Attorney Wilson Approaches the Bench

Again proving that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client, Attorney pro se Linwood Wilson has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Kent (DE) County, Durham County, and no fewer than 31 individuals (ranging from his estranged wife Barbara to Beau Biden(!), the vice president’s son and the current Attorney General of Delaware). The former DA’s chief investigator, Christian singer, and ethical sinkhole alleges that his arrest for possible spousal abuse in fact involved malicious prosecution, concealment of evidence, conspiracy, supervisory violations, and fabrication of false evidence—all matters of which, it goes without saying, his service under Mike Nifong gave him intimate knowledge.

Wilson’s 92-page complaint, filed alongside 10 exhibits (totaling some 355 pages), takes 10 pages just to identify the various people that he’s suing. Attorney Wilson suggests a wide-ranging and multi-layered conspiracy of his wife, her alleged “paramour,” a Delaware police officer with whom she also allegedly was having an affair, his wife’s family, some of his wife’s friends and co-workers, some law enforcement officials in Durham County, and various law enforcement officials in Delaware—all working in concert to deny Linwood Wilson his constitutional rights. Remarkably, until the filing of this complaint, this vast conspiracy went undetected—not by the media, nor by state legislators in Delaware or North Carolina, nor by various watchdog agencies. How could this be?

In the real world, the chief purpose of the complaint seems to be less exposing a previously undetected “conspiracy” than humiliating Wilson’s estranged wife and her alleged “paramour,” Joseph Curtis. Attorney Wilson describes his wife as “a mentally troubled woman who had abandoned her marriage.” Indeed, she had “plenty of Zoloft at home,” yet was caught going to the pharmacy for more. Wilson recounts the following alleged event at a local Mexican restaurant: “Defendant [Barbara] Wilson drank a large double margarita (while taking Zoloft, Clonazepam, and Xanax) and got extremely drunk, telling Plantiff [Linwood] how she wanted to rip his clothes off and have sex with him on the table.” Attorney Wilson describes this evening as “the best [the marriage] had been in months.”

But, alas, Barbara Wilson was leading a double life, according to her husband. She was having an affair with her “paramour” at the workplace, while at their “marital home,” Barbara Wilson “sat next to her husband each night, wanted [sic] him to rub her feet and legs.” The “paramour,” meanwhile, “ran from Wilson’s marital home like a dog with his tail between his legs” when confronted by Linwood.

The gap between Attorney Wilson and Plaintiff Wilson is sometimes difficult to follow. For instance, in paragraph 48 of the complaint, Attorney Wilson speaks of “our marriage” (the marriage between Barbara and Plaintiff Wilson); at other occasions, he uses “I” rather than “plaintiff” to describe his recollections of alleged events.

Attorney Wilson claims that his client has suffered various injuries, including “economic” harm, presumably a result of the marriage’s breakup shattering the “Voiceovers by Wilson” business that the husband and wife planned to start. Attorney Wilson also claims that his client has “suffered irreparable harm to his reputation.” How? After the exposures of the lacrosse case, Linwood Wilson had no reputation to lose.

Attorney Wilson is particularly fond of the phrase “upon information and belief”—an approach used in civil suits when lawyers believe that something occurred but for which they do not, before discovery, possess hard evidence to substantiate. But in the Wilson complaint, virtually every “factual” claim comes not from any evidence he possesses but from his own . . . beliefs. To give a sampling from the complaint:

“Upon information and belief Durham Coca-Cola was already aware of the affair.”

“Upon information and belief . . . Barbara Wilson had been reportedly locking herself in her office at work and crying all the time.”

“Upon information and belief, a display of public affection occurred between Defendants Wilson and Curtis, in Curtis’ car on the way back from NCCU.”

“Upon information and belief, Barbara Wilson was the only one who got a raise in the past 2-3 years.”

“Upon information and belief, the ‘Delaware Conspiracy’ along with co-conspirators . . . from North Carolina, made a ‘rush to judgment’ and manufactured changes.”

“Upon information and belief, Defendant Reimann continued to conspire with Defendants [Barbara] Wilson, Curtis, and Delaware Sgt. Weaver.”

“Upon information and belief Defendants Whitfield and Wilson hacked Plaintiff’s computers at his residence and falsified evidence.”

“Upon information and belief, Defendant Deputy Reimann was the source of information for Defendant Weaver, thus thickening the conspiracy more and more between North Carolina law enforcement and Delaware law enforcement.”

“Upon information and belief, it was common knowledge throughout the legal system in Dover, DE.”

“Upon information and belief, this is when the conspiracy was formed . . . to make it appear that Barbara Wilson was afraid of her husband (Plaintiff) and that he (Plaintiff) was crazy.” [As an aside, Barbara Wilson needn’t have entered into a conspiracy to have accomplished these goals: she simply could have told people to read this complaint.]

The strangest of these “information and belief” structures comes in paragraph 49, when Attorney Wilson writes, “Upon information and belief . . . Beth Greenman called Plaintiff [Linwood Wilson] and advised him that “If you don’t get Barbara away from [her alleged ‘paramour’] Joe he is going to ruin her and destroy your marriage.” The person who wrote these words was a party to the alleged call. This is his complaint. Is Wilson suggesting that he himself doesn’t know if the call occurred (the only reason for an “upon information and belief” construction)?

The anti-Linwood “conspiracy,” Attorney Wilson claims, intensified after his wife discovered that Linwood planned to involuntarily commit her for mental observation. At that point, Barbara Wilson decided to “flea [sic!!] the jurisdiction of North Carolina in order to avoid commitment proceedings.”

Attorney Wilson also appeared to have taken writing lessons from the grammatically-challenged Tracey Cline. Consider, for example, this head-scratching sentence: “Also none of it was relevant to Delaware since, according to Defendant Weaver himself, the fact that all this supposedly occurred in another jurisdiction, North Carolina, which Defendant Weaver had nothing to do with.”

Some of the “evidence” proffered by Attorney Wilson, alas, undermines the position of his client. For instance, Attorney Wilson recounts a conversation between Barbara Wilson and her husband, in which she told Linwood that she wanted the marriage to work, but that she had some “conditions.” That admission might sound damaging to Barbara, until Attorney Wilson reveals the wife’s conditions: that Linwood “was not to call her cell and ask where she was or what she was doing”; and that Linwood was not to “follow” her. If, in fact, the unemployed Linwood Wilson was following his wife around, or frequently calling her up asking her what she was doing, it would seem as if he was engaging in, at the least, emotional abuse; and, at the most, stalking.

In any case, Attorney Wilson says that his client immediately discerned that his wife wasn’t serious in hoping that the marriage would work—a conclusion he based on his “training and experience as a police investigator, private investigator, and District Attorney investigator, for over 38 years.”

Or take this charming anecdote from Attorney Wilson after his wife’s alleged “paramour” visited the “marital home” to check on Barbara Wilson’s well-being. Linwood Wilson admits to screaming at Curtis, “Don’t come into my home, push me out of the way, and disgrace me, my wife, or my home in this way or I’ll blow your f_king head off!” Again: a person charged with spousal abuse is admitting that he threatened to “blow [the] f_king head off” the man he believed was sleeping with his estranged wife.

As the marriage deteriorated, Attorney Wilson admits that his client refused to have sex with his wife, as the “Plantiff knew that would damage his case, if the marriage didn’t work out, from 20 plus years as a private investigator. A field in which Plaintiff had testified as an expert witness over 200 times . . . throughout North Carolina.” Demonstrating his client’s classless nature, Attorney Wilson passes along the fact that his wife “started using dildo’s” to pleasure herself.

The Linwood Wilson who comes through in this complaint is an enraged man, something of a control freak, clearly humiliated by his wife’s apparent infidelity. How he could escape sanctions for filing such a bizarre complaint remains to be seen.

Finally, perhaps the strangest or the many strange clauses from the Wilson filing was the following: “Defendant Eric Campen stated loudly in the lobby of the Durham County Sheriff’s Department and Courthouse in front of Deputy Tom McRae, several unknown deputies, about ten people in the lobby, one [sic] of whom was Victoria Peterson and Richard Porter, “You are a convicted felon! You will never get your guns back! You know better than to even try this!.” “I’ve seen your handy work on the computers, I know how good you are!” The truth is that Plaintiff Wilson has never been convicted of any felony and why was Campen tampering with evidence that he was not authorized to (computer). When Plaintiff Wilson and Richard Porter left the lobby of the Sheriff’s Department several unknown bystanders stated, “We didn’t know you were a convicted felon!” An obvious character assassination and deformation.”

Leaving aside the implausibility that the events occurred even remotely as Wilson described, and further leaving aside Wilson’s hilarious claim that a government official allegedly saying false things about him constitutes “deformation,” the vignette begs the question: what was Durham’s resident bigot and homophobe, Victoria Peterson, doing milling around the sheriff’s office lobby?