The Courtroom File — How Wilson Is Litigating the Case She Filed

This is a living document, and it works like its companion. It deliberately begins where the endgame began — the court’s May 22, 2026 omnibus order; the full litigation record, back to the original December 2022 complaint, lives in The Record, and the whole arc is charted on the interactive timeline. Each entry below is a dated docket dispatch recording a filing or ruling and what it does. The method is consistent enough to name once at the top: this is the lawsuit Wilson filed — she chose the venue, the claims, and the witnesses — and as trial approaches, each of those choices is being unmade. Claims exit the case without ever being defended on the merits. The witnesses who were supposed to prove the story are replaced, three weeks before trial, by members of her own paying community whom the defense never had a chance to question. And when the courtroom deadline arrived, the campaign documented on the Road to Trial page crossed into the docket itself: a federal judge admonished Wilson, by name, for posting about a witness.

A note on fairness. Everything below comes from the public court record, with links to the documents. Filings are one side’s contentions; only rulings are findings, and where a ruling is “without prejudice” — revisitable at trial — we say so. Where a move creates legal exposure (for example, under the federal rules on late-disclosed witnesses), we describe the exposure; whether it draws a consequence is for the court. No minor child is identified on this page.

Prologue — three “final” witness lists, and a roster of thirty

Wilson filed this case in Hawaiʻi state court on December 6, 2022. Over the next two and a half years her side filed three successive “Final” Namings of Witnesses, building to a roster of thirty: her family, her company, a paid intelligence firm, and more than fifteen witnesses across Saskatchewan and North Dakota. One of the people she named as her own witness in February 2025, she sued as a defendant that July. The case moved to federal court in July 2025, and the thirty-name roster came with it. Hold that number; it matters in the July 13 dispatch — because of those thirty, the only names still standing on her side by trial would be Wilson herself, her husband, her son, her daughter, and one student who is also, by her own filing’s description, her paid independent contractor. Whatever the size of the following she broadcasts to, the witnesses who stayed are her household plus one person on her payroll.

Source: Plaintiffs’ Final Naming of Witnesses, Dkt. 191 (Nov. 8, 2024); First Amended, Dkt. 259 (Feb. 13, 2025); Second Amended, Dkt. 261 (Feb. 13, 2025), Life Mastery Network LLC v. Haygarth, No. 5CCV-22-0000107 (Haw. 5th Cir.); First Amended Complaint, Dkt. 443 (Jul. 3, 2025). Certified copies of Dkt. 191 and 261 are in the federal record at ECF 82-3 and 55-3.

Judge Jill Otake’s omnibus order — roughly seventy pages across four motions — went against Wilson on the issues that mattered. Two results set up everything that follows on this page. First, the court excluded the “Sourced Intelligence” report and the testimony of its investigator — the paid attribution work that was supposed to prove who ran the anonymous accounts Wilson sued over. Second, on the counterclaims, the court’s summary-judgment ruling left Wilson an adjudicated defamer as to her “abandoned child” statement about Paula Haygarth. The same order documented what the court called a “diametric inconsistency”: in her 2023 criminal case Wilson “proudly discussed creating” the Exposing Family Abuse website, while her sworn declaration in this case denies creating it. The court declined sanctions — the earlier statement was not sworn, and “it is not for this Court to determine which of the two statements is false” — and we note that fairness point as the court did.

Source: Order, ECF No. 92 (D. Haw. May 22, 2026) — document · docket entry.

Both sides filed pretrial statements the same day. The defendants’ ran twenty-six pages. Wilson’s ran ten — and its “Witnesses To Be Called” section named nobody at all, stating only that a list would be filed by July 13, the last day the scheduling order allowed. There is nothing improper about using the time a schedule permits. But keep the sequence: a party that had named thirty witnesses in state court now, three weeks after the omnibus order, declined to name any — until the final permitted day.

Source: Plaintiffs’ Pretrial Statement, ECF No. 106 at 5–6 — document; Defendants’ Final Pretrial Statement, ECF No. 107 — document.

The defendants moved before trial to exclude the evidence behind two of the most repeated elements of Wilson’s public story: the death threats she says she received, and the stalking she says she endured. Wilson’s four written oppositions led with procedural complaints about how the motions were conferred, and her stalking opposition argued procedure only — no defense of the claims themselves. At the July 10 hearing, Judge Otake ruled. The death-threat evidence: excluded, because Wilson failed to preserve the voicemail and its metadata — the court applied the federal spoliation rule to evidence Wilson herself claimed was central. The stalking evidence: excluded, unopposed. (Both rulings are without prejudice and can be revisited at trial in limited circumstances; two other motions were denied, with limiting instructions to be briefed.) Years of public narrative exited the courtroom not because a jury rejected it, but because its proponent did not preserve it — and then did not defend it.

Source: Oppositions, ECF Nos. 109–112 (Jun. 26, 2026); Minutes of MIL Hearing, ECF No. 115 (Jul. 10, 2026) — document · docket entry. Companion reading: The Death Threats That Disappeared.

On the last permitted day, three weeks before trial, the witness lists landed. The defense list is a study in discipline: eight witnesses, every one of them disclosed long ago — the parties, Wilson called adversely, Amanda Brady, Haley Winter, Wade Martin, and a records custodian. Wilson’s list is a study in substitution. Of the thirty witnesses she named in state court, twenty-five are gone — including Amanda Brady and Drew Brady (Amanda Brady now appears on the defense list), the excluded intelligence firm, and every one of the fifteen-plus Saskatchewan and North Dakota witnesses to the underlying events. What remains is Wilson, her husband, her son, her daughter, and one associate — a student the filing itself describes as her independent contractor and the “main point of contact” for her community. Do the arithmetic without the six debutants and the picture sharpens: of a claimed thirty-witness case, the people still willing to stand up for her at trial are four members of her own household and one person on her payroll. And in their place: six new names — described in the filing itself as her students — who do not appear on any witness list ever filed in either court, in three and a half years of this litigation.

Why that matters: the federal rules require parties to disclose their potential witnesses while discovery is open, precisely so the other side can question them before trial. The scheduling order in this case closed discovery — including for new claims and parties — on March 6, 2026. The six surfaced on July 13: more than four months after the last day the defense could have put a single question to any of them, and twenty-one days before trial. Unless they were disclosed somewhere off the public docket, the rules make late-disclosed witnesses presumptively excludable — Rule 37(c)(1) — unless the failure was “substantially justified or harmless.” And this is not a plaintiff’s table that can plead unfamiliarity with the rules: Wilson has described herself as a former Wall Street attorney, and her lead trial counsel has practiced civil litigation at the same Honolulu firm since 1972 — more than half a century at the bar. Whether the defense objects, and how the court rules, is the next thing this page will record. (Update, July 16: it objected — see the July 16 dispatch below.) The same day’s companion filings complete the picture: Wilson’s proposed statement of the case for the jury — a single paragraph — no longer mentions death threats or stalking at all, and her deposition designations reach for the transcript of the intelligence firm whose report the court excluded in May.

An analysis, offered as such: a trial team of that experience knows the odds six never-disclosed witnesses face of ever reaching the stand. But naming them costs nothing — and if they are excluded, the exclusion itself becomes an asset. Six loyal community members return to the fold carrying a story more useful than any testimony they might have given: we came to stand up for her, and the court would not let us speak. The Road to Trial page documents the machinery that story feeds — the silenced-martyr frame, the persecution narrative, the audience primed to receive it. Read that way, the list is not built for the courtroom at all. It is set dressing for the community’s verdict on the verdict — whichever way the jury goes.

Source: Amended Rule 16 Scheduling Order, ECF No. 30 ¶¶ 5a, 13 (discovery closed Mar. 6, 2026; witness lists due Jul. 13, 2026) — docket entry; counsel tenure per the firm’s published professional profile; Defendants’ Comprehensive Witness List, ECF No. 117 — document; Plaintiffs’ Witness List, ECF No. 119 — document; Proposed Statement of the Case, ECF No. 123 — document; Designations, ECF No. 120 — document. Comparison against the state-court lists: Dkt. 191, 259, 261 (Haw. 5th Cir.), certified copies at ECF 82-3 and 55-3.

Filed the same day as the witness lists: the parties’ trial briefs — the filing where each side tells the court what its case actually is. The defendants’ ran twenty-two pages, with a declaration of counsel and exhibits. Wilson’s ran five, and four of them are the caption and the certificate of service. The single page of substance says three things. Plaintiffs “agree with the case law of defamation, civil conspiracy, and false light as set out in the Court’s Order” — that is, they adopt without argument the legal framework of the very order that took their case apart in May. They “do not foresee any procedural issues,” beyond one sentence anticipating “authenticity and admissibility issues with respect to documents, videos, photographs.” And then the only firm commitment in the entire document, in a footnote: “Plaintiffs reserve their right to appeal the Order.” No theory of the case. No damages. At the moment a plaintiff states her trial case, no case is stated — and the one thing nailed down is the plan for losing.

Source: Plaintiffs’ Trial Brief, ECF No. 121 (Jul. 13, 2026) — document · docket entry; Defendants’ Trial Brief, ECF No. 118 — docket entry.

The same afternoon the witness lists were filed, defense counsel wrote the judge: Wilson had been posting, on @lianashanti, “threatening and harassing statements about at least one of the individuals Defendants had identified as a potential witness, Amanda Brady,” with documentation attached. Wilson’s own lawyer replied within hours: “I have instructed my client that no further postings about the trial, parties or witnesses until the completion of the trial. She understands and agrees.” The court’s order came the same day. It commands all parties to stop posting about the case, its parties, and its witnesses — on any account, public or private; warns that any ambiguous post “will be viewed in a light that is least favorable to the party who posted it”; and then does something orders rarely do: “the Court ADMONISHES Plaintiff Liane Wilson for this behavior.” The order also discloses that Magistrate Judge Trader had already instructed the parties at a settlement conference not to post about the case — meaning the conduct on the Road to Trial page was happening under an existing instruction. “Any future postings will result in the imposition of sanctions.”

This is the junction of the two chronicles. For months, the platform campaign and the courtroom case ran on parallel tracks. On July 13 they met: the posting became a docket entry, the docket entered the posting, and the subject of the posts — a witness who once supported Wilson and now testifies against her — is the same person whose name Wilson’s own witness lists carried for two years before she crossed the aisle.

Source: Letter, ECF No. 124 — document; Email Response, ECF No. 125 — document; Entering Order, ECF No. 126 (text-only) — docket entry.

A small entry, and the smallness is the point. Three days after the admonishment, the court entered another electronic order — this one directing Wilson’s counsel to submit courtesy copies of their trial filings (witness list, deposition designations, trial brief, proposed voir dire, statement of the case) “no later than 7/17/2026 at 12 p.m.,” citing the local rule and the judge’s standing procedures that required them in the first place. Courtesy copies are trial-practice housekeeping; the order exists because they had not been delivered. Twice in four days now, the court has had to order Wilson’s side to do something an existing rule or instruction already required — first the posting (ECF 126, after Magistrate Judge Trader’s earlier instruction), now the paperwork — with trial eighteen days away.

Source: Electronic Order, ECF No. 127 (D. Haw. Jul. 16, 2026) (text-only docket entry) — document · docket entry.

On Monday, July 13, six names that appear nowhere in the disclosure record of this litigation surfaced on Wilson’s trial witness list. On Thursday, July 16 — three days later — Defendants moved to strike all six by name: Malana Hokulani, Roxanne Smith, Joni Abbott, Joshua Guzman, Aaralyn Shiri, and Andrea Harris. The motion’s own vocabulary describes what happened: Plaintiffs “sprang six trial witnesses not previously identified in Plaintiffs’ initial disclosures or in any other disclosure required under Rules 16 and 26”; the “flurry of eleventh-hour disclosures of witnesses Plaintiffs have known about for years” is “pure gamesmanship” — “exactly the type of gamesmanship and trial by ambush that Rule 26 was intended to prevent” — and “[c]oncealing witnesses until it is too late for Defendants to obtain discovery regarding such witnesses is sufficient to demonstrate prejudice.” Attached as exhibits is the disclosure record itself: Plaintiffs’ February 2024 initial disclosures (Exhibit A) and all three state-court witness lists (Exhibits B–D) — with none of the six anywhere in it. A footnote frames the dilemma cleanly: if these “students” have first-hand knowledge of the events at issue, Plaintiffs have known their identities for over four years; if they are new students, they cannot have first-hand knowledge of the 2022 events at all. The relief requested is exclusion — that none of the six testify. Whether it is granted is for the court, likely at the July 27 final pretrial conference. And if exclusion comes, this record of why will matter: not the silencing of supporters, but the rules’ standard answer to witnesses withheld until cross-examination was impossible — the precise sequence, with dates and documents, is set out above.

The motion’s legal architecture is worth pausing on, because it explains why the six now sit in real jeopardy. Under Rule 37(c)(1), the burden is not on the defense to show harm — it is on Wilson to show her failure to disclose was “substantially justified or is harmless” (Yeti by Molly v. Deckers, 9th Cir. 2001). The court need not find bad faith or willfulness to exclude (Hoffman v. Construction Protective Services, 9th Cir. 2008): exclusion is “a self-executing, automatic sanction,” appropriate, in the Ninth Circuit’s words, “even when a litigant’s entire cause of action will be precluded.” The motion also pre-empts the obvious counter — that filing on the July 13 deadline made the list timely — in a single line: the scheduling order’s witness-list deadline “is surely not intended to allow sandbagging with new witnesses not previously disclosed.” And it closes on a phrase that carries its own weight in federal practice: the late disclosure has “unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings on the eve of trial.” As the July 13 dispatch observed, this is not a plaintiff’s table that can plead unfamiliarity with these rules — lead counsel at that table has practiced since 1972, and Wilson describes herself as a former Wall Street attorney. The rules the motion recites are the ones they have worked under for their entire careers.

Source: Defendants’ Motion to Strike, ECF No. 128 (Jul. 16, 2026), with Exs. A–D — document · docket entry.

And then the letter. At approximately 3:07 that afternoon — three days after the court ordered the parties to stop posting about the case and warned that “any future postings will result in the imposition of sanctions” — the @lianashanti account posted a story announcing that “International news media” had contacted her attorneys, would be “attending the trial,” and that a “TRUTH DOCUMENTARY website” would launch “when the trial concludes,” because “Jesus is putting this on the world stage.” By evening, defense counsel had filed the post with Judge Otake: “In light of the Court’s EO issued on July 13, 2026… we feel compelled to alert the Court,” with the screenshot enclosed. It is the second such letter in four days; the first one ended in an admonishment. What this one ends in is the next thing this page will record.

Source: Letter to the Court, ECF No. 131 (Jul. 16, 2026), with enclosure — document · docket entry. The post itself, and the platform campaign around it, are documented on the chronicle’s week-ending-July-19 page. Also filed the same day: Defendants’ proposed jury instructions, ECF Nos. 129–130.

What the last dispatch said this page would record next has now been recorded. One day after the 3:07 PM post reached her desk, the court “ORDERS Plaintiff Liane Wilson to SHOW CAUSE why sanctions should not be imposed for her violations of the Court’s order to ‘immediately cease the posting on social media or elsewhere… of any statements… about this case’” — her violations, the order’s own words — quoting back its July 13 warning that any ambiguous post “will be viewed in a light that is least favorable to the party who posted it.” Wilson’s explanation is due July 21, five pages, no more; the defense may answer by July 23. To be fair and precise: an order to show cause is a demand for an explanation, not yet a finding — her five pages come first. But the burden has moved to her, on her own conduct, three days into a sanctions warning.

A companion order (ECF 133) sets the schedule for the six-witness fight: Wilson’s opposition to the motion to strike is due July 23, with the hearing set alongside everything else. Look at what July 27 at 1:30 p.m. now holds: the final pretrial conference, the hearing on striking her six late-disclosed witnesses, and the hearing on whether she should be sanctioned for defying the no-posting order — one afternoon, one courtroom, one week before trial. The case she filed in December 2022 has arrived at a single sitting in which the questions are her witnesses, her conduct, and her trial.

Source: Order to Show Cause, ECF No. 132 (Jul. 17, 2026) (text-only docket entry) — document · docket entry; Scheduling EO, ECF No. 133 — document · docket entry.

Wilson’s five pages arrived on the deadline. Signed by Cades Schutte, they argue that the First Amendment and Hawai‘i’s constitution protect her speech, recite the test a court must satisfy before restraining a trial participant, and then narrow the entire matter to a single, benign Instagram Story — one that, in her telling, did no more than “alert her followers that she will not speak with them about this case until the conclusion of trial.” From that premise the conclusion follows in a line: if she did not violate the order, there can be no bad faith, and so “there is no basis for this Court to levy sanctions.” What the five pages never do is engage the volume of posting, or the witness-directed content the defendants had actually put before the court. (ECF 153, filed July 21.)

Two days later, the defense said exactly that. Their response opens by charging that Wilson’s account “ignores much of the content” of the post at issue — a July 16 story to her 30,000-plus followers that, far from saying only that she cannot talk, brags that “International news media (legacy media – not Joe Schmo with an iPhone)” have asked to interview her and will attend the trial, and promises that she is “ready. Willing. Finally. To speak the truth. All of it. Every piece” once the trial ends. That, the defense argues, is not a notice of silence but “a veiled threat to parties and potential witnesses that their testimony will be publicized — not merely by virtue of testifying in a public proceeding — but amplified and/or distorted by the media and Plaintiff Wilson herself.” (ECF 154, filed July 23.)

And where the plaintiff’s response is silent on witnesses, the defense’s is not. A footnote returns the court to the posts behind the defendants’ July 13 letter, in which — the defense reminds the court — Wilson had alleged that their witness Amanda Brady “engaged in illegal hiring practices,” called her “a racist,” and suggested she would “ultimately file suit against her.” (ECF 154 n.1, citing the defendants’ July 13 letter and its exhibits, ECF 124.) The omission is the argument: the plaintiff’s five pages describe one harmless post; the defense hands the court the witness-directed content those pages leave out.

On the law, the defense turns the plaintiff’s own authorities around. A court may sanction for either a willful violation of its order or bad faith; here, it argues, both are present — Wilson does not deny making the post, she made it knowing the order, and, unlike the “inadvertent, fleeting and harmless” slip that the case she cites excused, she filed no declaration admitting fault and offered no apology. Instead she “tries to defend her actions by contending her post says something other than it does” — a defiance the defense says “suggests she would not hesitate to make a similar post in the future, before and during trial.” It adds the cost of chasing the violation under 28 U.S.C. § 1927, and the concrete stake: public statements that “may influence the decision of key witnesses to travel voluntarily from Saskatchewan, Canada and testify.” The request is attorneys’ fees and a fine “calculated to deter future misconduct.”

A word of care, as with the order itself: these are the parties’ filings, not the court’s ruling. The sanctions question is now fully briefed — her explanation, their answer — and it belongs to Judge Otake at the July 27 hearing. But the defense’s central prediction, that Wilson “would not hesitate to make a similar post,” did not wait for the hearing to be tested. In the days on either side of these two filings her public account did much of what the defense described — documented and dated in the Deflection Chronicle. Whether any of it bears on the sanctions question is for the court; that it happened is on the record.

The same day the sanctions briefing closed, a third filing went in on Wilson’s side of the docket — this one about who gets to take the stand. It is her memorandum in opposition to the defendants’ motion to strike six of her trial witnesses (that motion, ECF 128, filed July 16). The six are Malana Hokulani, Roxanne Smith, Joni Abbott, Joshua Guzman, Aaralyn Shiri, and Andrea Harris. The court hears it July 27.

Her lead argument is not about the witnesses at all; it is about the forum. The defendants removed this case to federal court, and the amended scheduling order that governs it (ECF 30) sets only one witness deadline — a July 13 final comprehensive witness list — and no deadline for the “final naming of witnesses” or initial disclosures that state practice would have required. She filed her list on that date (ECF 119). On that reading she owed no supplementation, because there was no federal deadline to supplement against. The forum the defendants chose is the forum whose gaps she now invokes.

Her second argument is that the defense cannot claim surprise. Five of the six, she says, wrote letters supporting her that were produced in November 2024 and February 2024 — so the defense has held these names for the better part of two years and never deposed them before discovery closed on March 6, 2026. Any prejudice, on that logic, is self-inflicted. But the same passage says plainly what the six are for: they are her students, offered as character witnesses to her “work and teachings and reputation” and to what the brief calls “the defamation campaign and civil conspiracy.” The witnesses she is fighting to keep are the ones who carry her narrative.

And one of them points straight back at the sanctions story. Aaralyn Shiri is offered, in the brief’s own words, to testify to her “personal knowledge regarding statements made by Amanda Brady” — the defendants’ witness, and the same witness whose treatment online produced the July 13 letter and the admonishment. The witness Wilson is fighting hardest to keep is positioned against the witness she was admonished for targeting: the witness fight and the sanctions fight are the same fight, run on two tracks.

As with the order itself, a word of restraint: this is a brief, not a ruling. The scheduling-order gap she leans on is a real argument on its face; whether it carries — and whether two years’ notice cures a late disclosure — is for the court to weigh on July 27.

On July 27, from 1:30 to 2:45 in the afternoon, Judge Otake took the whole backlog in one sitting — the final pretrial conference, the show-cause hearing, and the hearing on the motion to strike her witnesses, together. The minutes (ECF 164) resolve both threads this page has been following.

On the show-cause order, the Court declined to impose sanctions. That is the headline, and it is fair to state it plainly. But it is not the whole ruling. The Court found its own original order had been overly broad and said it would issue a narrower one — barring trial participants from public statements about the character, credibility, or reputation of a party or witness; about the strengths or weaknesses of either side’s case; and anything that could discourage a witness from testifying. And it ruled that at trial the defendants may use Wilson’s social-media posts — the ones they had brought to the Court’s attention — if otherwise admissible. The show-cause process ended without a penalty, but the posts behind it moved from the feed onto the exhibit table.

On the motion to strike, the gambit backfired. Recall where her roster stood by then: after two and a half years and three “final” witness lists, the thirty names she had once claimed had collapsed to her own household — herself, her husband, her son, and her daughter — plus a single associate on her payroll. The six she was now fighting to keep were never part of that long-built case; they were students named as trial witnesses for the first time on the last permitted day, three weeks out — a wall bolted on after the real roster had fallen away.

The defense moved to strike them as untimely (ECF 128), and on July 27 the Court agreed in large part. Four — Malana Hokulani, Roxanne Smith, Joshua Guzman, and Andrea Harris — are precluded from testifying at all. The last two, Joni Abbott and Aaralyn Shiri, are confined to impeachment and shut out of her case-in-chief. The forum-gap argument of her opposition (ECF 155) did not save them. The eleventh-hour addition did not buy her a wall; it drew a ruling that stripped her back toward the household roster and put the maneuver on the record. The sharpest cut is Shiri: the witness Wilson had added to testify about statements made by the defendants’ own witness, Amanda Brady — the same Amanda Brady she had once listed on her side, now sitting on theirs — left with nothing but impeachment.

Around those two rulings, the housekeeping of a case about to go to trial. The motion to strike deposition excerpts (ECF 152) was deferred, with Wilson directed to subpoena a witness to establish his unavailability before the Court decides whether his deposition may be read. The Court finalized the concise statement to be read to the jury (ECF 163) and told the parties to meet and confer on a voir dire question addressing the child-sexual-abuse allegations at the center of the counterclaims. Trial is locked in: jury selection Monday, August 3; evidence August 4–12; a verdict anticipated by August 13 — eight jurors, no alternates, a unanimous verdict required.

Read together, July 27 gave Wilson the one thing she can call a win — no sanction — and took much of the rest. The order she was admonished under is narrowed, not lifted; the posts that drew the admonishment are cleared for use against her; and the students she assembled to vouch for her were mostly turned away at the door. She goes to trial on August 3 with a thinner witness list and her own words in the defendants’ hands.

Within a day of the hearing minutes, the paperwork that will shape the jury’s first hour arrived. The Court had given both sides 24 hours to object to its proposed statement of the case — the neutral paragraph read to prospective jurors before anything else. Both did, and the two objections are a study in what each side wanted the jury primed to hear.

The defense’s objection (ECF 166) asked for two words of precision: that the statements at issue were made “about them,” and that the case concerns what the parties allegedly said. Half a page, two underlined edits. Wilson’s objection (ECF 168) asked the Court to add an entire sentence: that she also alleges the defendants “engaged in a civil conspiracy with an anonymous group known as the Liana Shanti Cult Recovery Team” to defame her — an anonymous adversary written into the jury’s very first paragraph, before a single exhibit is shown.

The Court’s final statement (ECF 169, July 29) answered without a word of discussion. Both of the defense’s edits are in, adopted verbatim. Wilson’s sentence is not. The case the jury will first hear about is two sets of parties accusing each other over what they said online — no shadowy team, no conspiracy frame. She asked to install the narrative at the threshold; the Court left it at the door.

The same day, the Court filed its proposed voir dire questions (ECF 170) — and opened with a correction. At the pretrial conference the parties were ordered to meet and confer and submit a proposed question addressing the child-sexual-abuse allegations; the Court had verbally instructed them to file it by July 29 at 9:00 a.m., “but it has not received anything from the parties.” The verbal instruction now returns as a written order: the parties “are ORDERED” — capitals the Court’s own — to submit the question within 24 hours of the filing. The questions themselves map the terrain this case actually occupies: whether jurors have created or received messages from anonymous social-media accounts, how much time they spend on Instagram and Reddit, whether they have heard of the Cult Education Institute, whether they have lived through a difficult custody dispute, whether anyone close to them has joined — or been affected by someone joining — what they would consider a cult.

One more late swap rounds out the batch: the defense filed an amended objection to Wilson’s trial exhibits (ECF 167) because Exhibit 78 was “substituted by Plaintiffs with a different document on July 27” — the day of the pretrial conference itself. The objection chart runs fourteen pages, contesting nearly her entire list for authenticity, foundation, and hearsay. The pattern of the witness fight repeats on the exhibit side: late changes, papered and preserved.

Four days out, the Court issued the two documents that script the trial’s opening hours. The final voir dire questions (ECF 174) arrived after the parties belatedly filed their proposed questions; the set is the one the Court proposed on July 29, with one addition under child custody and welfare: “Have any of you, or an immediate family member or close friend of yours, been a victim of, witness to, or accused of child abuse?” The question the parties were twice told to produce now exists, in the Court’s wording. The rest stands as proposed — anonymous accounts, Instagram and Reddit habits, the Cult Education Institute, custody disputes, cults.

The proposed preliminary instructions (ECF 175, objections due within 24 hours) are largely the standard script read to every civil jury, but they formally fix what this trial is about. The jury will be told Wilson and Life Mastery bring five claims — defamation-libel, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and punitive damages — and that the Horvaths and Haygarth bring their own defamation counterclaims back, each side carrying its own burden.

And one instruction lands with particular weight in this case: for the duration of trial, the jurors themselves are ordered off the internet as a source — no discussing or researching the case “in any internet chat room, blog, website or application,” Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and the rest named one by one. The eight people deciding the case will be the only audience in it walled off from the feeds where it has been litigated nightly — sequestered from the very channels the exhibits come from.

What this page is watching next

The July 27 sitting resolved the motions this page had been following; what remains is the trial. Jury selection begins Monday, August 3, 2026, with evidence running August 4 through 12 and a verdict anticipated by August 13 before Judge Otake — eight jurors, a unanimous verdict required. What this page watches now is how the posts the Court cleared for use, and the two witnesses left standing, actually figure once the jury is seated — and one promised document still missing from the docket: the narrowed no-posting order the Court said on July 27 it would issue in place of its “overly broad” original. As of July 30 it has not appeared. Its terms will define exactly what a trial participant may say in public while the jury sits — and whether an “exposure” launch dated to mid-trial fits inside them.