Before You Hear It

The “restraint” was a fifteen-month public campaign — announced twice from the highest office, in writing, to the entire membership, and still running this week. Four mass emails from three officers in the first seventy-four days — one calling a fellow Archon a liar, one accusing him of converting Fraternity property — then a podium directive to shun him, four cease-and-desist letters, two federal applications to silence him (both denied), and, six days before this convention, a written demand that he be met at the door by security and local law enforcement. Restraint is a private virtue. A campaign is a public program. Is that restraint?

The dates, for anyone who wants to count:

April 10, 2025 — one day after the vote, the Executive Director announces the removal to the entire Fraternity, asks for “cooperation and discretion in respecting our internal process,” and promises “updates on the findings” — findings the membership has still never been shown.

April 28, 2025 — the Grand Sire Archon mass-emails that a fellow Archon’s notice “is false… it is a lie,” that his actions “violate nearly every prohibited act,” including “conversion of Fraternity property for personal use” — an accusation of theft, over the highest officer’s signature, to thousands. The same letter claims “third-party legal opinions” never produced to this day, and declares — nineteen days after the vote — that the charges have “not been refuted.” The same sentence you will hear this week.

May 27, 2025 — the Grand Grammateus mass-emails the suspension to the entire membership.

June 2 and June 23, 2025 — the campaign is announced outright: from the podium, two thousand Archons are advised to make no contact with him “in any way” without consulting an attorney; by mass email — an email that opens by invoking “integrity, restraint, and quiet dignity” — the membership is told only one man may speak for the Fraternity, and to route all media to his telephone.

A man was told the Fraternity wished to handle this quietly — while the Fraternity’s own letterhead told thousands he was a liar and a thief. And as for “rebuffed” resolution: a written commitment to end all litigation within thirty days of this body acting has stood, publicly, for weeks. Ask what has been offered in return.

A man’s discipline is not evidence against him. The approvals are evidence — for him. Every request cleared four approvers. Out-of-policy requests were denied: the controls worked. Every expense now called a violation was approved and paid by the men who later prosecuted it. Hold the fork: if the expenses broke policy, why did you approve and pay them? If they didn’t, why was a man removed over them?

The charges were disputed — in writing, under interview, on the floor of that meeting, and in public ever since. What was disputed was the characterization: judgment calls and routine management, conflated into misconduct. The one thing ever conceded was responsibility for the state of the board. That answer has been published, with the documents, since March.

And under oath, the officers admitted the committee’s report recommended no removal. The same men investigated, judged, prosecuted, and voted.

“Never disputed” was first mass-mailed on April 28, 2025 — nineteen days after the vote, before the report had even been shared. It has been repeated, unrevised, for fifteen months. Their own chronology, on their own page, records a written response, a two-hour interview, and a forty-two-minute defense. A case is not undisputed because its builders say so.

Every charge has had a documented public answer since March. The verdicts have never shown their paperwork — no committee report, no unredacted minutes, not one exhibit, in fifteen months.

Then ask how the findings were reached. The officer who approved and funded the expenditures — the Grand Thesauristes — then investigated those same expenditures, then sat in judgment of them, then moved for removal over them. Accounting has a name for that: a segregation-of-duties violation. Auditing has a name for it: the auditor auditing his own work. Governance has a name for it: conflict of interest. No company survives an audit conducted this way. No court seats the complainant as the judge. Yet this is precisely how these “findings” were produced.

Do not take this page’s word for what a conflict of interest is. Take the Fraternity’s. Its own Conflict of Interest Policy is linked below — in full, as adopted. Its first page directs every Person Occupying a Leadership Position to avoid situations that could “compromise or reasonably appear to compromise… the Fraternity’s business decisions.” Its procedure goes further: when an interest is at stake, the interested member “shall leave the Grand Board meeting while the disinterested members of the Grand Board determine” the matter. He leaves the room. He does not investigate. He does not judge. He does not move the vote. Hold that language beside the arrangement described above, and ask how the two can coexist. Then ask why that question, raised repeatedly, has never once been answered.

And if vote counts are presented, watch the arithmetic closely. You may be told thirteen members voted on the findings — and then that twelve were “present and voting” on the removal, minutes later, in the same room. Ask where the thirteenth vote went. The sworn record answers: a written vote, set aside and recorded as an absence. Now do the math they hope you will not do. Two-thirds of twelve is eight — their count passes. Two-thirds of thirteen is nine — their count fails. Restore the one excluded vote, and the removal fails even under their own reading of the bylaw — before you ever reach the court’s. One side of this dispute can be checked from your seat tonight. Ask why the other cannot.

A denied expense report is the control system working. Enforcement is evidence of controls, not of crime. Every figure you will hear has an approval history — and a number stripped of its approvals is an accusation dressed as an audit. Demand the approvals beside the figures.

The “unauthorized” hiring was the first national search for General Counsel in this Fraternity’s history — conducted with the immediate past Grand Sire Archon, the outgoing General Counsel, and past Grand Sire Archons at the table. The contract was then delivered to the board’s own secretary — where it was never acted upon, the final step deferred amid the cyber attack. A hiring is not concealed from a board whose most senior officers helped conduct it. And a contract is not “never executed” by the man who delivered it to the board’s secretary and waited. The paper went to the secretary. Ask where it went after that.

As for the cleanup credit: the negotiation correspondence is on the record. It names who negotiated — and it was not the man taking credit. Read the correspondence beside the claim. Two documents. Five minutes.

The vote to suspend him for cause FAILED — six to six. It is in the minutes. What passed instead, minutes later, states its ground in its own text: suspension “due to the filing of a lawsuit against the Fraternity.” Filing a lawsuit is a suspendable offense nowhere in the Code of Conduct. “Administrative suspension” is a category found nowhere in the bylaws, nowhere in the Code — and nowhere in the minutes themselves. The phrase was coined six days later, for the mass email. No charge under the Code. No hearing. A category invented after the vote, for an offense that does not exist, announced to thousands as though it were law.

A suspension the rules do not recognize does not suspend anyone. He has never been lawfully suspended — because no lawful suspension has ever existed to serve. Their own notice concedes the frame: “This step is not a disciplinary measure” — their words, republished in full as their own exhibit last week. A non-disciplinary suspension is a suspension outside the Code — which is the entire point. And when the Grievance Committee later examined the underlying allegations, its written conclusion was that no useful purpose would be served by further action. As for “consistent with prior precedent”: no precedent has ever been named. Ask for one.

By the presenter’s own framing: outside the committee’s scope. Never charged. Never examined. Never adjudicated. Adjectives where exhibits should be. Real misconduct leaves paper. One sentence answers all of it: produce the emails — complete, unedited — and let the room read whether the adjective survives its own document. Put up the proof, or withdraw the accusations.

And consider what a description like that leaves out. You will hear “a trip to Paris.” You will not hear what happened there. On October 9, 2024, in the residence of the United States Ambassador to France, a portrait of Josephine Baker was presented to the U.S. State Department and the French people. The portrait, its shipping, its insurance, its installation — considerable costs, all of it — were funded entirely by Archon donations — and the man now being described to you was one of the two largest donors. Not one dollar of it from the treasury. The Fraternity paid for its Grand Sire Archon’s travel to represent it — at the invitation of the U.S. Ambassador and her husband. The Grand Sire Archon and his Archousa were on the ground a day and a half. The ceremony, and home. Not an extra day. Not an extra hour. That is the “trip to Paris.” The man now being described to you gave the dedication remarks alongside U.S. Ambassador Denise Bauer, before members of Baker’s own family — in a room of Archons who had traveled to be there, from as far away as California and as close as London. Do not take my word for any of it. Watch it. The video and the remarks have been public on this record all along — and the evening was covered independently, by people with no stake in this dispute.

“A trip to Paris.” That is not a description. It is a subtraction. Now ask what else has been subtracted — from every other item you are about to hear.

Accusations of this kind are not made to be answered. They are made to be heard — once, in a room the accused cannot enter, in the hours before you vote.

Entire means entire. Ten votes of fourteen. The record shows eight. A Pennsylvania court’s preliminary findings: the plain meaning requires ten; the votes were insufficient; the ratification unauthorized; he is likely to prevail. His injunction failed on one ground only — that money could repair the harm. And two days ago, a federal court denied their bid to silence him, on every factor the law requires. “Moving on” from an uncorrected wrong does not retire it. It ratifies it — and wills the precedent, eight counted as ten, to every board that follows.

Every independent reader of this bylaw has reached the same number: ten.

The Fraternity’s own General Counsel — the man who held the office on April 9 — was never consulted before the vote, and within weeks he was gone, replaced by the lawyer retained on April 28 to pursue the removal. Ask what his reading of the bylaw was — and why no one in that room wanted it. A past president of the American College of Parliamentary Lawyers, reading it cold: ten. A Pennsylvania court, in preliminary findings on the plain meaning: ten. And you, tonight, reading one paragraph from your seat: count for yourself.

Against that stands a single reading — held only by the men whose action fails under every other, its author’s considered description of the paragraph, from a podium: “pretty much ambiguous.” Independent readings on one side. A single interested one on the other. That is not a dispute about language. It is a count — and counts are what this entire matter has always been about.

You will be shown a slide defending this vote. Open the bylaw next to it. They do not match.

The slide quotes the rule as “present and voting.” Those words are not in the rule. The rule says entire Grand Board. They did not read it. They rewrote it.

The slide says the plain reading would let a man vote on his own removal. It would not. He is already barred — by our bylaws and by Robert’s Rules. That fear is invented.

The slide says absentees could block any vote. That is not a loophole. That is what “two-thirds of the entire board” means. They are calling the lock a flaw.

The slide says eight of twelve met two-thirds. Their own deck counts thirteen voting on the charges. Twelve here, thirteen there. Where did the vote go? The sworn record says it: a written vote, thrown out, marked absent. Now count. Two-thirds of twelve is eight — the bare minimum, only because a vote was removed. Two-thirds of thirteen is nine. Put the vote back and eight fails — under their own rule.

The slide brags that the ratification was 11–0 — “including two prior ‘no’ votes.” Read that again. Two men who voted no are recorded voting yes. That is not a fix. That is the evidence. The court has already called that ratification ineffective.

The slide says the court denied him. It did — on one point: money could repair the harm. The same decree says ten votes were required, eight were cast, the ratification failed, and he is likely to prevail. They quote the denial and bury the findings. You have seen this before, from the same podium. Read the decree. It is short.