Seventeen years of not calling, not writing, not acknowledging the existence of their granddaughter, not expressing a single moment of regret for throwing a pregnant teenager out into the cold.
And then the moment money entered the picture, suddenly family takes care of family.
Suddenly, we are still your parents.
I did not respond to the letter.
I folded it, put it back in the envelope, and placed it in the bottom drawer of my desk. That drawer was where I kept important documents, and I decided that the letter was important, not because it moved me, but because I suspected I might need it someday.
The pandemic slowed everything down in 2020. The courts moved to virtual hearings. I spent months conducting proceedings from a makeshift courtroom in my home office with Zara doing her schoolwork in the next room.
It was a strange, disorienting time for everyone, but it also gave me space to think clearly about what was happening with my family.
I did not hear from my parents again until the fall of 2021.
By then, the world had begun to reopen and the courts were back to in-person proceedings. I had been on the bench for nearly two years, and my reputation was growing. I was known for being fair but firm, compassionate but uncompromising.
I took my work seriously.
I treated every person who appeared before me with dignity, regardless of their circumstances, and I had a particular sensitivity to cases involving parental abandonment because I knew firsthand what it felt like to be the child who was thrown away.
In October of 2021, I received a formal letter from an attorney named Victor Strang. The letter was addressed to me at my home address, not my courthouse address, which told me that whoever had hired this attorney had gone to the trouble of finding out where I lived.
The letter stated that Victor Strang represented Dale and Connie Wills and that his clients intended to file a legal action to challenge the validity of the trust established by Lorraine Wills on the grounds that Lorraine had been of diminished mental capacity at the time the trust was created and that the trust was the product of undue influence exerted by me over my elderly grandmother.
I read the letter twice.
Then I called Harold Beckman, Grandma Lorraine’s estate attorney.
Harold was 74 years old by then, semiretired, but he remembered every detail of the work he had done for Lorraine. He told me that Lorraine had updated her trust in 2009 when she was 77, and that at the time she had been evaluated by her physician and found to be of sound mind.
He told me that Lorraine had been very clear and very deliberate in her instructions.
She had told Harold, in his own words, “My son Dale turned his back on his child. He doesn’t deserve a penny of what I have built. Joan is the only one who carried my values forward, and she is the only one I trust to use this money wisely.”
Harold told me he had documented everything.
He had the medical evaluation. He had the notes from his meetings with Lorraine. He had the signed trust documents witnessed by two independent parties.
He told me the claim of undue influence was baseless and that any competent judge would see through it.
But he also warned me that legal challenges to trusts could be expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally draining, and that my parents were clearly counting on exactly that.
I retained my own attorney, a woman named Priya Gupta, who specialized in trust and estate litigation.
Priya was brilliant, methodical, and relentless.
She reviewed all the documentation Harold had preserved, and she told me my parents’ case was extremely weak. The trust had been properly executed. Lorraine had been evaluated by a physician. The witnesses were credible and available to testify. And the claim of undue influence was undermined by the fact that I had been living in Louisville at the time the trust was created, 45 minutes away from my grandmother, and had no involvement whatsoever in the drafting or execution of the trust documents.
But my parents pressed forward.
Victor Strang filed the lawsuit in Bullitt County Circuit Court in November of 2021. The complaint alleged that Lorraine Wills had been manipulated by her granddaughter Joan Wills into excluding her rightful heirs from her estate and that the trust should be declared invalid and the assets distributed equally among all surviving family members.
When I read the complaint, I noticed something.
The language was not just legal.
It was personal.
The complaint described me as estranged from the family by my own choice. It described Grandma Lorraine as a vulnerable elderly woman who was exploited by a family member with legal training. It painted a picture of me as a predator and my grandmother as a victim.
It was a lie from beginning to end.
But it was a carefully constructed lie designed to play on the sympathies of a judge who did not know the real story.
I was angry. Not just annoyed. Not just frustrated.
Truly, deeply angry.
Not because they were trying to take the money. I could live without the money. I had lived without money for years.
I was angry because they were trying to rewrite history.
They were trying to erase what they had done to me and replace it with a fiction in which I was the villain and they were the victims.
They were trying to dishonor the memory of the woman who had saved my life, the woman who had loved me when no one else would, by painting her as confused and easily manipulated.
I told Priya to fight it with everything we had.
She filed a motion to dismiss accompanied by all of the documentation Harold had preserved. She attached Lorraine’s medical evaluation. She attached Harold’s notes. She attached the signed trust documents. And she attached a detailed affidavit from me describing the circumstances of my relationship with my parents, including the fact that they had thrown me out of their home at 16 while pregnant and had maintained no contact with me for nearly two decades.
The motion to dismiss was heard in January of 2022.
The judge in Bullitt County reviewed the documentation and denied the motion, but only because he wanted to allow the case to proceed to a full evidentiary hearing so that both sides could present testimony.
It was not a victory for my parents. It was procedural.
But Victor Strang sent a letter to my attorney calling it a promising development and suggesting that we consider settling the matter by agreeing to a fair distribution of the trust assets.
Priya sent back a one-sentence response:
The trust of Lorraine Wills was executed in full compliance with Kentucky law, and the beneficiary has no intention of settling.
The case was scheduled for an evidentiary hearing in March of 2022.
But then something happened that neither my parents nor their attorney could have anticipated.
Something that changed everything.
In February of 2022, one month before the evidentiary hearing in Bullitt County, a separate but related matter arose. A new case had been filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court.
It was a petition filed by Tanya, my younger sister, seeking a declaratory judgment against me. The petition alleged that I had breached my fiduciary duty to the family by failing to disclose the existence of the trust to the other grandchildren of Lorraine Wills. It further alleged that I had used my position as a judge to intimidate family members and prevent them from pursuing their legal rights.
The second lawsuit was different from the first.
The first one, filed in Bullitt County, was a straightforward trust challenge. It had weak merits, but it was at least a recognizable legal claim.
The second one, filed in Jefferson County, was something else entirely.
It was a provocation.
It was designed to put me on the defensive, to drag my name through the public record, to create the impression that I was hiding something, that I had used my judicial power improperly.
And it was filed in Jefferson County specifically because that was where I served as a judge.
When Priya told me about the second filing, I felt a knot form in my stomach.
Not because I was afraid of the allegations. They were frivolous and baseless. I had never disclosed the trust because I was under no legal obligation to do so. The trust was a private matter between Grandma Lorraine, Harold Beckman, and me. And the allegation that I had used my judicial position to intimidate anyone was a complete fabrication. I had not spoken to anyone in my family about the trust, the lawsuit, or anything else. I had not used my position for any personal purpose whatsoever.
But the second lawsuit created a procedural problem.
Because it was filed in Jefferson County, and because I was a sitting judge in Jefferson County, there was a potential appearance of conflict of interest.
Priya immediately filed a disclosure with the court, informing the chief judge that a family member had filed a civil action naming me as a party. The chief judge reviewed the matter and determined that since the case involved a family dispute and I was a named defendant, it would be assigned to another judge in the circuit.
That was standard procedure.
There was no scandal, no investigation, no inquiry into my conduct.
But it was embarrassing.
It was disruptive.
And I believe that was exactly what my parents wanted.
What I did not know at the time was that behind both lawsuits, there was a coordinated strategy.
My parents had not hired Victor Strang on their own.
They had been introduced to him by Craig Felton, Tanya’s husband, who apparently had a friend in the legal profession who had suggested this approach.
The plan, as I later pieced together from court documents and depositions, was simple: file multiple lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions, create enough legal pressure and public embarrassment that I would eventually agree to settle just to make it go away.
They believed that, as a judge, I would be especially vulnerable to reputational attacks and that the threat of having my name associated with a messy family legal dispute would force me to the table.
They were wrong.
Priya filed a motion to consolidate both cases in Bullitt County, arguing that they arose from the same set of facts and should be heard together.
The motion was granted in late February of 2022. The Jefferson County case was transferred to Bullitt County, and both matters were scheduled for a combined evidentiary hearing in April.