By Ken Snyder
On 5 August 2013 I had a meeting with Ms. Leeds. BPU had decided to file an "Offer Of Judgement" with the court for "$20,000.00 plus reasonable attorneys' fees and costs which had been incurred to date in this cause." This was just as insulting as anything they had done so far, the amount isn't ten percent of my losses to date.
The other part of this was that I now needed to prepare to give a deposition and Ms. Leeds would have to prepare to take depositions from individuals at BPU. As was the case with the mediator, I would need to pay for the court reporter and pay for a copy of the deposition BPU would take from me. Total cost? Somewhere around $15,000.00
So now the decision was: could I come up with $15,000.00 and continue this fight, or accept their cowardly offer? I tried contacting anyone I thought could help: my unit was almost dead silent, all I got was how they didn't know any way they could help and sent me off looking elsewhere. I tried groups outside of my unit: some didn't respond at all, some were so far from reality they would have done better to not have responded at all. What I needed was a loan -- there was no way I would accept just a hand-out, I had every intention of paying back the money regardless of how this situation finished. But in the end, no one stepped up to help me with this, and we were out of options.
On 13 August I e-mailed Ms. Leeds' paralegal and told her I would accept the offer. BPU knew full well that I was probably not going to be able to go much further on what little money we still had, and for them $20K is pocket change: I heard in one of their Board of Directors meetings that $40,000.00 is 1/100th of their annual revenue, so do the math on that one. Here is a link to the filing with the District Court.
At that time I decided that while they were going to "pay me off" with this pitiful excuse for a settlement, they didn't pay to shut me up. I had been working on this site for some time (some of it has been posted in the past), but now I dedicated myself to getting everything I could online. While their offer says they didn't do anything wrong (the exact words are "is not to be construed as an admission that Defendants are liable in this action, that Plaintiff has suffered any damages, or that Defendants are indebted in any way to Plaintiff") most everyone that has seen the offer mentions how unusual it is for a Defendant to not only offer a settlement amount but to offer attorney's fees and costs on top of it.
Are they really guilty? Judge for yourself -- on the next two pages I am going to go into as much detail as I can on what has been discovered over the past three years.