After waiting twelve days with no response to my inquiries, I finally called the courthouse myself. That was when a clerk told me that my Motion to Strike had been routed to Judge Walcyzk and that she was holding it. This was a serious problem because the court already knew she was a named defendant in my federal case and was therefore disqualified from touching any part of this matter. Routing the motion to her anyway was not a mistake. It was a deliberate act of interference with my constitutional rights and an attempt to block judicial review of an emergency filing. This is even more disturbing because she is running for a spot in the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
Once I realized what was happening, I had no choice but to file a Notice of Conflict and Request for Reassignment. In that notice, I documented the timeline: the motion had been filed as an emergency on September 5, my follow-up emails on September 12 and the morning of September 16 were ignored, and the Clerk’s Office confirmed in the afternoon that the motion was being held by a judge who was legally prohibited from ruling on it. I laid out the conflicts of three judges, all named defendants in the federal suit, and explained how routing an emergency motion to a disqualified judge after notice of conflict constituted obstruction and prejudiced my rights.
But the issue didn’t stop with the judge. At the same time, Attorney Yopp began trying to bypass the proper channels entirely. Instead of filing anything through the docket, he started emailing the Trial Court Administrator and asking her to forward private email threads directly to the judge, even though those emails contained his arguments on the merits. Those communications were not filed, not served, and not part of the official record. His request that the TCA deliver them to Judge Williams was an improper attempt at ex parte influence. I immediately objected and then filed a formal Notice of Improper Ex Parte Communication Attempt to ensure the record reflected exactly what he was trying to do.
The emails make the pattern unmistakable. The full thread shows me repeatedly asking for a status update, explaining the emergency nature of the motion, and correcting procedural errors, while Yopp inserted arguments through administrative channels and then asked the TCA to hand those arguments to the judge directly. Even when I reminded him that all communications for judicial consideration must be filed through the court and properly served, he insisted that forwarding the private thread was permissible. I corrected him again and then filed the notice to prevent him from manipulating the review behind the scenes.
At this stage it was obvious that the combination of delayed rulings, improper routing, ignored inquiries, and Yopp’s attempts to circumvent the record were not isolated errors. It was coordinated obstruction inside the courthouse itself, designed to delay my case and interfere with my access to the courts.