened or become involved. More than one person expressed fear about speaking publicly. I could not determine exactly what each person had been told or where every version originated, but I could feel relationships changing before I even understood the accusation myself.

That was why silence did not feel like a safe option.

I had spent years building work that depended heavily upon trust, credibility, and relationships. Even in 2022, long before I became a candidate for governor, Wild Willpower already represented years of work I intended to continue for the rest of my life.

But I was worried about something more serious than social rejection.

Only two days before I was barred, I had publicly told the Reliable Street community about the 2009 assault prosecution that I maintained had arisen from a false accusation.

People in that community therefore knew that an assault conviction already existed on my record.

Now I was suddenly being characterized as a transgender woman who had “violated a woman's space.”

I did not know what was being said behind my back, how widely it was being repeated, whether additional accusations were being developed, or whether someone might eventually attempt to involve police or the courts.

I did not yet have the legal vocabulary for what I feared. I was not an attorney. But I understood the practical danger.

If someone made a new accusation against me first and it was accepted as true, I could immediately be placed into a defensive posture. The person making the allegation would appear to be the complainant; I would appear to be the accused. And an existing assault conviction—however unjust I believed it to be—could make a new portrayal of me as threatening or dangerous considerably more persuasive to people who did not know its history.

I was particularly afraid that accusations circulating among multiple people could eventually develop into a mutually reinforcing narrative used in a criminal complaint, civil action, affidavit, police report, or some other formal proceeding. I did not yet know the term malicious prosecution or understand the legal elements of such a claim. But in practical terms, I feared being falsely accused again—and this time being forced to defend myself after the accusation had already been repeated, reinforced, and accepted by others.

That concern was especially serious in the political climate described earlier in this article. The characterization that a transgender woman had “violated a woman's space” overlapped almost perfectly with one of the most damaging stereotypes being used politically against transgender women.

And politics was not the only cultural force shaping how such an accusation could be understood.

This Was Unfolding in the Aftermath of the #MeToo Movement

 

There was another cultural reality I could not ignore.

These events occurred in the years following the #MeToo movement, when allegations of harassment, abuse, and violations of women's boundaries had—appropriately—come to be treated with much greater seriousness.

I supported that change. People who experience harassment or abuse should be able to report it without automatically being dismissed or humiliated.

But greater seriousness also makes factual accuracy and fair investigation more important, not less.

I was not being described merely as someone involved in an interpersonal disagreement. I was being told that women felt “unsafe” around me and that I had “violated a woman's space.”

In the political environment described earlier in this article, that language carried another layer of danger. I was a transgender woman living amid an increasingly prominent narrative portraying transgender women as men intruding into women's spaces.

An accusation framed in those terms could therefore acquire meaning far beyond the particular interactions from which it supposedly arose.

That was another reason I believed I needed to determine exactly what had been alleged, preserve the contemporaneous record, and obtain a fair factual examination.

Judge Bethany Currie Would Later Recognize the Seriousness of the Reputational Harm

 

I did not yet have the legal vocabulary in April 2022 to describe all of these concerns.

Two years later, however, the Story County District Court would recognize that the consequences of the March 31 exclusion extended beyond losing access to one property. In describing the exclusion, Judge Bethany Currie observed that barring me from Reliable Street and its events effectively excluded me from a substantial part of the local art community.

In discussing defamation law, the court also recognized that defamatory matter can include statements that impute a crime, impair a person's ability to perform in an occupation, calling, or office, or expose that person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule.

Those were the kinds of reputational consequences I had already been afraid of in April 2022, even though I did not yet know what the ICRC record would eventually contain.

After my mediation request went unanswered, I followed through on the advice I had already received. The BBB and several attorneys had directed me toward the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, and on April 22, 2022, I filed my complaint.

I had not begun by trying to sue anyone. I had begun by asking what happened, examining my own conduct, seeking outside advice, preserving the contemporaneous record, and asking the people involved to mediate. When those efforts failed, I turned to the civil-rights process.

---

 

 

 

VI. August 3, 2022:
The Preliminary Case Review Escalated Everything

 

On August 3, 2022, the Iowa Civil Rights Commission sent me two documents:

— its Notice of Administrative Closure; and

— the accompanying Preliminary Case Review.

The closure letter informed me that my complaint had been administratively closed and that the Commission would take no further action unless I successfully requested reconsideration within thirty days.

But the closure itself was not what alarmed me most.

It was what I learned from the Preliminary Case Review.

For the first time, I could see the outline of the narrative that had been submitted in response to my complaint.

And it was far more severe than anything Sharon Stewart or Lyndsay Nissen had disclosed to me on March 31.

What Had Begun as "You Made People Uncomfortable" Had Become Something Much More Serious

 

The Review summarized Lyndsay's position by saying that I had regularly “corner[ed] her” about the garden, performed work without consulting others, and that the prairie had become an “obsession.”

It said that I continued to push for “more control of the project,” that I did not listen to others, and that I “bull-dozed them.”

Then the narrative escalated.

The Review stated that I had become “obsessed” with Willa Colville “to the extent that Complainant was stalking and harassing her.”

It said other employees had reported that I made racist comments and “inappropriate comments about employees' sexual identities.”

It described a text exchange as one in which I supposedly “wrongly identifies and asks questions about the employee's national origin.”

And it introduced yet another person—a patron—who allegedly claimed that I had made racially insensitive comments, harassed café staff, solicited money from employees, patrons, and high-school students, and harassed him by repeatedly texting and calling him.

I was stunned.

This was no longer simply:

Someone felt uncomfortable.

It was an emerging character portrait:

obsessive; controlling; intrusive; racist; sexually inappropriate; stalking; harassing; and repeatedly bothering members of the community.

That was exactly the kind of escalation I had been afraid of.

The Preliminary Case Review Did Not Create My Fear — It Gave it Shape

 

My concern about my reputation did not begin on August 3.

It had begun the moment I was publicly removed from a community in which I had played a visible role after being told that women said I had made them feel unsafe and “violated a woman's space.”

Only two days before that removal, I had stood at Reliable Street's open mic and told the community about the earlier assault prosecution that I maintained had resulted from a false accusation.

I already knew that an assault conviction existed on my record.

So when I read the Preliminary Case Review and saw multiple accusations now converging around a portrayal of me as threatening, obsessive, stalking, harassing, racist, and inappropriate toward others, a fear I had struggled to articulate became much more concrete.

I became concerned that I was watching a narrative develop that could eventually place me into another defensive legal posture—and that the old assault record could be used socially, politically, or legally to make the new portrayal seem more believable to people who did not know what had actually happened in 2009.

I did not yet possess the complete ICRC file.

I therefore could not determine who had originated each allegation, who had repeated it, what exact evidence had been submitted, or whether the accounts had been coordinated. I could not reliably distinguish firsthand testimony from hearsay; an employee's words from a manager's characterization of them; a complete conversation from a selected excerpt; or one person's allegation from another person's repetition of it.

But I could see that the allegations were matching and reinforcing one another.

That was enough to alarm me.

The Agency Said It Was Not Making Credibility Determinations

 

There was something else in the Preliminary Case Review that troubled me deeply.

The Commission expressly described the limited nature of this screening stage:

“the ICRC does not evaluate credibility at the screening stage”

and explained that it was only determining whether the information created a reasonable possibility of probable cause sufficient to justify further investigation.

That made what followed difficult for me to understand.

When I filed my complaint, the dispute I was asking the Commission to examine was substantially narrower than the accusations I was about to encounter in its Preliminary Case Review.

I had told the Commission that Sharon and Lyndsay removed me after saying that people felt “uncomfortable,” later “unsafe,” and that I had been “violating their personal boundaries.” Willa had subsequently told me that she believed I had violated her personal space and failed to respect her boundaries “for months.”

I disputed those accusations and had provided contemporaneous communications explaining why. I also alleged that the way the complaints had been handled was discriminatory: I had been punished before being told any specific conduct, before my account was meaningfully sought, and without an opportunity to correct conduct I did not know anyone considered objectionable. My questionnaire expressly stated that I believed a non-transgender woman in the same position would have been questioned and given some benefit of the doubt rather than simply presumed guilty.

I had also explained why the word “uncomfortable” concerned me. In my questionnaire, I described two earlier experiences in which that same word had been used in circumstances I believed involved anti-transgender discrimination. I therefore asked the Commission to examine whether gender-identity bias had affected how the complaints against me were received and handled.

The Preliminary Case Review, however, introduced allegations far beyond what I had understood when I filed.

For the first time, I learned that the respondents' account included accusations involving stalking, harassment, racist comments, inappropriate comments concerning employees' sexual identities, and other serious misconduct. Those allegations later became part of what I attempted to challenge in my appeal.

Yet even as the Review introduced that substantially more severe narrative, it concluded:

“Respondent provided legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason and supported with admissible evidence: YES.”

It also concluded that I had failed to establish pretext, stating:

“Complainant does not show pretext through falsity.”

But I had never been given the respondents' underlying statements and exhibits.

That distinction was critical.

I could dispute some of what I was reading immediately because I knew my own conduct and possessed contemporaneous communications inconsistent with important parts of the narrative. But I could not identify who had made each new accusation, the exact words they had used, what documents had been submitted to support them, whether the Commission was summarizing firsthand statements or hearsay, or whether the underlying materials contained context that the Review did not disclose.

Then, on its final page, the Review checked:

MATERIAL DISPUTED FACTS — No

and:

MATERIAL CREDIBILITY DETERMINATIONS TO BE MADE — No

before recommending:

Administratively Close.

That was extremely difficult for me to reconcile with what I was reading.

I already disputed the accusations I had brought to the Commission: that I had knowingly violated communicated boundaries or engaged in conduct that justified my immediate removal.

Now I was also confronting new allegations in the Review that I knew or believed were false—including stalking, harassment, racism, and inappropriate comments—but without access to the statements and documents necessary to determine where those allegations originated or how they had been presented.

And the contemporaneous communications already in my possession gave me concrete reasons to believe that important factual disputes existed.

Yet the Review treated the respondents' explanation as legitimate and supported, concluded that I had not shown falsity as pretext, and proceeded toward administrative closure.

The full significance of that became clearer when I reached the Review's final page.

I Could See Their Narrative — but Not the Evidence Used to Build It

 

The Preliminary Case Review gave me enough information to understand that something far more serious had been submitted against me.

But it did not simply tell me what particular people had said.

Instead, it presented a consolidated narrative attributed broadly to the respondents, employees, and patrons—while withholding the underlying statements and documents from which that narrative had been assembled.

That made the document extraordinarily difficult to evaluate.

The Review first described Lyndsay Nissen's account of my garden and prairie work in language that bore little resemblance to the months of approval, collaboration, permission-seeking, and project planning documented earlier in this article.

It stated that Nissen alleged I would:

“corner her regularly to talk about the garden and her ideas for it.”

It said that after the prairie proposal:

“Complainant soon came up with the idea of a prairie”

and portrayed the subsequent work as something I began pursuing despite other people already having a plan.

It then said I:

“continued to push for more control of the project.”

The Review further summarized Nissen as saying that I did not listen to the people involved and that I:

“bull-dozed them.”

It characterized my communications about the projects as excessive and portrayed the funding discussions described earlier in this article as increasingly inappropriate.

That alone was difficult to reconcile with the record I possessed.

The reader has already seen Lyndsay tell an outside participant that Emily Poag and I were:

“taking the lead on the community garden this upcoming season.”

and, a month later:

“I've forwarded this to the folks in charge of the garden this year. Emily from SHEPH and Sondra our friend and neighbor.”

The reader has also seen me explicitly tell Lyndsay that I was ordering garden materials and ask whether I could use Reliable Street's address for future purchases—and Lyndsay respond by giving me the address.

So when I read a government document describing the same period as though I had been forcing myself into the project, refusing to listen, and pushing for control, I already had concrete reasons to question what I was reading.

But then the Review became much more serious.

It stated that I had been:

“stalking and harassing an employee”

and that:

“3 other employees shared that Complainant had also made racist comments and inappropriate comments about employees' sexual identities and national origin.”

It said that:

“The private text messages and statements from employees and patrons who express these sentiments and those comments were provided.”

And it introduced another allegation involving a patron, stating that I had:

“harassed him by texting and calling him and numerous others in the community, multiple times a day.”

Those sentences changed the nature of what I believed I was confronting.

I had gone to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission complaining that I had been removed after being told broadly that people felt “uncomfortable,” later “unsafe,” and that I had violated personal boundaries.

Now an official State document was telling me that the respondents had supplied information portraying me as someone who stalked and harassed an employee, made racist comments, made inappropriate comments about employees' sexual identities and national origin, harassed staff and patrons, and repeatedly called and texted people throughout the community.

And yet the document did not tell me who most of these people were.

Who was “an employee”?

Which “3 other employees” supposedly made these reports?

Which employee was associated with which allegation?

Who was the patron?

What did each person actually say?

Were these firsthand statements?

Were they paraphrases?

Were some of them being reported through Lyndsay or Sharon?

Were different people's accounts being combined?

I could not tell.

That blindness mattered enormously because some of the people described anonymously in the Review were people whose contemporaneous communications I still possessed.

I would later learn that Denise Martinez was among the employees whose communications had become part of the administrative record. But the Preliminary Case Review did not identify her by name or tell me which allegations, if any, were attributed specifically to her.

The reader has already seen what my communications with Denise actually looked like before March 31.

When I worried that a hug might have made her uncomfortable, Denise expressly responded:

“Don't worry!! I wasn't uncomfortable ❤️ I'm ok with hug from people I know!!”

When I invited her to participate in the garden Discord, she replied:

“Awesome I'll join rn!”

When I asked whether she wanted to help with the garden, she wrote:

“I'm excited to help out.”

And when a brief misunderstanding arose during a discussion of huitlacoche and her family's background, Denise corrected me, I apologized, and she responded:

“You're good lol.”

Those were the communications I knew.

Yet the Preliminary Case Review was now telling me that unnamed employees had reported “racist comments” and “inappropriate comments about employees' sexual identities and national origin.”

I could not even tell from the Review whether Denise was one of those employees.

That is what made the document so difficult to answer.

The same problem existed with Willa.

Only a few months earlier, Willa had told me directly that:

“For months, you have violated my personal space and not respected my boundaries.”

She also told me that she had not felt comfortable approaching me and therefore:

“I said something to Sharon.”

That was serious, and I disputed her characterization.

But her April 7 message to me did not accuse me of stalking her.

It did not accuse me of following her.

It did not say she hid from me at work.

It did not say I repeatedly appeared wherever she was.

It did not use the word “harassment.”

Yet the Preliminary Case Review now said I had been:

“stalking and harassing an employee.”

From the Review alone, I had no way to know where that characterization came from.

Did Willa tell Sharon that I had stalked and harassed her?

Did Willa describe other conduct that Sharon or Lyndsay interpreted that way?

Did Sharon relay something to Lyndsay?

Did Lyndsay add her own characterization?

Did the ICRC investigator compress several statements into that wording?

Or had multiple people's allegations been combined?

I could not tell.

And when I eventually obtained the underlying file, I learned why that question had mattered so much.

Lyndsay Nissen's actual statement went substantially further than anything Willa had written to me.

Nissen wrote that I had become:

“quite frankly obsessed with this woman.”

She alleged that the employee:

“would watch for Sondra and if she saw her coming, she would hide in the kitchen until Sondra left.”

Nissen then wrote:

“We had no idea the extent to which Sondra had been stalking and harassing her.”

That later-disclosed statement illustrates precisely what I could not determine on August 3.

Were those facts things Willa had actually reported to Nissen?

Were they Nissen's characterization of what Willa told her?

Were some of them Nissen's own observations or inferences?

And where, exactly, had the words “stalking and harassing” originated?

The Preliminary Case Review gave me no way to answer those questions.

The same problem extended throughout the document.

I could not reliably distinguish:

firsthand testimony from hearsay;

an employee's actual words from management's characterization of them;

a complete conversation from a selected excerpt;

one person's allegation from another person's repetition of it;

or even, in some instances, which person had supposedly made the allegation at all.

That distinction was not academic.

It determined whether I was dealing with one person's firsthand accusation, another person's interpretation of it, several mutually reinforcing accounts, or a narrative that had changed as it passed from one person to another.

I could identify some allegations as false or seriously misleading from my own firsthand knowledge and from the contemporaneous communications already in my possession.

But I could not yet reconstruct the chain.

I could not determine:

Who originated each allegation?

What exactly did that person say?

What did management add or paraphrase?

What evidence accompanied the allegation?

What portion of any conversation had been provided?

What context was missing?

And how had all of those separate statements and documents been transformed into the narrative appearing in the Preliminary Case Review?

The Commission's own materials show that the Tier One determination was based upon statements and documentation submitted by the respondents, but those underlying materials were not provided to me at the time.

I therefore confronted a peculiar and frightening situation.

The State had shown me the accusations.

It had not shown me the evidence necessary to determine who had actually made them.

And on the next page of the Review, after presenting allegations of stalking, harassment, racism, inappropriate comments concerning employees' identities and national origin, and repeated unwanted communications, the Commission concluded:

MATERIAL DISPUTED FACTS — No

and:

MATERIAL CREDIBILITY DETERMINATIONS TO BE MADE — No

before recommending:

Administratively Close.

I could see the accusations. I still could not see the record behind them.

Then I Looked at the Top of the Closure Letter

 

There was another detail that affected me personally.

At the top of the State of Iowa's August 3 closure letter, beneath the Iowa Civil Rights Commission logo, were the words:

KIM REYNOLDS, GOVERNOR
ADAM GREGG, LT. GOVERNOR

Governor Reynolds' name appearing there did not prove that she had personally reviewed my complaint, directed the investigator, or influenced the decision. I did not have evidence of that, and I do not claim that the letter itself established personal involvement.

But seeing her name on the document mattered to me because of everything that had already happened at the state level.

As described earlier in this article, by August 2022 I had watched Iowa's government defend restrictions on medically necessary gender-affirming healthcare and had watched political rhetoric increasingly portray transgender women not simply as people with whom politicians disagreed, but as males intruding into women's spaces.

Now I was a transgender woman who had gone to the State's civil-rights agency after being expelled under the allegation that I had “violated a woman's space.”

And the agency had closed my complaint while preserving a respondents' narrative portraying me as stalking, harassing, racist, intrusive, and unsafe.

The thought that came to me was stark:

Transgender people were not being protected from being framed as threats. The framing itself appeared to be receiving the protection.

That was my reaction to the institutional contradiction I believed I was seeing—not proof that Governor Reynolds personally participated in my particular case.

But it intensified my concern that I could not simply trust the system to recognize what was happening and correct it for me.

The Record Had Become More Dangerous Than the Original Accusation

 

What frightened me was no longer merely what people at Reliable Street might believe about me.

The accusations now existed inside an official government record.

And the narrative had a self-reinforcing quality that made defending myself unusually dangerous.

Once I had been characterized as “obsessive,” stalking, harassing, and unwilling to respect boundaries, the actions I would naturally have to take to disprove that characterization could themselves be interpreted through it.

Asking questions could look like refusing to let go.

Contacting people who had witnessed events could look intrusive.

Requesting records could look obsessive.

Repeatedly asking institutions to examine the evidence could be characterized as fixation.

Yet doing none of those things would mean leaving the accusations substantially unanswered.

The narrative created the need to defend myself, while making the act of defending myself susceptible to being used as evidence for the narrative.

To an outsider, legitimate efforts to clear my name could therefore be misread as confirmation of the very characterization I was trying to disprove.

That was why simply walking away was no longer a realistic option.

Why I Could Not Fully Reconstruct the Record in August 2022

 

When the Iowa Civil Rights Commission issued its Preliminary Case Review on August 3, 2022, I had only thirty days to seek reconsideration.

More importantly, I did not possess the respondents' complete submissions.

I could see the allegations summarized in the Review, but I could not compare those summaries against the complete statements, screenshots, documents, and other materials from which they had been drawn.

That distinction matters.

I could dispute allegations based upon my own firsthand knowledge and the communications already in my possession. But I could not perform the kind of documentary reconstruction presented later in this series because I did not yet have the complete record necessary to determine who said what, what documents accompanied those statements, what context may have been omitted, or how the Commission's narrative had been assembled.

The complete ICRC file was eventually released to me on October 11, 2023.

By then, however, obtaining the file created another urgent procedural problem: the right-to-sue deadline was approaching. I had only weeks to continue looking for counsel, begin understanding a complicated administrative record, determine what claims might exist, and decide whether litigation was necessary before the deadline expired.

The detailed comparison of the respondents' submissions against the original communications is therefore presented separately in Political Sabotage.

Record Retaliation stops where my knowledge stopped on August 3, 2022: I could see what I was being accused of, but I could not yet see how those accusations had been constructed.