The vexatious litigant

by Graham Email

Every so often, one comes across the story of a person who, for some reason clearly best known only to themselves, has devoted his/her life to what seems like a futile campaign of legal harrassment, filing of lawsuits etc. against anybody and everybody, irrespective of cost, time or consequence.
While I lived in the UK, in the 1970's and 1980's I grew used to reading about the increasingly bizarre and eccentric activities of Dorothy Squires, the Welsh singer who, in her old age, filed lawsuit after lawsuit, nearly all of them frivolous, to the extent that she was eventually declared a vexatious litigant and barred from starting any further legal actions.
While reading the Feedback page at Poynter Online today, I stumbled across a modern American example - Kay Sieverding. After initially reading her plausible-sounding letter in this section at Poynter, I began looking up her name to see if she was a victim of injustice. However, it soon became clear that the reality is somewhat different. She has been filing lawsuits like some people throw confetti at a wedding, most recently in Colorado, where she lived until moving (fleeing?) to Wisconsin. She has more recently spent time in jail, after she refused to withdraw a bunch of lawsuits filed in Colorado. She is a prolific letter-writer and bombards blogs and every other location on the Internet, even from jail. Her activities remind me of the Black Knight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", who, even after being dismantled, still insists "OK, it's a draw...".
Al Bernstein, on his website, has this to say about how the brain sometimes works:

....our brains cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. To use the technical term, the brain is crazy.

It seems as though Ms. Sieverding has an obsession indicative of a combination of paranoia and grandiosity which causes her to operate as a modern-day Don Quixote. The more succinct English term would be "barking mad", but over here I guess "moonbat" might have to suffice.
Her activities remind me of the vain attempts by tax protestors to convince the court system that there is no requirement to pay Federal Income Tax.