Some years ago there was a highly unusual court hearing involving an unfortunate attorney named Rebekah Nett. Ms. Nett got herself into hot water in, of all things, a Minnesota bankruptcy case. Despite that humble origin, her representation of a client named Yehud-Monosson USA, Inc. managed to attract the attention of a number of national news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal.
How had she done this? Glad you asked. The problem began with an earlier court hearing. Nett claimed that that she had been misled about when it had been scheduled. So, she filed a request asking that the ruling be overturned because she hadn’t been given proper notice.
Her description of why she’d missed the hearing started like most other court documents — until the second page. Nett claimed that the bankruptcy trustee — an official appointed by the court to oversee the orderly disposition of the debtor’s property — told Nett the wrong time to appear at the hearing, even though the trustee “had informed Nancy Dreher, the Catholic judge” of the actual time for the hearing. The trustee then “pretended” not to know why Nett wasn’t there.
Wait . . . the “Catholic judge”?
And from there, things got more and more surreal. According to her motion, the Minnesota bankruptcy court (and much of the U.S. legal system) was transplanted from, oh, say, the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Her motion referred to Judge Dreher as a “black-robed bigot.” It accused the two trustees in the case and “Catholic judge” Dreher of all “being of the same race and religion.” Her motion called Judge Dreher a “Catholic Knight Witch Hunter,” referred to another of the court’s judges as a “Jesuit,” to one of the trustees as a “priest’s boy,” and another as a “Jesuitess.” It added that because her client “has been vocal is [sic] exposing their dirty deeds, these dirty Catholics have conspired to hurt Debtor.”
Judge Dreher, who in a footnote noted that she had “never been Catholic” (and even if she had, it’s not clear what that had to do with a bankruptcy case) promptly ordered that Ms. Nett and her client appear at a different hearing to explain why Judge Dreher shouldn’t fine Ms. Nett $1,000 for each outrageous statement — or as the judge called them, “factually unsupported” statement — in her previous court filing.
Nett filed a written response to the order, which didn’t exactly go swimmingly, either. She referred to a section in her earlier court filing that, as a later judge explained, was “a twenty-six page dissertation chronicling what Nett called the ‘infiltration of our justice system’ by ‘the Roman cult and their military arm-the Jesuit Order.’ Beginning with the sixteenth century, the memorandum reviewed the Jesuits’ alleged involvement with, among other things, the African slave trade, the French Revolution, the Congress of Vienna, the American Civil War, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the Vietnam War . . . terrorism in the United States, and the sinking of the Titanic.”
One can only imagine what Nett must have thought of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit ever to hold that office.
Judge Dreher decided not to come down on Ms. Nett quite as hard as she could have. Instead of fining her $1,000 per violation, she only fined her $500 per, um, bizarre statement — which was still a total fine of $5,000. She also ordered Nett to attend legal ethics training, never to refer to any party’s religious beliefs in a court filing, and referred Nett to the District Court for Nett’s possible disbarment from that court.
The federal district judge wasn’t particularly sympathetic, either. Nett finally admitted that she hadn’t actually written the document that had gotten her into so much trouble. Instead, it was written by her client, and she claimed that she had signed it and filed it with the court without reading it.
It’s almost as if Nett anticipated the trouble a number of attorneys have had lately when they ask A.I. to write a brief — that they then don’t check.
But the district judge found that Nett, although not the author of the piece, had effectively adopted its contents when she signed and filed the document. The federal court rules are clear that anything an attorney submits to a court with the attorney’s signature is a certification by the attorney that the document’s contents, formed after a “reasonable inquiry,” aren’t submitted for an improper purpose, such as to harass.
Nett clearly neglected her duties when she let her client prepare something and then didn’t bother to read it. Rejecting a number of other arguments, the judge let the sanctions imposed by Judge Dreher stand — including that $5,000 fine.
Ouch.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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