Here’s the timeline of the initial events that surrounded the lawsuits that Sonia and I filed against each other. (If you have a lot of time on your hands and you want to read the actual documents to which I refer, just click on the links.)
September 18, 2020: My lawyer sent a letter to Sonia on our behalf, explaining the legalities of the property situation, and asking her to stop harassing us. Sonia did not respond.
September 30, 2020: I wrote a much longer letter to Sonia, covering the same ground as my lawyer’s letter, but in a lot more detail. (Hey, I’m a writer, I can’t help it.) As with my lawyer’s letter, Sonia ignored my letter as well.
January 26, 2022: After more than a year passed and Sonia failed to modify her behavior, I got back in touch with my lawyer and asked him to send her a follow-up letter. This time he urged her to “discuss a resolution to this matter” so we wouldn’t have to “investigate other remedies.” Keeping her record intact, Sonia paid no more attention to my lawyer’s second letter than she had to his first letter.
March 2, 2022: More than a year and a half after Sonia launched her campaign of harassment, I finally ran out of patience and gave my lawyer the go-ahead to file a lawsuit against her. He asked the court to declare, among other things, that we had an easement over a portion of Sonia’s property so that we could access and maintain our own property.
April 4, 2022: I guess that filing a lawsuit was the only way to get Sonia’s attention, because she quickly lawyered up and responded to our lawsuit, denying “each and every material allegation asserted by Plaintiff.”
May 25, 2022: Because the best defense is a good offense, Sonia’s lawyer filed a counterclaim that accused me of trespassing on her property.
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As I read through the sequentially numbered paragraphs in the Trespassing Counterclaim, most of the document seemed pretty straightforward to me.
Paragraph 5, for example, pointed out that Sonia owned the property at 4060 Windhaven Lane, while paragraph 6 noted that I lived next door. Paragraph 8 claimed that I had “veered far out of the express easement granted across her [Sonia’s] property.”
Even though I’m not a lawyer, nothing in paragraphs 1-8 of the Trespassing Counterclaim took me by surprise.
And then I read paragraph 9, and my life changed forever.
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