Social Media Creates a Monster

Date: December 13, 2025

This update documents record-level discrepancies appearing in publicly available filings involving Brock Fredin, with particular focus on how those discrepancies intersect with the conduct of two recurring institutional actors: Referee Elizabeth Clysdale and Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Brett Bacon.

The purpose of this page is to preserve and contextualize the Fredin-related irregularities as they relate to ongoing litigation documented in this archive. It examines how defects, assumptions, and referee-level characterizations in Fredin's proceedings recur in later cases, informing litigation posture, record reliance, and institutional narratives that continue to surface in current matters.

Procedural Context

Fredin's federal defamation action against City Pages and its reporter was dismissed after the district court adopted a magistrate judge's report and recommendation, applying statute-of-limitations and privilege doctrines as dispositive. The dismissal did not involve independent adjudication of the underlying allegations.

Instead, the publication at issue was treated as a derivative summary of existing judicial records-including prior harassment proceedings and appellate rulings-thereby insulating it from liability on the theory that it accurately reproduced what the court record already asserted.

Narrative Inheritance

The record reflects a recurring progression. Referee-level characterizations enter early proceedings, where they function as provisional descriptions rather than adjudicated facts. Over time, those descriptions migrate into later filings and are treated as settled context instead of contested assertions.

By the stage of subsequent civil litigation, the operative question is no longer whether the underlying conduct occurred as described, but whether later actors were permitted to rely on the existing record as authoritative. Through this process, allegations acquire durability through repetition, hardening into assumed fact without renewed examination.

Overlapping Actors

Referee Elizabeth Clysdale appears at the origin point of the record chain. Her referee-level findings entered early proceedings and were subsequently carried forward, not as provisional characterizations, but as settled descriptors relied upon by later courts and third parties. These findings were not re-litigated or independently tested in subsequent forums; they functioned instead as narrative anchors embedded in the record.

In later stages, filings associated with Ramsey County Attorney Brett Bacon's office relied on those inherited records as authoritative source material. Counsel did not reassess how the underlying findings were generated, but defended their reuse as accurate accounts of prior events. This reliance is not abstract: Fredin v. Clysdale was later cited by Bacon in separate litigation as supporting authority, extending the same referee-originated narrative into new proceedings without renewed examination.

The result is a closed loop: referee findings become record truth, record truth becomes litigation authority, and that authority is then redeployed to justify the same procedural posture in later cases.

Why This Matters

This update is not concerned with whether Brock Fredin was justified, sympathetic, or culpable. It is concerned with how judicial records behave once a narrative is fixed at the earliest stages of adjudication.

When later courts, counsel, and third parties rely on inherited descriptions without renewed scrutiny, the record itself becomes the operative authority. The boundary between allegation and adjudicated fact erodes-not through intent or fabrication, but through procedural momentum and repeated reliance.

The overlap documented here matters because it demonstrates a repeatable system behavior: referee-level characterizations shape downstream outcomes, and county counsel's reliance on those characterizations extends their force across cases. Once embedded, the record ceases to be descriptive and becomes determinative, governing every later forum in which it appears.

At that point, the record no longer reflects events-it directs them.