Richart Ruddie Companies Sent Forged Papers to Rhode Island Federal Court

by Paul Alan Levy

There have been a few key developments in the story of Bradley Smith v. Deborah Garcia, the fake lawsuit filed for the purpose of getting certain articles written by Steve Rhode on the Get Out of Debt Guy web site deleted from search engine databases so that they would not be returned as search results.  As I explained in previous blog posts, Bradley Smith, the CEO of a debt-relief company called Rescue One Financial, has denied having signed the complaint and consent order, and Deborah Garcia, who supposedly “consented” to a judgment, appears not to exist at all.  But his company admittedly hired a company to use unspecified “proprietary methods” to scrub the Internet of unwanted criticisms.

Last week, I appeared before Chief Judge William Smith, who, in addition to granting the blogger’s motion for leave to intervene, expressed chagrin at having been duped into signing the “consent order” and raised the possibility that the filing of forged papers violated various criminal statutes; he indicated that he was going to ask the United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island to investigate.

While I was at the courthouse in Providence, I had the chance to talk to the clerk’s office and learned the identity of the process service that brought the forged litigation papers to court.  The process server, in turn, when informed that he had filed forged papers, had no compunction about identifying the company which in turn had provided those papers and the company on whose account the check to pay the filing fee had been written.  The check was from RIR1984 LLC, the very company with which Rescue One Financial had contracted for services to get Steve Rhode’s critical web pages removed from search engine indexes.  The individual signer for RIR1984 on the contract is Richart Ruddie, who, as Eugene Volokh and I reported last month, is apparently responsible for dozens of fake lawsuits around the country.  And the go-between was “Annuity Sold,” a company with which Richart Ruddie himself has self-identified. 

Consequently, we have moved both to vacate the order, and to dismiss the complaint.  Because the Rhode Island anti-SLAPP statute provides for awards of not only attorney fees but also compensatory and punitive damages if the lawsuit aimed at protected speech was “frivolous or were brought with an intent to harass the party or otherwise inhibit the party's exercise of its right to petition or free speech,” we intend to argue that not only Ruddie and his company, but the debt relief company for whom Ruddie was serving as an agent in getting pages taken out of the Google search index, bear legal responsibility for Myvesta’s attorney fees and damages.   In the final analysis, hiring an SEO company might both prove to have been an expensive mistake for Rescue One Financial, not to speak of costing it a significant hit to its reputation – after all, consumers may well wonder, what did Rescue One Financial have to hide that it needed to hire this sort of trickster?

Comments

[saqib]

Excellent and very exciting site. Love to watch. Keep Rocking.

The author of this comment is a lawyer who is desperate for links -- which have been deleted

[Matthew Chan]

This is simply amazing work. There are few words which can describe this latest breakthrough.

For me, the three significant pieces of information that has come out is: 1.) A copy of the signed check by Ruddie through one of his corporate entities was uncovered. 2.) The process server was eager to cooperate. 3.) The transcript had immeasurable value because it shows the judge was angry about what was uncovered and he seems motivated to pursue followup with the U.S. Attorney.

It is abundantly clear that this case will continue into 2017. Richart Ruddie has something to lose sleep about.