UPDATE: Judge Starr Upholds HRO on Altered Record
Date: August 19, 2025
Event: On August 19, 2025, Judge Nicole Starr held a hearing on Plaintiff's Motion to Vacate the harassment restraining order (HRO). At the conclusion of the hearing, Starr denied the motion and upheld the HRO, relying heavily on the August 14 collateral estoppel memorandum filed by Kyle T. Manderfeld and an evidence packet containing irregular, conflicting versions of key orders.
How the Record Was Framed
The August 19 hearing did not begin from the actual Register of Actions or the full evidentiary record on file. Instead, it proceeded on the basis of:
- Manderfeld's August 14 collateral estoppel memo, which sought to freeze the record and bar further challenge;
- An evidence packet containing:
- a signed December 12, 2024 HRO not present on the docket at that time, and
- an unsigned May 23, 2025 denial order.
Plaintiff's August 15 objection-which attached copies of the December 12 and May 23 orders in their unsigned forms matching the ROA-was not meaningfully addressed on the record.
Adoption of Irregular Orders as "Fact"
In her oral ruling and subsequent Findings of Fact, Starr:
- treated the December 12, 2024 HRO as a properly signed and fully effective order;
- described the May 23, 2025 denial order as if it were signed by a judge;
- relied on those two orders as the foundation for denying the Motion to Vacate.
At the time of the hearing, no signed version of the May 23 order existed in the official record. The only versions Plaintiff and the court had previously received were unsigned, and the docket reflected those unsigned forms. Starr's decision therefore adopted the disputed, irregular version of the record introduced by Manderfeld while disregarding the conflicting evidence Plaintiff had placed before the court.
Procedural and Substantive Concerns
The August 19 proceeding raises multiple concerns that later became central in the federal civil rights case:
- Reliance on a fabricated procedural posture: The estoppel theory and "finality" of the HRO were derived from documents whose authenticity and filing history were already in dispute.
- Failure to reconcile the record: Starr did not address why the versions of the orders submitted by Plaintiff (unsigned) differed from those in Manderfeld's packet (unsigned), nor did she order any corrective action.
- Suppression of service and ADA issues: Irregular service, unsigned orders, and ignored ADA requests were treated as closed questions rather than live defects in the underlying proceedings.
- Adoption of laundered evidence: The hearing marked the first time a judicial officer formally adopted the altered documentary record as "fact."
Impact on Federal and Appellate Proceedings
Starr's August 19 findings were later:
- attached to Ramsey County's federal Motion to Dismiss as proof that the HRO process was regular;
- used by county counsel Brett Bacon to argue that Plaintiff's claims were precluded by prior state-court rulings;
- incorporated into Plaintiff's Notice of Evidence Laundering in the federal case as a key example of how irregular documents migrated from administration to advocacy to judicial findings.
The August 19 hearing is therefore a central node in the broader timeline: the moment when an already contaminated record was elevated from clerical anomaly to judicial fact, and then exported into the federal docket as if it were a reliable account of what actually happened.