Origin Story

How a cyberstalking case became the federal civil-rights action Strickland v. Ramsey County — and why I publish every development in public instead of waiting for a broken system to fix itself.

Most people meet this case in the middle

Most people find this archive somewhere in the middle of the story: a single filing, a dossier, an update about a hearing that never should have happened the way it did. This page is the beginning — the part that explains why the rest of it exists.

It started with a stalker

I'm Kellye Strickland. Online, and in my work as an indie game developer, I go by Onion Madder. I'm autistic, I build interactive things for a living, and I spend my time as an OSINT investigator and digital archivist — which means that documenting what happened to me turned out to be the one thing I was already trained to do.

It started the way these things often start: I became the target of a cyberstalker. I did what you are supposed to do. I went to Ramsey County and asked the court for protection.

Then the paperwork started lying

That is when the story stopped being about a stalker and started being about a courthouse.

The harassment-restraining orders came back unsigned and were treated as binding anyway. A sheriff's deputy called me under the banner of "victim services," collected my address, and that address reached the person I was hiding from. When I called the court to request ADA accommodations — the legal kind, the kind they are required to provide — an administrator recognized my name and refused. A judge I had never appeared before turned up mid-case, credited with decisions made at hearings I was never told about.

Every one of those sentences is drawn from the record. None of it is the worst part.

It wasn't a glitch. It was the machine.

The worst part is that none of it was personal.

Ramsey County keeps two different versions of the same case. The public-facing MCRO view is stamped "informational only." The internal Register of Actions that county lawyers treat as authoritative in federal court tells a different story — index numbers out of sequence, entries inserted after the fact, others simply gone. For a while I assumed this was my case, my bad luck, my mistake.

Then I found the same defect in cases that had nothing to do with me — Wright, Scheffler, and the Perryn Marks file a court clerk accidentally mailed to my house. Same county. Same broken record-keeping. Different strangers.

That changes what kind of problem it is. Under Monell, a pattern that shows up across unrelated cases is not a clerical error — it is a custom. A court system whose own timeline will not hold still is a court system in which due process cannot actually be exercised.

Finality without authenticity is not justice — it is foreclosure.

Why I publish this in public

By the summer of 2025, this had become a federal civil-rights case — Strickland v. Ramsey County — which I largely litigate pro se. The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division assigned it a file number. The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor opened a look at the court's finances.

But oversight is slow, and some of it never arrives. When the formal channels that are supposed to catch this kind of thing are the same channels producing it, public documentation stops being a vanity project and becomes the only working accountability mechanism left.

So I document. Every update on this site is a contemporaneous, primary-source-linked record of something that actually happened — a filing, a ruling, a fee, a retaliation, a federal agency picking up the phone. Individually, each one is a receipt. Together, they are the timeline the internal record will not hold still long enough to show.

When formal systems fail, I build functional ones

That line is from my bio, and I meant it literally. When institutions erase, I keep the copy. This archive is built the way I build everything: open sources only, every claim traceable to a primary document, every actor named with their public role and nothing more.

It is, as I have said elsewhere, both a record and a signal — to other litigants who recognize the pattern, to journalists looking for documented grounding, and to officials whose job it is to look.

How to read what follows

Start with the Live Updates if you want the chronology as it unfolded, or the Cast of Characters if you want to know who is who first. Every factual claim links back to its source; the document archive holds the PDFs.

If you want new developments as they land, subscribe on Substack — this origin story is the first thing there too, for exactly the same reason it is the first thing here.

Everything here is real. Even the parts that aren't. Especially the parts that shouldn't be.