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Showerthought: blew $1,200 on a legal letter after my HOA threatened me over a blog post
So I run a tiny blog about local politics in my town near Sacramento, nothing big, maybe 400 readers. My HOA sent me a cease and desist last March over a post I wrote about their new parking rules, claiming I was spreading "defamatory info" and hinted at legal action if I did not take it down. I panicked and hired a lawyer for $1,200 to send a response letter. Here is the part where I disagree with most folks in this community. Everyone says just fight it, never back down, the letter is a scare tactic, and yeah, it was a scare tactic. But that $1,200 did not save my blog, it bought me time to realize I was not actually protected the way I assumed. The lawyer read my post and said two sentences in it could be read as stating facts I could not prove, and that was enough for them to keep pushing. So I pulled the post, rewrote it without the claims, and republished. People called me a coward in my comments. I still think paying that money was worth it because it showed me where the real line was instead of guessing. Has anyone here actually won one of these HOA or small town fights, or did you also end up editing first and fighting later?
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loganburns18d ago
Man, that edit-first approach probably saved you way more than twelve hundred down the road.
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