Michael Hersh says CTA will not change

CTA Legal Dept
Michael Hersh

Hi Michael:

My goodness, you’re not your old self lately! You’ve been following a more imaginative course of action than CTA’s time-honored practice of continually insisting that you weren’t properly served. I was impressed by your filing responses to my lawsuit when you knew I was working on a first amended complaint, and I didn’t plan to serve the original complaint. Tricky! Who gave you that idea?

I called up the court today and found out that you filed pleadings on July 10, 2007 and July 13, 2007. Apparently the court has not filed my motion to dismiss (enclosed) or your motion to declare me a vexatious litigant. But I’m sure it will all get straightened out. There are many different ways to deal with this case, all of which, I trust, will eventually lead to good outcomes for everyone.

I will argue, of course, that you have no right to attorney’s fees or court costs when you were not even served with a summons. It was your choice, your wish, done for your own purposes.

I will also argue that you left out the most significant case of all in terms of vexatious litigants: my suit against Kathleen Elton for filing a false police report. That suit was settled in my favor for $75,000, as you well know, and precludes my being labeled a vexatious litigant.

Have your new advisors ever mentioned that you might want to deal with true facts in this case? Do you really think you can keep the truth hidden forever by continually playing legal games? Are you really that cynical about the justice system? Are you completely convinced that you and Beverly can hide your crimes indefinitely?

Beverly Tucker and CTA certainly made vexatious litigants of themselves in the Turlock case. That case demonstrated how little CTA cares about kids, how much it cares about power, and what a pathetic lapdog Bob Thompson is to Beverly Tucker.

The current case is just a small part of a larger battle between those who want education to be fixed, and those who want to maintain the status quo in the vastly powerful California Teachers Association, which, you once told me, “is not going to change.”

Yours truly,
Maura Larkins


[Note: The Turlock case was about CTA members wearing buttons in the classroom to campaign against the efforts of teachers to have another union replace CTA in the Turlock School District. The administrative law judge at the Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) ruled against the teachers. The judge's decision was clearly correct, since the California Court of Appeal had decided the question of campaign buttons in the classroom in a case from San Diego. But the PERB board overruled its own judge. When Turlock School District appealed, Bob Thompson, general counsel at PERB joined with CTA head lawyer Beverly Tucker to fight the appeal. They lost.

But Bob Thompson and Beverly Tucker did prove that they care more about the power of those who control CTA than they care about the taxpayers or children of California. How did they prove this? They used tax dollars to fight this self-serving lawsuit during the 2003 budget crisis in California.

Bev and Bob lost; the decision is HERE. So what did they do then? They appealed to the state supreme court and lost again. These are truly vexatious litigants.]