If Loose Lips took every person that said mean things about him online to court, he’d never have time to do anything else. One of the lead organizers behind the campaign to recall Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen apparently has a lot more time on her hands.
April Brown, a local realtor and the treasurer of the recall group, has accused one of the people running a group supporting Allen of stalking and harassment in new court filings. Brown submitted papers asking for a restraining order against Rosina Teri Memolo, the chair of the “No Recall in Ward 6” group, in D.C. Superior Court on July 9.
Brown claims in the complaint that Memolo, an artist who has been active in progressive politics for years, has been harassing her online since February as the recall effort has heated up. She alleges that Memolo has also started sending her harassing text messages and “inciting others to follow me and come to my home, creating an immediate and severe threat to my safety.” Memolo has also begun “contacting and tagging my workplace” with her online posts, “attempting to get me fired,” Brown writes in court documents.
“This harassment has caused significant emotional distress and fear for my safety, negatively affecting my daily life and work,” she added in the complaint. Brown did not respond to LL’s requests for additional comment.
Memolo declined to discuss these allegations with LL, citing the court case to come, but she wrote on X (aka Twitter) that the recall’s backers are “officially using ‘lawfare’ against me to try to silence me.” She formed her pro-Allen group in early February. Another anti-recall group popped up shortly after. The second group, sanctioned by the councilmember himself, is called Neighbors United for Ward 6 and is helmed by former Councilmember Tommy Wells.
Brown’s complaint doesn’t get into too much detail about what Memolo has done to have her so shaken, so it is difficult to judge how seriously to take her claims that she fears for her safety. But the legal case mostly focuses on the pair’s frequent social media spats rather than any real life conflict, not dissimilar from fellow recall supporter Josh Lopez’s attempts to secure a restraining order against one of his Twitter antagonists two years ago.
Brown went so far as to file a police report about Memolo’s behavior on June 21 and included a copy alongside her lawsuit. A Metropolitan Police Department officer wrote that Brown walked into the Fourth District station in Brightwood Park and told officers that “she is very pro-police” and that Memolo is “anti-police and does not agree with her policy proposals” and “has been sending her text messages full of political rants and accusations and also posting her information and home address on social media.” Brown “denies any threats have been made and no suspicious activity has occurred,” the report continues, but she still “fears for her safety and well being due to her opponent posting things about her and posting her home and business address.”
LL couldn’t find any evidence of Memolo posting Brown’s address online (though it’s possible she’s since deleted them). But the pair certainly have gotten into their fair share of virtual squabbles. Brown has since locked her account from public view, but it’s clear that they’ve argued many times over the past few months, as Brown and other crime-obsessed Twitter users have made it a habit of populating Memolo’s mentions as she’s defended Allen.
To the extent that Memolo has mentioned Brown’s residence at all, it’s been to point out that she actually lives in Ward 5 (though Brown has previously said she has family in Ward 6 and does business there). And when Memolo has mentioned Brown’s employer, RLAH Properties, it’s been to observe the incongruity of someone constantly deriding the city as a crime-infested hellhole while trying to sell houses here.
But Brown writes in her complaint that Memolo “has been targeting my workplace in an attempt to get me fired.” She didn’t provide further details, but did ask the court to bar Memolo from contacting the firm “or taking any actions intended to jeopardize my employment.” (In researching this case, LL discovered that Brown’s former employers at Coldwell Banker Realty secured a $15,000 judgment against her two years ago in some sort of dispute resolved through arbitration.)
In asking for the restraining order, Brown also claims that Memolo “has a history of stalking and harassing several other individuals, exhibiting a relentless and dangerous pattern of behavior,” though she did not go into detail. The closest evidence LL can find of this was a request for a restraining order against Memolo in Charles County, Maryland, in 2021, which was dismissed after the plaintiff failed to appear in court—Memolo wrote on Twitter that the whole ordeal stemmed from a dispute with someone who was stalking her.
Brown also writes that Memolo’s “actions have escalated to extreme levels, including an incident where she chained herself to construction equipment.” Amusingly enough, LL was actually present for this particular episode, when Memolo and two other people broke into the construction site at the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant and strapped themselves to some bulldozers to protest the tortured development project. (Police let them go once they agreed to unlock their chains voluntarily.) It was a bizarre incident to be sure, but evidence of a “pattern of conduct” that “demonstrates a continuous disregard for the law and safety of others,” as Brown claims? LL has his doubts. A judge will get to decide on the restraining order in an Aug. 21 hearing.
More than anything else, LL sees this whole messy fight as evidence of just how overheated this recall effort has gotten and how bonkers it’s driven everyone involved. The recall itself isn’t particularly grounded in reality—remember, the key argument centers on Allen’s role in somehow single-handedly causing an increase in crime in D.C.—so why should supporters or opponents of this strange campaign make any sense either?
Soon enough, elections officials will decide just how long this recall effort and the resulting drama will drag on. Backers have until Aug. 12 to submit petition signatures and try and force a recall vote.
LL has heard some apprehension among Allen’s allies in recent weeks that they’ll have enough signatures to do so. The councilmember will surely have the resources to challenge many of those signatures—his supporters reported raising more than $132,000 between Feb. 1 and July 31, and Attorney General Brian Schwalb recently led a high-dollar fundraiser to boost his efforts—but the recallers have enough money of their own to make this a real contest. They raised about $66,000 over the same time period, per new financial reports, though they’ve spent most of it on canvasing and advertising.