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“I don’t have to tell you I’m married.”

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When my father starved to death in 2016, I had been in court with a Jezebel, her husband, and a conspirator of theirs for some 10 months, 10 months during which I might have detected the gravity of my dad’s condition in time to reverse it or mitigate its threat to his life—or at least eased his suffering.

Instead I was every waking moment preoccupied with staying out of jail. Four legal actions, two of them seeking my incarceration, were initiated against me that year alone. Together they were meant to sound a death knell. They did. It just wasn’t mine.

One of the “witnesses” who volunteered to testify for the Jezebel in 2016 was her husband’s father. This man, whom I had never met, had been a deacon of the Presbyterian Church in America, or PCA. Faith leaders of the PCA to whom I had appealed for help in arresting the abuse, who included the deacon’s son-in-law, a pastor, indifferently went about their business as it continued. The wife of the pastor maintained a Pinterest page cataloging winning paint colors and children’s birthday themes.

I don’t have children, and I don’t expect that I ever will. In 16 years, I’ve never had the spare resource or the ease of mind to consider it.

The October when my father stopped breathing was the tenth month of the tenth year that I had been persecuted based on the chronic lies of a woman who didn’t let her wedding ring interfere with her fun and who apparently enjoyed this freedom with her husband’s consent. Both she and he had been brought up under the influence of evangelical Southern Protestant sects, ones that can instill resentment of getting caught more firmly than they do uprightness. Lying, the opposite of uprightness, is a behavior the Gospels associate with evil and with murder.

This three-minute video synopsizes what would become 12 years of lying and abuse. For best textual readability, press play, tap the settings icon at the bottom of the frame, and adjust the playback quality to 720p. The Jezebel tailored her lies to whatever audience she was addressing at the time. More details can be found below.

While the persecution reached its crescendo, my dad died without dignity in a bottom-rung nursing facility, alone. The horror excited by his gaunt and ravaged countenance denied him the solace of many familiar visitors, and I could have been prevented from being one of the few he did have.

While my dad lay dying, the aforementioned deacon, who was also a medical doctor, plotted with his son and daughter-in-law to have me installed here:

According to public records, this is where the deacon and his wife resided:

I had phoned to see how my father was getting on after one of the prosecutions seeking my imprisonment was dismissed and the other was suspended. My dad said he was on the floor and couldn’t get up. God only knows how long he had been that way. I had to break into his house and lift his emaciated frame into bed and then clean the proud man’s living room with a rake and a shovel. Because he couldn’t walk to the toilet or bathe himself, I had to have him hospitalized. He eventually rejected the feeding tube that sustained him for a brief while and then perished within hours. I got the call around 2 a.m.

My dad was returned to me a couple of weeks later as cremains, sealed in a black plastic canister. I placed the object on a shelf, which is where it has rested undisturbed over the intervening years, gathering dust like everything else around me.

All In all, I was in and out of court with the Jezebel and lackeys of hers for over 12 years. I visited a dentist afterwards who told me that to repair teeth that I had gnashed in my sleep during this period would cost me the price of a “pretty good new car.”

The final 2016 prosecution, in which “jail time [was] requested,” would grind on for some 15 months after my father’s death. Two nuisance actions brought by a crony of the Jezebel, which were meant to spread me too thin to cope, I had to fend off without the help of an attorney. There was no time to grieve or mourn, and even if there had been I was too numb to feel much of anything.

Before a cloud of filth pervaded my life, my ambition had been to publish humor for kids, a creative endeavor I had applied myself to every night after work. I have since toiled almost exclusively as a manual laborer, not competent to meet the expectations of structured nine-to-five employ and loath to answer questions about the litter of lies blemishing my public record, which had been spotless.

In a span of months in late 2005 and early 2006, I went from tending plants and crafting children’s verses in quiet obscurity to responding to slurs like this one:

The PCA

I had appealed for help with halting this evil years prior to my father’s death, in 2012 and possibly further back than that, to as many clerical members of the Presbyterian Church in America as I could imagine might take an interest, including Dr. L. Roy Taylor, who was at the time the grand pooh-bah (he has since retired from the post and been replaced by Dr. Bryan Chapell). The man who was suing to have me jailed, Philip Bredfeldt, had, as I’ve said, been reared in the church; his father, Dr. Raymond Bredfeldt, M.D., had been a deacon of Coventry Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas; and his brother-in-law, Jeremy Cheezum, was a pastor, most recently of Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church in Montrose, Colorado.

One would have thought such a concentration of godliness would count for something benevolent.

The crippling effects of a decade of persecution radiate. There can be no doubt that the abuse to me impacted my father and everyone else in my family who depended on my sanity. At the end, my dad simply gave up, and to this day I have a hard time looking forward to much.

“Rev.” Cheezum, to whom I had made the lengthiest and most urgent appeals for relief, simply passed my disregarded emails along to his brother-in-law, Phil, after whom one of Cheezum’s four children may be named. Emails between Cheezum and other PCA pastors would be introduced into evidence given against me in a 2013 lawsuit that unlawfully denied me the right to even talk about the matter, at all, which had of course been the aim of the prosecutions from the start. What may not be said need not be accounted for to God, to the church, or to anyone.

“Rev.” Cheezum seems to have stage-managed the narrative among his fellow pastors. He’s a very ingenuous speaker. “Rev.” Kevin Hale, one of Cheezum’s church brethren, spurned an email I sent him as potential “porn spam,” because it contained hyperlinks to court documents. What he would have perceived had he followed the links should have struck him as far dirtier than pictures of bare skin.

“Rev.” Daren Dietmeier, another PCA pastor, was content to conclude that I needed a hobby and wished his friend Cheezum “blessings.”

I’ve sometimes contemplated whether I might have gained assistance from the church if there had been a single female pastor to whom I could have directed a plea instead of a network of old boys.

Though their emails became public documents when they were admitted as “evidence” against me, I was prohibited from sharing Pastors Hale and Dietmeier’s mocking and gaily dismissive remarks with anybody for five years.

My First Amendment rights were conditionally restored to me in 2018 with the gracious help of Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor of law and one of the country’s most distinguished constitutional scholars. He blogs on Reason.com and doesn’t defend unworthy causes.

I’m certain that “Revs.” Cheezum, Hale, and Dietmeier know the truth now. But if their smiles have dimmed a solitary watt, the difference is beyond my powers to tell. Their smiles may even have broadened. That’s how pastors of the Presbyterian Church in America seem to deal with deviance and dereliction: They smile.

Of note is that publication of sermons by “Rev.” Jeremy Cheezum halted in July of 2021, and Cheezum seems since then to have resigned his vocation in the church and traded spiritual guidance for career counseling, possibly not by choice. Yet he practically dominates peers in a group photo with a smile that for him must be reflex.

Below is a hand-written last will and testament I found among my dad’s papers when I vainly tried to recover his home from foreclosure as he lay on his deathbed. By the time anyone knew, a life insurance policy meant to provide security for my brother and me, a policy that my father had religiously made payments on for decades, had lapsed, and my dad’s home and the surrounding land were weeks away from being seized by the bank, because he hadn’t been paying his mortgage premiums.

My father bought his final residence in 2005 for $399,000, as a retirement investment. A friend and coworker who contributed $25,000 toward its down payment will never recover that money. This friend labors every day under the punishing Arizona sun with a stiffened neck that barely allows him to turn his head. And as for my surviving family and me, we have ashes, in a rigid plastic box. Mementos from my childhood, along with photographs of my dad and mom and my brother and me that were in my father’s possession were unceremoniously dumped in a landfill after the bank foreclosed on his home.

The families of the husband and wife who sued me repeatedly for over 12 years seem notably to be invested in the concept of “generational wealth,” despite that wealth is something the Gospels openly scorn, as obscene. The patriarchs of the families, both self-avowed evangelical Christians, are a Colorado medical doctor, Ray Bredfeldt, who flacked health insurance for years, and Tim Hargis, an Arkansas cattle rancher and former bank vice president. Hargis’s father was also a bank vice president.

Money is persuasive. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that PCA leaders rejected the appeals of a would-be writer who has toiled with his hands and back since his odyssey in the toxic morass known as the justice system began 16 years ago. The Bible may consider wealth contemptible, but I suppose the church must cherish its tithe potential.

The Jezebel

The reader may wonder what the Jezebel’s story was.

Mine is this: For months, a Ph.D. student named Tiffany—she was careful not to use her last name—hung around my house at night, sometimes until the wee hours, and came on to me while representing herself as a single woman living alone with a dog. She boarded her dressage horse in a stable adjacent to my yard in the stall closest to where I went in and out. By day, the woman cozied up to my mother who was then in treatment for breast cancer. She and I became friends, and there was an unspoken expectation that I should meet her when I was home and she was around. We frequently talked half of the night away. I took her sexual taunts and the excuses she found to grasp or hold my hand at face value. Then she abruptly disappeared and began lying about the nature of our “interaction” when I learned her telephone number belonged to a man named Phil and tried to make sense of it all.

Below is her narrative reconstructed from a handful of excerpts from statements that the Jezebel gave in evidence to the police and numerous judges over a 10-year period. The first statement is by her attorney; two are from emails from her to me, which she presented to the police and the court herself; and one is by a witness, the woman’s boss, a man I’ve never met.

Almost without exception, one statement is contradicted by the next.

Before the court finally shut her down in 2018—she’s now formally prohibited from stalking me or reintroducing any of her copious claims against me in a court of law—the Jezebel had accused me to law enforcement officials in “multiple” states, on the municipal, county, state, and federal levels (that is, to the FBI), besides to other unidentified “state officials,” more judges that I could confidently surmise, and to friends, colleagues, and employers, including at the university I had attended. I would be surprised if I hadn’t been monitored by a private detective or two over the years, also.

The Jezebel and I have resided in different states since 2006, Texas and Arizona, respectively, and in all the years since I found her idly standing beside my house one day in 2005 I’ve only ever seen her at my own home, where she habitually wore a blue or a red tank top, and in courtroom after courtroom.

A friend of hers I met in 2005 as Jenn had actually come forward in 2012 and professed regret to me, met me for coffee, and corresponded with me for months. Jenn told me that it was only after years of acquaintance that she herself had learned the Jezebel was married, that she had visited the Jezebel’s home and never met her spouse, whom she called “the phantom husband,” and that she had sometimes stayed out with the Jezebel all night. Jenn expressed the hope that Pastor Cheezum would intervene on my behalf and help lay the matter to rest.

Here are some excerpts from her scads of emails:

This mother of two girls was induced to lie for the Jezebel and her husband less than 12 months later and then brazenly reappeared in court in 2016 to do it again. Whether Jenn was bought off, I don’t know.

Something I do know is that if I had never become acquainted with the freakish, coldblooded “couple,” their sick friends, or their sanctimonious family, and if I had never placed faith in the lofty principles of authorities like the court and the Presbyterian Church in America, there’s a chance that my father would be alive today and that I might have spent my life creating things of worth to the world…and to me.

The Husband

The husband of the Jezebel, Phil Bredfeldt, who was the only “witness” to have the opportunity to testify in their final prosecution, whimpered on the stand—as he’d probably been coached to do by their greasy attorney—that it wasn’t true that his wife had been unfaithful to their marriage vows. Phil Bredfeldt, the deacon’s son, had been by her side when his wife reported to the police that she had informed me she was married, and Phil Bredfeldt had been present in court when she testified that she had never told me she was married. The man, and I believe men are whom the Presbyterian Church in America hold to be God’s appointed masters, knew his wife was a liar, but I think he was confident that they would win, that I would be muzzled and jailed, and that he would save face.

In 16 years, not a single lie has been recanted, not a single police or court record expunged, and not a single sincere apology tendered. The families have only striven to silence and subvert unflattering truths and to lie low.

If Google is to be trusted, the husband moved to a different state from his wife after their case was thrown out, Colorado, where his parents and sister lived, and I’m pretty sure that if I cared enough to nose around I would discover a decree in the courthouse of Bastrop County, Texas, annulling their nuptials.

After he apparently separated from his wife, the doctor’s boy and “Christian academy” grad, who persecuted me for over 12 years, went on a solo bike trip and posted a selfie online to congratulate himself (taken with a tripod he carried along with him, I guess). In the photo, he smiles.

I think I read somewhere that the Presbyterian Church in America frowns upon divorce. But what are divinely inspired principles if not adaptable to the whims of the “elect”?

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