The Address of June 2, 2025

The bylaw he cited — Bylaw 2 §4G — requires ten votes of the entire Grand Board to remove a Grand Officer. On April 9, 2025, eight were cast. An independent parliamentary opinion by James H. Slaughter, a past president of the American College of Parliamentary Lawyers, reads the bylaw the same way: ten votes. The bylaw he named says ten. The vote he defended had eight.

The minutes of the May 21, 2025 Grand Board meeting — the record of the action itself — contain no phrase “administrative suspension” and no reference to Bylaw 14, Section 6F. What they record is two suspension votes. The motion to suspend for cause failed, six to six. The motion that passed, eight to four, states its ground in its own text: suspension “due to the filing of a lawsuit against the Fraternity, effective until the lawsuit is adjudicated.”

Here is the problem, plainly. Neither the mechanism nor the offense exists. “Administrative suspension” appears nowhere in the bylaws. And “filing a lawsuit” is not an offense in the Code of Conduct or the disciplinary manual — no rule of the Fraternity makes suing it a suspendable act. A member was suspended under a procedure the bylaws do not contain, for an offense the rules do not name. He remains suspended today.

The complaint had been filed by his own counsel days before the address. Its claims are: trademark infringement, defamation, misrepresentation, appropriation of name and likeness, and attorneys’ fees. It contains no claim — of any kind — about financial irregularities. The docket is public. Read the complaint that was actually filed, then read the description he gave two thousand Archons three days later.

By the speech’s own account, these fees were a disputed bill, still being negotiated — and a bill you are disputing is not money you have lost. The dispute settled at $245,000. The other $355,000 was never paid to anyone.

Yet the full $600,000 was reported, in the same speech, as part of 2024’s “over $1,000,000 loss” — and blamed on the “Douglas investigation.” So the same fees appear twice, described two ways: a loss when he is blaming another man, a settlement when he is crediting himself. Both cannot be true. The loss he announced to two thousand Archons was inflated by $355,000 that nobody ever paid.

The correspondence in the record shows who conducted that negotiation, and when. It was not the speaker. He claimed the board’s authority, the word “we,” and the savings — for another man’s work.

No provision of the bylaws or the Code of Conduct confers on any officer the power to direct the brotherhood not to contact one of its own members. The directive was issued from the podium, in the first person, to the assembled national membership.

And it was neither the first act like it, nor the last. This was silencing, and the record shows how it was carried out: through a series of cease-and-desist letters, temporary restraining order filings, and speeches, beginning on April 29, 2025. Every item on the timeline aims at the same two things — contact, and speech:

April 29, 2025 — the first cease-and-desist letter, weeks before the address. June 2, 2025 — the directive quoted above, delivered to two thousand Archons. September 26–27, 2025 — at the Northeast Regional at Foxwoods, general counsel extended the directive from the podium: after describing the lawyer’s instruction — “Don’t you talk to anybody about anything, anyhow, I’ll do all the talking” — he told the assembled members, “And so that applies to you.” In the same session he instructed members who received communications to delete them — “make sure it’s gone and don’t pass it on.” October 6, 2025 — a second cease-and-desist letter. November 5, 2025 — in the federal case in Atlanta, an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order to restrain these communications. November 13, 2025 — denied. That is the court’s own word. April 6, 2026 — a third letter, proposing that he consent to a standing federal injunction against these communications, with a renewed filing to follow if he declined. April 24, 2026 — the request renewed: a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, which runs until the case is decided. June 26, 2026 — the court heard argument in Atlanta. July 14, 2026 — denied. The court’s own word, a second time. The order finds the party seeking the order “failed to carry its burden in showing that the extraordinary relief it seeks is warranted” — on every one of the four factors the law requires — and holds that the balance of equities and the public interest favor his “First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association.” Two days before this convention. No order restraining these communications has ever been in effect. July 10, 2026 — a fourth letter, six days before this convention: if he appears at the business sessions of the Grand Boulé, he will be “denied entry, treated as a trespasser, and immediately escorted from the premises by security and local law enforcement.”

Fifteen months. One directive from the chair; one extension of it by counsel; four letters demanding silence — the last promising security and local law enforcement at the door of the body’s own business meeting; two trips to a federal courthouse asking a judge to order it — both denied, the second two days before this convention. The direction never changed, and neither did the target. And the communications never stopped.

The pledge of transparency appears twice in the address, nearly verbatim, as its opening and closing commitment. The Grievance Committee recommendation promised “within 30 days” was due by early July 2025. Thirteen months have passed. The membership has never seen it. Any delegate may ask for it.

While that pledge stood, the record shows a hard, documented effort running the other way: cease-and-desist letters demanding that communications to the membership stop; requests for restraining orders asking federal courts to stop them, both denied — described by general counsel at Foxwoods, in his own words, as an effort to “shut that down” — and an instruction to members, from the same podium, to delete what reached them anyway and not pass it on. A body may pledge transparency, or it may spend fifteen months and heavy legal fees working to control what its members can read. The record shows which one happened.