Introduction
Early in our lawsuit, Marie and I began to feel that we were destined to lose, no matter what the facts were or what the law said. That feeling has stayed with us.
It felt as though a concerted effort was steering the case toward one destination: dismissal. Limit disclosure. Narrow the claims. Restrict discovery. Close off the routes by which disputed facts could reach a trial.
The court record shows how that road took shape.
The image behind the title
The title of this article borrows an image from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. In the older New International Version, the warning includes these words:
“For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction”
Matthew 7:13, New International Version (1984 wording; excerpt)
In the next verse, Jesus contrasts that broad road with a narrow road leading to life. He is describing two ways of living and urging his listeners to choose their direction carefully. Readers of any faith, or none, can recognize the image: a well-traveled road can still lead to a devastating destination. Read Matthew 7:13–14.
In a courthouse, the broad road can be paved with familiar procedural decisions. Each has a name, an explanation, and a place in the rules. What matters is where those decisions lead when taken together.
We entered court to have the facts examined
We filed our lawsuit in November 2020. My claims concerned defamation. Marie’s claim concerned intentional infliction of emotional distress. We also alleged civil conspiracy. The case was assigned to Judge Kevin M. Miller in Otter Tail County District Court.
Marie’s claim grew out of deeply personal harm. As Marie’s story explains, contact with the estranged father she feared brought her past back into our lives. We told the defendants about her reaction and pleaded for the conduct to stop. Her claim concerned both what they knew and what they did after those warnings.
We wanted the evidence developed and the disputed facts heard by a jury. That required access to communications, meaningful questioning of witnesses, and decisions that addressed the claims we had actually brought.
Much of the evidence we needed was in other people’s possession. Discovery—the process for obtaining evidence from the other side—was how we expected to get it.
The court narrowed the claims we could bring
Minnesota Rule of Civil Procedure 15.01 states that permission to amend a complaint “shall be freely given when justice so requires.”
On December 15, 2021, Judge Miller allowed us to add Ashley Anderson as a defendant and a conspiracy claim tied to Marie’s emotional-distress claim. The defendants had not opposed either addition. But he ordered paragraphs 53(f), 53(g), 54(b), and 99 removed from our proposed Amended Complaint. He treated three as substantially true and one as privileged—protected from a defamation claim. Read Justice-Denied’s examination of the amendment ruling.
To Marie and me, these were among the most important and relevant parts of the proposed amendment. They included accusations that I had taken Renee’s possessions and money and secretly added my name to her fire-insurance policy.
We had offered sworn evidence and records disputing the accusations. My declaration described how my father, Renee’s insurance agent, called her and obtained her permission before adding my name to the policy. That directly disputed the claim that I acted secretly. The court excluded the allegation before a jury could hear that factual dispute. Read my declaration, Doc. 136, pages 2–4.
The gates began to close during discovery
We compared telephone-carrier records with the text messages and interrogatory answers produced in discovery and found gaps surrounding every significant event. We found multiple lengthy conference calls that the defendants had not disclosed. The records also showed text traffic for which the actual messages had not been disclosed. We filed three motions to compel, asking the court to require Sean Stevenson, Renee Stevenson, and Lisa Stevenson-Allen to provide fuller answers and evidence.
We sought those communications to test whether the defendants had coordinated their conduct, what they knew about Marie’s vulnerability, and what they did after receiving warnings about her distress. Those questions went directly to our conspiracy and emotional-distress claims.
Six days after excluding those additional defamation claims from our Amended Complaint, Judge Miller denied all three of our motions to compel discovery. His December 21, 2021 order also used the common-interest doctrine to shield communications among defendants from disclosure under attorney-client privilege. That left us trying to investigate alleged coordination without access to important communications. Read the order, Doc. 154, pages 2 and 13–16.
Justice-Denied has examined the legal reasoning behind that shield and the independent records supporting our discovery concerns.
For Marie and me, the consequence was immediate. We had to build our case with the evidence we could obtain, while requests for information we believed essential were rejected.
Later disclosures should have changed the course
On September 12, 2022, defense attorney Ross Tentinger had told our attorney: “As for Lisa’s forensic examination, there is nothing to produce, the examination was never completed.”
We first learned that a forensic report from Lisa’s phone existed in her written opposition to our spoliation motion (Doc. 335), filed on October 24, 2022. Our motion concerned spoliation—the loss or destruction of evidence.
That disclosure came ten days after the October 14 discovery deadline set in the amended scheduling order (Doc. 221), and two weeks before the November 7, 2022 spoliation hearing. We still had not received the report.
At that hearing, defense attorney Kirsten Hansen acknowledged that Sean had deleted at least ten to fifteen text messages and lied about it in his first deposition. She said approximately half had been recovered and half had not. Her account did not explain why more than 100 other text messages that telephone-carrier records showed Sean had sent or received had not been produced.
At the same hearing, Ross Tentinger confirmed possessing a forensic report from Lisa’s phone that had not yet been produced. He told the court he had only learned the previous week that the report had reached his office.
Judge Miller acknowledged that Lisa’s report had not been provided to us. He said he would consider that information in deciding whether to extend discovery. Read the hearing transcript, Doc. 364, pages 18, 23–25, and 36.
We received one report on November 8, 2022, the day after the hearing.
Those disclosures raised questions about the completeness and reliability of the evidence on which our case would be decided. Receiving a report after witnesses have been questioned is different from having it available during their depositions, when they testify under oath. New information can call for new questions.
Discovery could wait. Dismissal could proceed.
Summary judgment allows a court to decide a claim without a trial when there is no genuine dispute about facts that matter to the outcome and one side is entitled to judgment under the law.
On December 6, 2022, the court ordered Sean to pay the costs and fees of forensic examinations of Renee’s and Lisa’s phones. It declined our request for an adverse-inference instruction, which would have allowed a jury to infer that the missing evidence was unfavorable to the defendants. Paying for the examinations addressed an expense. It left unresolved what we would be allowed to do with the newly disclosed information.
In that December 6, 2022 order, Judge Miller cited Cafferty v. Garcia’s of Scottsdale, Inc. when discussing what Marie would have to prove about Sean’s knowledge of her condition. That Minnesota Court of Appeals decision recognizes that conduct can become extreme and outrageous when a defendant knows of a person’s particular vulnerability to emotional distress and proceeds despite that knowledge. Read Doc. 366, page 36.
Our discovery requests also identified Sean’s text-message backups as a source of evidence. After receiving a preservation notice, he used SyncTech SMS Backup & Restore to print a conversation with one of my daughters. The program prints from backup files, giving us a concrete reason to ask that those files be searched for missing communications.
Our Request No. 8 expressly asked that texts no longer found on his phone be produced using backup programs he had already used during discovery. Judge Miller quoted part of that request in his December 6 order, but left out the backup-recovery instruction. The order did not address Sean’s text-message backups as a way to recover the missing communications. Read Doc. 366, pages 7–8. Then read Justice-Denied’s comparison of the request and the order.
The same December 6 order laid out the sequence that troubled us most. Judge Miller declined to postpone summary judgment and left the decision about reopening discovery until afterward. He reasoned that summary judgment could make the remaining discovery issues moot—eliminating the need to decide them. Read Doc. 366, pages 49–54.
To Marie and me, that statement seemed to foreshadow how the case would end. The broad road toward dismissal was coming into view: the lawsuit could end before our requests for evidence were resolved. The narrow road toward a trial, with the evidence fully developed and the disputed facts heard by a jury, was becoming harder to reach.
Minnesota’s rules provide a way to address that problem. Under Rule 56.04, a party opposing summary judgment can explain in an affidavit why facts essential to its response are unavailable. The court may then defer or deny the motion, allow time to obtain evidence, or issue another appropriate order. The rule recognizes that a party may need access to evidence before being required to answer a motion that could end the lawsuit.
Judge Miller had expressly identified that route in his December 6 order: we could submit an affidavit explaining why we lacked access to evidence that the defendants formed a conspiracy. Read Doc. 366, page 54.
We submitted several affidavits—statements made under oath or penalty of perjury—to support our requests for further discovery before summary judgment. They included my 51-page Amended Second Declaration of Craig Stevenson (Doc. 419). It identified the still-missing communications between defendants and included charts highlighting the gaps in the data.
In opposing summary judgment, we also repeatedly cited Cafferty in our memorandum (Doc. 394, pages 39–40 and 42). The authority addressing the defendants’ knowledge of Marie’s vulnerability was before the court again.
At the March 15, 2023 summary-judgment hearing, our attorney explained that the declaration’s exhibits summarized telephone-carrier records and the communications produced in discovery. He expressly asked the court to apply Rule 56.04, explaining how limited discovery and spoliation had hindered our ability to oppose summary judgment. (Doc. 421, pages 31–32 and 61.)
The June 2023 dismissal
On June 16, 2023, Judge Miller granted summary judgment dismissing our remaining claims. The order did not specifically identify Doc. 419 or analyze our Rule 56.04 request. It dismissed all other pending motions and requests as moot. (Doc. 429, pages 1 and 33.)
How the court described Marie’s emotional-distress claim mattered to the dismissal, too. As Justice-Denied’s analysis explains, the court treated her claim as an attempt to repackage defamation as emotional distress. But Marie never made that claim. Instead, her claim centered on repeated conduct, the defendants’ knowledge of her vulnerability, and what they did after receiving warnings about her distress.
That distinction was fundamental to us. Yet in that order, Judge Miller said we had cited no case in Minnesota or elsewhere sustaining an emotional-distress claim on the theory he attributed to Marie, and that the court could find none. (Doc. 429, page 28.)
The law addressing known vulnerability was already before the court, and Judge Miller had cited it himself six months earlier. Marie’s claim needed to be evaluated under that law and against the conduct and warnings we had described. Read the comparison of the two orders.
We had repeatedly brought Sean’s backups to Judge Miller’s attention, but he never addressed our request to recover the missing communications from them. This was another limit on discovery: our claims were dismissed while an identified source of evidence remained unexplored.
Later invoices revealed an earlier timeline
On July 13, 2023, after our claims had been dismissed, we first learned what the defendants’ own Carney Forensics invoices revealed (Doc. 432). They recorded a successful extraction of Lisa’s phone on May 9, 2022, and reports generated and sent to counsel on May 12 and May 18—months before Tentinger’s September denial. (See also Doc. 434, pages 136–140.)
The invoices also documented at least one additional report that we still have never received. Read the forensic-report timeline and billing-record comparison.
The appeal left discovery unresolved
In April 2024, the Court of Appeals affirmed that judgment and concluded that the discovery-related motions were moot. Read the appellate opinion, especially page 12.
The requests we wanted decided before dismissal were treated as unnecessary once dismissal had occurred.
Justice-Denied examines that sequence in The Discovery–Summary Judgment Loop.
Beyond our own case
Our concern has grown as Justice-Denied examines other cases before Judge Miller. In Svendsen v. Fergus Falls Housing and Redevelopment Authority, claims were narrowed, discovery was restricted, and the remaining claim ended at summary judgment. In his September 18, 2026 order, Miller acknowledged genuine factual disputes over liability but dismissed the claim, finding insufficient evidence of damages. Yet two days earlier, defense counsel had acknowledged that Svendsen’s bank records established $1,934.20 in moving expenses.
Our Stevenson–Svendsen comparison examines the claims, discovery restrictions, and summary-judgment decisions in both cases.
The broader civil jury record is striking. Justice-Denied’s review identified 43 Otter Tail County civil cases with jury-trial settings before Miller, covering his appointment on May 7, 2018, through August 31, 2026—more than eight years.
None produced a jury verdict deciding contested liability: who was legally responsible. His one identified jury verdict, in 2019, decided damages only. Many of the other reviewed cases ended through settlements or dismissals agreed to by the parties.
The feeling that never left us
Throughout our case, we kept gathering records, identifying contradictions, seeking discovery, and explaining the law. The defendants sought limits on disclosure and discovery, and the court repeatedly granted them.
Claims were narrowed, the record remained contested, and a decision about further discovery was postponed until after summary judgment. That pattern made the process feel concerted to us. We sensed the direction early. The dismissals came later.
A fair opportunity to prove a case requires a workable path to the evidence, an accurate description of the claims, and careful attention to what remains disputed. My Christian faith gives those expectations a deeper meaning: truth should be sought, suffering taken seriously, and people treated with dignity. Those expectations stayed with us as we tried to reach a trial.
Our road to trial ended at a brick wall. The disputed facts we wanted a jury to decide remained on the other side.
For Marie and me, the wide road led to dismissal.
