IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR THE STATE OF OREGON
FOR THE COUNTY OF JOSEPHINE
ADRIAN DYER, an individual, Plaintiff,
v.
CHRISTOPHER ELDRETT, an individual, Defendant.
Case No. 25CV65869
PLAINTIFF’S INDEPENDENT ACTION FOR RELIEF FROM VOID JUDGMENT
UNDER ORCP 71 B(1)(d) AND ORCP 71 C, WITH ALTERNATIVE GROUND
UNDER ORCP 71 A, AND RESERVATION OF SUPPLEMENTAL GROUNDS
PENDING TRANSCRIPT CERTIFICATION
I. The Nature of a Void Judgment and the Authority to Say So
That which is not just is not law, and that which is not law ought not to be obeyed.
Algernon Sidney wrote those words in an unpublished manuscript for which the Crown executed him in 1683. The American Founders cited them as a foundational text of republican liberty. Oliver Ellsworth, second Chief Justice of the United States and the primary drafter of the Judiciary Act of 1789, carried Sidney’s principle into the constitutional framework at the Connecticut Ratifying Convention on January 7, 1788: if the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void, and the judicial power will declare it to be void. John Marshall gave both principles institutional voice in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), establishing that an act repugnant to the Constitution is void, and that it is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.
A judgment derives its binding force not from the power of the court that issued it but from the integrity of the process through which it was obtained. A judgment obtained through a process whose integrity was corrupted by the officer of the court who stood to benefit from that corruption is not a judgment in the legal sense. It is a document that wears the form of a judgment while lacking the substance that gives judgments their claim on conscience and compliance. ORCP 71 B(1)(d) authorizes this Court to relieve a party from a void judgment without time limitation, because void judgments occupy a special category whose flexible timing reflects the law’s recognition that a judgment lacking legal force from its inception cannot acquire that force through the passage of time. ORCP 71 C independently preserves this Court’s inherent authority to entertain an independent action to set aside a judgment for fraud upon the court, a ground that carries no one-year time cap and requires no accompanying pleading, because it invokes the court’s inherent authority rather than the rule’s enumerated grounds. Both grounds are invoked here, independently and in the alternative. No accompanying pleading is required under either ground, because relief is sought under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) and ORCP 71 C rather than subsections (a) through (c), to which the accompanying pleading requirement applies.
This action proceeds in parallel with the Notice of Appeal filed with the Oregon Court of Appeals on April 28, 2026, and with the Motion for Sanctions filed simultaneously herewith, as independent remedies pursued simultaneously through separate legal mechanisms rather than as substitutes for appellate review. The filing of the Notice of Appeal does not divest this Court of jurisdiction to entertain an independent action for fraud upon the court under ORCP 71 C, nor does it affect this Court’s authority to vacate a void judgment under ORCP 71 B(1)(d). The hearing transcript, currently pending certification, will confirm in the Court’s own words what the Court already knows from its own memory of April 23, 2026. This motion does not wait for the transcript to establish its primary grounds, because this Court does not require the transcript to remember what it heard.
The judgment entered in this proceeding rests on two findings, each of which is void on independent grounds, and each of which was produced by a process that Sidney’s maxim, Ellsworth’s void-law principle, and Marbury’s institutional framework collectively condemn. As an alternative and threshold ground, ORCP 71 A authorizes this Court to correct clerical mistakes in judgments, orders, and other parts of the record at any time, on its own motion or on motion of a party, where the written instrument fails to reflect what actually occurred in the proceedings. The proposed order submitted by defense counsel diverges from the oral ruling this Court delivered on April 23, 2026, and the proposed general judgment characterizes the statutory disposition in a manner ORS 31.150 does not authorize, in a manner that ORCP 71 A independently authorizes this Court to correct regardless of its disposition of the void judgment and fraud upon the court arguments. This Court has the authority to say so on three independent grounds. This motion asks it to exercise that authority on all three.
II. Statement of Facts
This proceeding began with a choice. Christopher G. Eldrett had a brother-in-law he believed had wronged his family. He could have called him. He had the number. The call would have taken less time than the drive to the police station. He chose instead to file a false report with law enforcement, across state lines, initiating criminal prosecution against a man he had never confronted directly, on the basis of a narrative he invented, for the purpose of destroying what he could not defeat in person. That choice was not the act of a man exercising a constitutional right. It was the act of a coward who weaponized institutional authority because he lacked the courage to use his own voice.
On January 23, 2026, before defense counsel filed a single motion in this proceeding, Plaintiff served counsel with a letter identifying the frivolous defense threshold under Oregon RPC 3.1 and Oregon State Bar Formal Opinion 2005-21 by name, establishing the brothers-in-law relationship as the factual predicate that made any good faith belief in the acquaintance characterization impossible, offering counsel the ethical exit under ORPC 1.16(a)(1) and ORS 9.380 with specific mechanics, and giving her seven days to take it. That letter is already part of this Court’s record as Plaintiff’s Exhibit A in Plaintiff’s Opposition to Defendant’s Special Motion to Strike, Case No. 25CV65869. Counsel declined. She filed the motion anyway.
On January 30, 2026, Defendant filed a sworn declaration in this proceeding containing three false statements about his sister, Jamie Eldrett, the only other person present on the phone call the declaration purports to describe. Defense counsel certified those statements under her bar number and filed a Special Motion to Strike premised upon them. After reading the declaration and identifying its false characterizations of her words and conduct, Jamie Eldrett contacted defense counsel through LinkedIn, sending a professional connection request through a channel counsel was demonstrably using as recently as March 2026, as documented by her own public posts on that platform. Counsel did not respond. She filed additional motions repeating the same characterizations without ever speaking to the one witness whose testimony was directly relevant to the motion’s central factual claim. The obligation to make contact ran in the other direction. Oregon attorneys are required under ORPC 3.3 to investigate the factual basis of claims they certify to courts. The investigation the rules required was a single conversation with a readily available witness who had already initiated contact. That conversation never happened. See Exhibit A (Declaration of Jamie Eldrett Regarding LinkedIn Contact with Defense Counsel).
On April 23, 2026, this Court heard argument on Defendant’s Special Motion to Strike. At that hearing, Plaintiff drew an explicit distinction this Court heard from the bench: this proceeding is not about emotional harm. It is about an existential threat, the systematic destruction of a household’s professional capacity, financial security, and access to justice across two states, initiated by a single false police report and sustained across three years of coordinated legal proceedings in four courts and three jurisdictions. At that same hearing, this Court invited Plaintiff to concede that lying to police is a protected activity under ORS 31.150(2). Plaintiff declined. Refusal was not procedural stubbornness, but a moral position, stated on the record, in open court, from which Plaintiff has not retreated and does not intend to retreat.
At the same hearing, defense counsel made three representations to this Court about Jamie Eldrett that are demonstrably false on the face of the documents they purport to describe, and that this Court heard delivered by an officer of this Court in open court. Counsel characterized a photograph conceived, composed, and directed by Jamie Eldrett as depicting a sex act staged for the purpose of harassment. See Exhibit F (Declaration of Jamie Eldrett Regarding the Photograph). Counsel characterized a fax Jamie Eldrett sent to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office as stating that Plaintiff had died, when the fax states the opposite. See Exhibit G (Declaration of Jamie Eldrett Regarding the Fax). Counsel attributed to Jamie Eldrett a statement, that Plaintiff had died, that Jamie Eldrett has never made in any forum, in any document, at any time. See Exhibit H (Declaration of Jamie Eldrett Regarding the Death Attribution). Each of those representations was made to this Court by an officer of this Court, about a person who was not present, in a proceeding that person was not a party to, at a moment when this Court was evaluating the credibility of the declaration whose central claims concerned that person’s words and conduct. The certified hearing transcript will confirm each representation, however this Court does not require the document to remember what it heard.
Following the hearing, defense counsel served on Plaintiff a proposed Order on Defendant’s Special Motion to Strike and a proposed General Judgment of Dismissal Without Prejudice on April 27, 2026, the same day the instruments were prepared, bearing a Certificate of Readiness that certified none of the predicates UTCR 5.100 requires. See Exhibit B (Email from Lauren M. Butz to Adrian Dyer, April 27, 2026) and Exhibit E (General Judgment of Dismissal Without Prejudice with Certificate of Readiness, served April 27, 2026). The following day, counsel acknowledged in correspondence that UTCR 5.100 requires seven days of advance service before submission, establishing that the requirement was known to her at the time she served the defective instruments. See Exhibit C (Email from Lauren M. Butz to Adrian Dyer, April 28, 2026). The proposed order characterizes the oral ruling more broadly than the ruling this Court delivered, substituting a general prima facie failure for the damages-specific finding this Court actually made, in a direction that systematically advantages the defense’s appellate posture. See Exhibit D (Proposed Order on Defendant’s Special Motion to Strike, served April 27, 2026). The proposed general judgment characterizes the disposition as a dismissal without prejudice, a framing ORS 31.150 does not authorize, whose remedy upon granting a special motion to strike is the striking of the claim rather than a general judgment of dismissal, and whose without-prejudice characterization has consequences for the mandatory fee-shifting provision of ORS 31.152(3) and for the appellate record that the proposed judgment does not acknowledge. Both written instruments fail to reflect what actually occurred in the proceedings within the meaning of ORCP 71 A, and this Court may correct both at any time.
III. The Step-One Finding Is Void Under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) and ORCP 71 C
Oregon’s Anti-SLAPP statute, ORS 31.150, was enacted to protect legitimate petitioning activity, public participation, and speech on matters of genuine public concern. Its legislative history reflects a specific purpose: to prevent the use of civil litigation as a weapon against citizens who exercise their constitutional rights to speak, petition, and participate in public affairs. That purpose is the statute’s constitutional foundation and the outer boundary of its authority.
A false police report, filed by a private individual against a specific named target, for the purpose of initiating criminal prosecution across state lines, is not speech on a matter of public concern. It is private fraud directed at the Court itself for private advantage, using law enforcement as an instrument of private retaliation. Its only public character is the institutional machinery it weaponizes, which is precisely the character that removes it from the statute’s protection rather than bringing it there-within. A construction of ORS 31.150(2) that immunizes private fraud against civil liability by characterizing it as petitioning activity extends the statute beyond any authority the legislature possesses to protect deliberate falsehoods made to law enforcement for the purpose of destroying a named individual’s professional capacity, financial security, and freedom from criminal prosecution. No Oregon appellate decision has applied ORS 31.150(2) to a private false police report filed by one individual against another for the purpose of initiating criminal prosecution. The defense counsel certified was premised on a construction of the statute that no appellate decision supports, filed after Plaintiff’s Exhibit A in the opposition documented the absence of any non-frivolous basis for that construction before the motion was filed.
Ellsworth’s principle applies directly. The government possesses no legitimate authority to immunize private fraud from civil remedy. A statute construed to do so is void to the extent of that construction. The step-one finding that Christopher Eldrett’s false police report constitutes a statement made in connection with a public issue within the meaning of ORS 31.150(2) is a finding premised on that void construction. It is therefore void on Sidney’s test before it reaches any other question, because a law that protects lying to police as a form of protected speech is not a law that deserves the name of law, and a finding premised on that law carries no more binding force than the law itself.
This Court invited Plaintiff to concede that finding. Plaintiff declined, as any man of conscience must. The refusal was correct. This motion asks this Court to find it so, under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) as a void judgment and under ORCP 71 C as a finding produced by a process corrupted by the officer of the court who stood to benefit from it. Both grounds are independent. Either is sufficient. Both are presented.
Defense counsel has offered no limiting principle that distinguishes her client’s false police report from any other false report filed by any private individual against any other private individual with law enforcement. If the step-one finding is correct, it immunizes every such report, regardless of falsity, regardless of malice, and regardless of harm, because the institutional recipient is always a public body and the report always concerns a matter the institution classifies as public. If that consequence is acceptable, the Anti-SLAPP statute has become a license for private individuals to weaponize law enforcement against their neighbors, their family members, and their brothers-in-law without civil accountability of any kind. If that consequence is not acceptable, then the limiting principle that prevents such perjury must be identified, and whatever principle this Court or the Court of Appeals identifies will almost certainly exclude this report from the statute’s protection, because the only limiting principles available, good faith, genuine public concern, and legitimate petitioning activity, are each independently negated by the documented character of the false report at the center of this proceeding. This Court invited Plaintiff to concede the step-one finding. Plaintiff declined.
The absence of any limiting principle in the defense’s position is the reason the refusal was, is, and will always be correct.
IV. The Step-Two Finding Is Void Under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) and ORCP 71 C
Oregon defamation per se law presumes general damages without requiring proof of special damages. Benassi v. Georgia-Pacific, 62 Or App 698, 662 P2d 760, adh’d to as modified on recons, 63 Or App 672, 667 P2d 532 (1983); Bank of Oregon v. Independent News, 67 Or App 710 (1983). The presumed damages rule is the common law baseline. ORS 31.210’s additional requirements apply only to media defendants. Christopher Eldrett is not a media defendant. He is a private individual who filed a false police report. No constitutional overlay applies to his conduct, and no proof of special damages was required at the step-two stage or at any other stage of this proceeding, that last clause being stipulated by defense counsel at its outset.
The proceeding in which this finding was made was stipulated by defense counsel at its outset to be non-evidentiary. The step-two standard under ORS 31.150(4) required this Court to accept Plaintiff’s evidence as true, draw all reasonable inferences in his favor, and ask only whether a reasonable factfinder could find for him. Young v. Davis, 259 Or App 497 (2013); Oregon Education Assn v. Parks, 254 Or App 306 (2012). The filed record before this Court at the time of the April 23, 2026 hearing established publication through Defendant’s own police report, falsity through the sworn deposition testimony of Jamie Eldrett, per se defamatory character through the report’s imputation of criminal threatening across state lines, and abuse of qualified privilege through evidence that Defendant deliberately misrepresented Plaintiff’s identity and marital relationship to law enforcement. Schafroth v. Baker, 276 Or 39 (1976). Those four elements, accepted as true, satisfy the step-two standard on the record already before this Court. General damages are presumed by operation of law. No damages showing was required, especially in a non-evidentiary hearing.
The open court misrepresentations through which the step-two finding was produced are most accurately characterized not as intrinsic fraud under ORCP 71 B(1)(c), which addresses misconduct of an adverse party, but as fraud upon the court under ORCP 71 C, which addresses conduct by an officer of the court that corrupts the judicial process itself. MBNA America Bank v. Garcia, 227 Or App 202, 205 P3d 53 (2009), specifically recognized that fraud upon the court can be committed by someone other than a party, including counsel, and that such conduct invokes the court’s inherent authority under ORCP 71 C independently of the enumerated grounds in ORCP 71 B. The distinction between intrinsic fraud and fraud upon the court forecloses the argument that Plaintiff had an opportunity to address the misrepresentations during the proceeding and therefore cannot seek relief under ORCP 71 C. The fraud upon the court doctrine applies precisely because the misrepresentations were made by an officer of the court in open court, about a non-party witness who was not present and could not correct the record, at a moment when the court was being asked to rely on those representations as a basis for its ruling. That is not intrinsic fraud. That is the corruption of the judicial process itself, which is the precise conduct ORCP 71 C was designed to address. See Exhibits F, G, and H.
The step-two finding was not merely legally erroneous. It was produced through three demonstrably false representations made to this Court by the officer of the court who certified the motion’s central factual claims, repeated those claims in argument, and declined to investigate their falsity despite actual notice that the only witness with direct personal knowledge of the underlying events had already initiated contact through a professional channel counsel was actively using. See Exhibit A. A step-two finding produced under those conditions is void under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) as a judgment lacking legal force from its inception, and subject to independent action under ORCP 71 C as a judgment produced through fraud upon the court. Both grounds are independent. Either is sufficient. Both are presented.
V. The Proposed Order and General Judgment Are Subject to Correction Under ORCP 71 A
As a threshold alternative to the void judgment and fraud upon the court arguments, and without prejudice to either, Plaintiff invokes ORCP 71 A as an independent basis for correction of both proposed instruments’ language. ORCP 71 A authorizes this Court to correct clerical mistakes in judgments, orders, and other parts of the record at any time, on its own motion or on motion of a party, where the written instrument fails to reflect what actually occurred in the proceedings.
The oral ruling this Court delivered on April 23, 2026 found that Plaintiff had not demonstrated damages. That is a step-two finding on a specific element of the defamation per se claim. The proposed order submitted by defense counsel states that Plaintiff has not established a prima facie case for defamation per se and intentional infliction of emotional distress. See Exhibit D. That formulation is broader than the oral ruling this Court delivered and does not accurately reflect its stated basis. A written order that diverges from the oral ruling it purports to memorialize fails to reflect what actually occurred in the proceedings within the meaning of ORCP 71 A. This Court may correct that divergence at any time, on its own motion, without reaching the void judgment or fraud upon the court arguments.
The proposed General Judgment characterizes the disposition as a dismissal without prejudice. See Exhibit E. ORS 31.150’s remedy upon granting a special motion to strike is the striking of the claim, not a general judgment of dismissal without prejudice. A proposed judgment that characterizes the statutory disposition in a manner the statute does not authorize fails to reflect what the law required to occur in these proceedings within the meaning of ORCP 71 A, and is subject to correction on that ground independently of the void judgment argument. The without-prejudice characterization also carries consequences for the mandatory fee-shifting provision of ORS 31.152(3) that the proposed judgment does not acknowledge, and whose resolution affects both the appellate record and the enforceability of any fee award that follows from the judgment.
Plaintiff requests that this Court exercise its ORCP 71 A authority now, correcting the proposed order to reflect the damages-specific finding this Court actually made, and correcting the proposed general judgment to reflect the statutory disposition ORS 31.150 prescribes, without prejudice to the Court’s disposition of the void judgment and fraud upon the court arguments presented above.
VI. Conclusion
This proceeding began with a choice. Christopher G. Eldrett had a brother-in-law he believed had wronged his family. He could have called him. Instead he filed a false police report across state lines, initiating criminal prosecution against a man he had never confronted directly. That choice was the act of a coward who weaponized institutional authority because he lacked the courage to use his own voice. The judgment that protects that choice as though it were protected speech under Oregon’s Anti-SLAPP statute is not a judgment that deserves the name of law.
At the April 23, 2026 hearing, Plaintiff named this proceeding for what it is: not a dispute about emotional harm but an existential threat, sustained across three years and as many jurisdictions without counsel, without institutional support, and without the professional income that Defendant’s false report permanently foreclosed. Plaintiff was asked at that hearing to concede that lying to police is a protected activity. He declined. That refusal was the foundation of every argument this motion makes, and it is the foundation of every argument that follows this motion in every forum where this record travels.
Plaintiff does not bring this action for $1.2 million. That figure does not approach what this proceeding has cost, and no figure available to this Court could make Plaintiff whole for three years of foreclosed professional income, a liquidated retirement account, a demolished professional network, and a pending felony charge that bars entry to every secured facility his career was built to serve. Plaintiff brings this action because the false narrative Christopher Eldrett swore to a Massachusetts police officer in May 2023 remains uncorrected in any public record, because the Massachusetts criminal prosecution that narrative initiated remains pending, and because the institutional cascade that false narrative produced continues to operate against Plaintiff and his wife in the absence of a judicial record that names it for what it is. Defense counsel is fighting for a fee. Plaintiff is fighting for his life, and for his wife’s life after him. Jamie Eldrett is fourteen years Plaintiff’s junior. The period of her life most likely to be lived without him is also the period most likely to be longest, and the window in which Plaintiff can establish the financial and legal foundation that protects her during that period is correspondingly narrow. Christopher Eldrett’s window to provide for his own family is underwritten by maternal subsidies whose character he has described across decades in terms of obligation and entitlement. Plaintiff’s window was built on a tradesman’s wages, one paycheck at a time, and has been closing since June 2023. Settlement was never available because no settlement resolves what this proceeding is actually about, and every tactical assumption premised on its availability was wrong from the first filing. An attorney who mistakes an existential fight for a billable dispute has already lost the proceeding whose outcome she is billing to secure. The record now before this Court is the evidence of that mistake, accumulated across five months of instruments whose author understood what the proceeding was about and whose opponent did not.
Algernon Sidney was executed for writing that unjust laws are not laws. The Crown proved his thesis in the act of suppressing it. Socrates was offered exile, recantation, and survival by the democratic institution that convicted him. He declined each offer, not from stubbornness but from the conviction that a man who abandons justice to preserve his life has already lost the thing worth preserving. Plaintiff does not invoke those names as rhetoric, but as the most precise allegory available of his own position, arrived at through three years of documented sacrifice whose cost he has calculated, found acceptable, and decided does not change the answer.
This Court has the authority Sidney identified, Ellsworth codified, and Marshall institutionalized, on three independent grounds: ORCP 71 B(1)(d) for the void judgment, ORCP 71 C for the fraud upon the court, and ORCP 71 A for the clerical correction of both proposed instruments. It has the opportunity to exercise that authority now, before the Court of Appeals exercises it on review, and before the supplemental grounds reserved in the parallel sanctions motion are fully developed into the record the certified transcript will produce. Correction now is wisdom. The alternative is a written opinion from the Court of Appeals identifying the damages standard error, documenting the fraud upon the court grounds reserved in the transcript, and reversing a judgment entered by this Court in a proceeding whose integrity was corrupted by the officer of the court who drafted the proposed order that memorialized it. Correction now is wisdom. Correction later is that.
If this Court declines to pursue and uphold justice in this matter, Plaintiff will do so through every instrument the law provides, and if the law itself proves insufficient, through every instrument his conscience sanctions, even alone, even at whatever price that pursuit demands. That is not a threat directed at this Court or at any person. It is a statement of the same position Plaintiff stated at the hearing when he declined to concede that fraud is speech, the same position Sidney stated when he declined to recant, the same position Socrates stated when he declined exile. It is the position of a man who has calculated the cost, found it acceptable, and decided that acceptance of a void judgment obtained through a corrupted process as the final word on an existential threat is a price he is not willing to pay.
Plaintiff asks this Court to void the judgment under ORCP 71 B(1)(d) and set aside the general judgment, restoring this proceeding to the posture it occupied before the process that produced the judgment was corrupted by the officer of the court who stood to benefit from that corruption. If the judgment is void, the fee-shift award in the proposed order is equally void, because it derives its authority from the judgment it accompanies and cannot survive the judgment’s nullification. Plaintiff further asks this Court to correct the proposed order’s language under ORCP 71 A to reflect the oral ruling this Court actually delivered, to correct the proposed general judgment’s characterization of the statutory disposition under ORCP 71 A to reflect the remedy ORS 31.150 prescribes, to impose the sanctions described in the parallel motion for sanctions filed simultaneously herewith, to refer counsel’s conduct to the Oregon State Bar pursuant to ORS 9.527. Finally and most importantly, Plaintiff humbly asks this Court to declare, in writing, for the benefit of victims less resolved than himself, that the step-one finding that a false police report constitutes protected activity under ORS 31.150(2) is void as a construction that exceeds the statute’s constitutional authority, and that no court in this jurisdiction should adopt it.
That which is not just is not law.
Dated: May 1st, 2026
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