Vexatious litigation: abuse with a case number

The first petition felt like a misunderstanding. The fourth felt like a pattern. By the tenth, I understood that the courthouse had become the one room where she could still make me sit across from her.

Vexatious litigation is the legal name for filings made primarily to harass, exhaust, or financially drain the other side. Each motion may be procedurally valid. The abuse lives in the volume, the timing, and the purpose — filings landing before holidays, before job interviews, before any moment I might have rested.

Courts are built to evaluate one claim at a time. They are not built to see a campaign. Every new judge saw a fresh dispute between two women with competing stories, not the years of pattern stacked behind it. That fragmentation is exactly what makes litigation abuse so effective.

What helped was treating my own case like a systems problem. A master timeline of every filing. Outcomes recorded beside allegations. A one-page summary that showed the pattern at a glance. Eventually, a lawyer who knew to ask the court about vexatious litigant designations and fee-shifting.

If you are being buried in paper, know this: the cost is the point, and the exhaustion is the strategy. Documenting the pattern turns it from a series of attacks into evidence. And evidence is the language the system finally hears.