The Lawsuit

March 2021 – Sept 2022

Written by Chelsea Filer

(TL;DR is available below this article for quick reference)

Hi, my name is Chelsea Filer aka Chelsea Papciak (my married name). I am a youth advocate, Executive Director of the ICAPA Network, and co-founder of WWASP Survivors. I also work in marketing as a graphic and web designer. I’m writing about this because it’s necessary to protect my professional reputation to correct the record. 

If you’ve landed here, chances are you Googled my name and stumbled across a lawsuit with my name in it. Maybe you saw the words “trademark infringement,” or “holding assets hostage” and thought, What the hell happened here? Good question. Honestly, I ask myself the same thing sometimes.

So let’s clear it up. I’ll walk you through the basics first, then we’ll peel back the curtain and talk about what really went down. Because the truth is messier and, if I’m being honest, far more ridiculous than what the court filings alone will ever tell you.

The Basics: What the Public Record Shows

Here’s the short version you’ll find in the court documents pertaining to Breaking Code Silence v Papciak et al. In 2021, Breaking Code Silence (BCS), the survivor-led nonprofit formed to expose and stop abuse in the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI), filed a lawsuit claiming that a few of us, the original founders and volunteers, had infringed on their trademark and were holding hostage the organization’s assets.

We, the defendants, filed a motion to dismiss. The judge agreed with us that the organization did not provide sufficient evidence to support their claims of ownership of the mark and granted our motion to dismiss. Eventually, BCS voluntarily dropped the case altogether. On paper, that’s it. End of story.

Except that’s not the whole story.

The Context: What is the TTI and BCS?

Before I dive deeper, let me give context for people who don’t live and breathe this stuff. The Troubled Teen Industry is a multi-billion dollar network of so-called “behavior modification” programs like boot camps, wilderness programs, and “therapeutic boarding schools.” These programs abuse and exploit children under the guise of treatment. I know because I lived it. I’m a survivor of these programs, and like many others, I’ve spent years fighting to bring awareness and policy reform.

In 2014, WWASP Survivors, a support group that I co-founded launched the first #BreakingCodeSilence campaign. The phrase comes directly from the punishment we endured in those programs called “Code Silence,” where we were forced into an isolating, oppressive silence for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time. Survivors coming together and breaking that silence became the movement. It was an empowering moment in our community’s history.

In 2019, Jenna Bulis and Jen Robison revived the #BreakingCodeSilence campaign as a larger grassroots effort. They recruited volunteers, set up social media accounts, built websites, and pushed messaging with a focus on policy change.

In early 2020, Paris Hilton got involved. Her documentary This is Paris exposed her own abuse in a TTI program, and suddenly the world was listening. Our little grassroots campaign went global overnight. We were on the news, at rallies, and in legislative offices. Survivors finally had a platform. The support, engagement, and testimonies rushed in like a flood and we scrambled to keep up with the momentum.

We decided to incorporate Breaking Code Silence as a nonprofit organization so that we could raise money to fund services for survivors, at-risk youth and lobby for policy reform.

We expanded fast. I stepped into leadership as COO, running operations, legislative advocacy, and managing opportunities that came our way, like the RISE Justice Labs accelerator program and our partnership with the ABA on an educational webinar series for legal professionals. We were all volunteers, pulling 60-hour weeks, nights and weekends, pouring everything we had into this cause.

But with rapid success came burnout, power struggles, and control issues. Which brings me to Katherine McNamara, aka Katie Mac.

The Split: How It All Fell Apart

Katie Mac came into BCS as a volunteer. With her background in cybersecurity, she became our IT person and was later tapped for the board. Mainly this position suited her because she claimed she wasn’t interested in day-to-day operations and mostly wanted to focus on building our program data archive. The problem was that she became almost obsessively controlling of the group.

The split didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t one fight or one moment. It was the culmination of compounding issues. Katie brought gossip and character assassinations into survivor spaces, particularly, our private group chats. We developed a reputation as the “mean girls” in the wider community. I regret not shutting it down sooner. I got sucked in, I said things I shouldn’t have, and I’ve since apologized. But the gossip and bullying culture? That was Katie Mac’s influence, and it poisoned everything.

One major pain point was our organizational structure, or rather, the lack of it. Katie hated the idea of a hierarchy and demanded that everyone be equal “co-founders,” except her, of course, who wanted a lifetime, irrevocable board seat. Our attorneys flat-out told us this structure was baffling and unsustainable, so incorporation paperwork stalled while we tried to come to an agreement.

This lack of structure also caused rising tensions. Too many cooks in the kitchen is an understatement. Put a bunch of strong-willed, intelligent, passionate women in a room and you’ll get a lot of leaders and very few followers. For a while it worked, but as the work became more complex, so did the need for clear leadership. Because everyone was supposedly a “founder,” creating hierarchy without demoting someone became nearly impossible. We weren’t incapable of figuring it out, we just didn’t get the chance before it all imploded.

At this point, the drama became more work than the actual work. Our intended Executive Director, Jen Robison, decided to step back. She wanted to focus on creating media, like her documentary project BCS TV. She planned to stay involved but didn’t want to manage daily operations. As COO, I was already running operations, so naturally I expected to step up. We set out to restructure, re-establish the original corporate model, promote people into leadership roles that suited them, hire new staff and file for nonprofit status.

The Final Breaking Point

The final breaking point came over a $500,000 grant from the Hilton Foundation. Our original vision was simple and impactful: to use the funds to provide survivors with access to therapy. That was the kind of direct support survivors had been asking for, and it aligned with our values as an organization. But what actually got submitted, was something else entirely.

The proposal outlined a costly survivor retreat that included training unqualified survivors to provide peer support, along with yoga and other wellness-style programming. On paper it may have looked wholesome, but we immediately saw the ethical red flags. Survivors running unregulated trauma groups without proper training, oversight, or licensure? The potential for retraumatization and harm was far too high. And honestly, it felt eerily close to the same unregulated and unqualified systems that harmed us as kids in the Troubled Teen Industry. The very thing we were fighting against was being mirrored in our own proposal.

We raised concerns and, after significant discussion, decided the best course of action was to donate the grant money to another nonprofit. This wasn’t just any random nonprofit, it happened to be run by the grant writer, Vanessa Hughes, but because of this, we insisted on creating a clear degree of separation. We wanted to avoid even the faintest appearance of impropriety. For us, this was about protecting our integrity, being transparent with donors, and avoiding any scenario that could be spun as mismanagement or embezzlement.

Katie did not take it well. She wanted Vanessa installed as the new director of BCS and viewed our decision as insubordinate. For us, this wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about Vanessa. It was about doing the right thing for the organization and the community. But Katie treated it as though we had just undermined her master plan. 

At one point I asked her why she wasn’t willing to consider me for the CEO position, and her response was, “Because you refuse to be on camera with your weight issues.” She went on to say that the next CEO would essentially be her decision anyway, since the other board members would vote however she told them to. 

The audacity of Katie Mac is truly something to behold. 

The Implosion

On March 9, 2021, Katie quit in dramatic fashion. She did not just step down quietly or bow out gracefully. She announced, with righteous indignation, that everyone else was unqualified to run the organization. It was a slap in the face to the people who had poured years of their lives into building Breaking Code Silence. 

Her departure should have been the end of her authority. Once you quit, you do not get to call the shots anymore. Except Katie did not see it that way. The very next day, March 10, she fired off an ultimatum: either we hand over BCS operations to her hand-picked director, Vanessa Hughes, or she would walk away entirely and “start anew”, taking with her anyone willing to follow. 

By March 14, we held a board meeting to discuss moving forward from this chaos. Katie refused to attend in person. Instead, she sent Rebecca Moorman to deliver her demands. The message was simple: surrender control or be destroyed. Once again, we said no. We made it clear. If Katie wanted to walk away and start her own organization, she was free to do so. If others wanted to follow her, they could. But Breaking Code Silence would recover and remain under the leadership of those who stayed to continue the work.

That was the line in the sand.

What happened next was nothing short of unbelievable. Almost immediately after that meeting, we were locked out of everything. Email. Website. Social media. Slack. Katie exploited the IT access she had been entrusted with and simply took it all as if it was hers, as if she believed she owned Breaking Code Silence herself. She convinced others who had access to the social accounts, namely Emily Carter and Rebecca Moorman, to revoke our access, and change the emails associated with those accounts to lock us out. Funny enough they also locked themselves out, because these accounts had 2FA associated with the phone numbers of the original creators, us. She claimed she was just “holding it for safekeeping” until we could have what she called a “divorce meeting.” But days turned into weeks, and she dodged every attempt we made to resolve it. It became obvious she had no intention of giving anything back.

In my final email to her to ask her to do the right thing and return our accounts, I told her point-blank that what she was doing was unethical and illegal. I reminded her that she had quit and she had no right to confiscate organizational property after walking away. This was not hers to take. It was theft, plain and simple. She ignored our requests and instead moved forward with her calculated plan: stage a coup, rewrite history, and cement her hostile takeover of Breaking Code Silence.

The Lawsuit

Mere days after she took over our accounts, Katherine McNamara aka Katie Mac incorporated Breaking Code Silence in her own name. She filed DBA’s in each state that we lived in and filed competing trademarks. She then used this new organization as a vehicle to sue us for trademark infringement, over a name I had created and trademarked years before.

The lawsuit was surreal. For the original creators and trademark holders to be sued for trademark infringement, by an organization that had been stolen and fraudulently incorporated and did NOT at the time have any claim to trademark rights, was mind-numbingly absurd. But unfortunately, absurdity has never stopped Katie Mac.

Here is how she set it up: in September 2020, we (the 6 original “founders”) had trademarked Breaking Code Silence and the campaign hashtag breakingcodesilence. Katie herself filled out the application. She listed us all as individual owners, but she filed it in a way that gave her full control. Then, when the USPTO issued a simple office action, a minor request for clarification that any responsible filer would have answered, she intentionally ignored it. Our trademark applications lapsed, and conveniently, her competing applications were allowed to move forward. She engineered it so that we lost our rights to the mark in the middle of our litigation.

Their entire claim rested on the assertion that an anonymous volunteer had used Breaking Code Silence before we did, dating back to 2010, and that they had assigned their “rights” to Katie’s new organization. However, after a falling out due to their toxic leadership, that very volunteer, submitted a sworn declaration stating he had been misled and used as a pawn. He admitted that he had never used the name in any trademarkable way and that he informed both Katie and Katie’s attorney of this fact. This was the point where their case came crashing down.

The judge zeroed in on this issue, ordering BCS to produce evidence of this supposed assignment of rights. They could not. Their case collapsed, and they voluntarily withdrew.

By then, the damage was done. Our names were permanently linked to a federal lawsuit. False claims that we had quit, stolen assets, profited off our community, and infringed on trademarks were already appearing in Google search results, damaging both our personal and professional reputations.

The damage to our livelihood and finances was also entirely deliberate. It was clear that BCS had no real case, but what they did have was the money to outspend us. Unfortunately, that is how lawsuits often work. Even without merit, you are forced through a grueling and expensive process just to prove your innocence. This is exactly why people with financial means bring lawsuits out of spite. They do not have to win in order to ruin your life. If that is the intent, the goal is easily achieved without ever proving the claims.

Some things, however, were so blatantly wrong that they still stand out to me. One defendant, M. Thompson (MT), was sued for no other reason than attempting to change her Gmail password after Katie Mac locked us out of our accounts. MT did what anyone would do if they suddenly could not access their email. For that, she was dragged through a year of litigation and forced into $40,000 of debt to defend her innocence. She was denied the right to recover her attorney’s fees because BCS abandoned their claims once it became undeniable that they would lose.

This is why weaponizing the legal system is so insidious. The courts are meant to deliver justice, but when exploited, they become weapons for abusers to inflict lasting harm. Katie Mac knows that her financial privilege gives her power over others, and she uses litigation as a form of intimidation. The message to the community is clear: step out of line and you could be next. She made an example out of us to silence others, a tactic pulled straight from the Troubled Teen Industry’s own playbook. For me, that connection is not theoretical. It is retraumatizing.

For context, I was sent to a program in Mexico called Casa by the Sea. Because I refused to “get with the program” and openly opposed the abusive nature of the program, I was transferred to a brutal bootcamp called High Impact. What I experienced there was nothing short of a torture. We were starved, forced to run in circles while carrying heavy rocks, wood, and sandbags, violently restrained, and locked in dog cages for days under the burning desert sun. I nearly lost my life when a staff member dumped a bucket of soapy water over my head and held my face in the mud until I lost consciousness. He did this because I had written a letter home describing the abuse and begging my mother for help, and he did it to make an example out of me. Only a handful of kids were sent there, and when we returned, staff paraded us in front of the entire facility, dirty, emaciated, and defeated, so they could use us as living warnings of what would happen to anyone who resisted. It was the single most traumatic experience of my life and the reason I became an advocate and activist against this industry.

To be made an example of once again, this time from within my own community, is heartbreaking. Yet the injustice of it only strengthens my resolve. Katie Mac may have hoped to intimidate me into silence, but too bad for her. The program never broke me, and neither will she.

 

The Pattern: Lawsuits on Repeat

If you thought the madness ended with the close of our case, you’d be wrong. Once the lawsuit against us fell apart, Katie didn’t stop. The pattern just shifted targets.

By December 2021, Breaking Code Silence (2.0) experienced its own internal collapse. Katie Mac’s toxicity had seeped deeply into their leadership, and the same turmoil she once directed at us began to play out within her new circle. That’s not to say there weren’t other players on the board with equally caustic personalities, but let’s just say she’s the one who stacked the board with like minded individuals… and that went predictably. Allegations started flying about financial mismanagement, board members were locked out of the organization’s accounts, and the organization quickly went down in flames. In the end, it was the same pattern repeating itself. She must have wrote the book on this particular SOP.

I do not have firsthand knowledge of every detail of what happened behind closed doors, but the story that got out told a tale that was all too unsurprising. When an organization is created out of a coup, when it’s foundation was built from theft and when the first order of business is a frivolous lawsuit to destroy the original founders, it is not exactly a recipe for long-term stability. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing caved in on itself.

Inevitably, out of the ashes of Breaking Code Silence, came a new organization by the name of Unsilenced, nearly a carbon copy of its predecessor. Same message, same mission and the same team that had followed Katie through the last coup, and now, created essentially BCS 3.0 with everything they could pillage from the wreckage of BCS 2.0. 

BCS leadership threatened to sue Katie to regain access to their accounts and property. Supposedly there were some early efforts to negotiate and apparently at that time Katie was represented by Unsilenced’s attorney. Apparently that didn’t go well because BCS followed through, filing a federal lawsuit Breaking Code Silence v McNamara et al. Case# 2:22-cv-02052-MAA under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The allegation was that when she had resigned from the organization, she absconded with organizational accounts and assets, and used that IP to create the new organization, Unsilenced. The main claim however was that she de-indexed their website by inserting a “noindex” tag on their domain, and did so strategically on a date that BCS was going to be featured in a national television show that would have given them increased traffic. The technical details of that claim would be better explained by a professional, but from what I understand, a significant amount of cyber forensic evidence was gathered to form the basis of this claim. 

Katie fired back with another lawsuit that included claims of sexual harassment, the claim that a board member ate Chick-fil-A “at” LGBT members and demanding repayment of a $100,000 loan she had made to the organization to initiate the first lawsuit against us.

The loan agreement stated repayment would only happen if the organization became fully funded. It never did. Why? Because Katie torched its reputation, poisoned its credibility, and sabotaged its fundraising potential. And yet, in her mind, donor dollars should still have been used to pay her back for the lawsuits she orchestrated.

In the end, she settled her claims just before trial and walked away “forgiving” the organization of her $100k loan. 

She also filed challenges to the very trademarks she had lied, cheated, and manipulated into her possession. The twist this time? She suddenly declared that Breaking Code Silence should be “open source,” belonging to the entire community rather than to any one organization. On that point, I actually agree. I gave up my rights to BCS long ago. I would love to see the name finally freed from this endless battle, because too much time, money, and emotional energy has already been wasted on fighting over it.

But of course, the lawsuits and threats didn’t end with trademarks. Katie has also threatened more lawsuits demanding public apologies, and that Jenna and I “bend the knee,” and even going so far as to say she would “take our houses” if we refused. Yes, those were her exact words.

Most recently, she has been threatening to file yet another frivolous lawsuit, a malicious prosecution claim against BCS for the Computer Fraud and Abuse case. That threat is laughable even on its face. To win a malicious prosecution claim, she would first have to prove she actually won the underlying case. She did not. The claim has no legal basis, but justice was never the point. Her goal has always been to use the courts not for justice, but for spite; for demoralization and intimidation.

Now, in the latest twist, she has tried to drag me back into her endless cycle of legal battles. According to her, I was secretly part of a “plot” to sue her, as part of some bizarre scheme to cash in on an insurance payout. She has even gone so far as to claim in court that I conspired to hack the BCS website in order to frame her. None of it is true, and none of it makes sense.

What is truly shocking is how far she has taken these conspiracies. She knows exactly what she is doing. By placing her defamatory claims into public filings, she shields herself from defamation claims and hides behind the excuse that “posting public documents isn’t illegal,” even when it is done maliciously and strategically to damage my reputation and interfere with my livelihood.

I wrote another blog called Plot Twist about the Computer Fraud case and her tangled web of lies. That post goes into far more detail about the absurdity of it all. But the bottom line is this: lawsuits are her favorite weapon. Not to win, not to get justice, but to drain people of money, energy, and hope. Katie almost never sees cases through to trial. That is not the point. The point is to make the process itself unbearable so that her targets go financially destitute and break under the pressure. She calls that victory.

The Cost: What Really Gets Lost

Let’s be clear. This has never just been about me, or Jenna, or any of the other survivors Katie Mac has targeted. The real cost is to the movement itself. Every time she picks another public fight or launches another lawsuit, the credibility of survivor advocacy takes a hit. Collaboration falls apart. Good advocates walk away because the environment has become too toxic to bear.

Breaking Code Silence was created to protect kids, fight institutional abuse, and give survivors a voice. Instead of uniting around that mission, nearly a million dollars has been burned on lawsuits and infighting. Money that could have funded therapy, legal aid for kids, and real advocacy was wasted on drama.

When people weaponize lawsuits out of spite, nobody wins. The only people who benefit are the attorneys who get paid regardless of outcome. Survivors lose. The cause loses. And children in these programs, the very people we set out to protect, remain at risk.

What hurts the most is that we had so much potential. We had the attention of the world after Paris Hilton’s documentary. We had momentum, we had credibility, and we had the resources to make real change. All of that was squandered because one person could not handle being told no.

 

Final Thoughts

I never wanted to write this blog. Honestly, it feels ridiculous that I even have to. I would rather spend my time celebrating advocacy wins, supporting survivors, or literally talking about anything other than lawsuits and smear campaigns. But when someone dedicates the stamina of a Karen on crack to defaming you, there comes a point where you cannot just sit quietly.

I do not want to keep reliving this cycle. I want it to stop. But as long as the attacks keep coming, I will keep correcting the record. Because silence is what the programs demanded of us. Breaking Code Silence was built on the idea that survivors would never be forced into silence again. That includes speaking up when the truth is ugly, when the story is complicated, and when it would be easier to walk away.

What I want more than anything is to move forward. I want to focus on my career, my family, my health, and the future I am building. I want to put this behind me once and for all. It has been nearly five years of wasted energy, wasted money, and wasted opportunities. I am tired. But if this blog and this website can serve as a permanent record of what really happened, maybe we can finally close the book on this whole dramatic story.

Because in the end, the work matters more than the drama. Survivors deserve better than this. Kids still trapped in abusive programs deserve better than this. And I shouldn’t be spending my time defending myself against lies. I hope this can be the last word on the matter.

If you have read this far, thank you for listening and trying to make sense of such a messy situation. It still blows my mind sometimes, and if you can even believe it, this doesn’t even cover it all. It is a lot to digest and I appreciate anyone who takes the time to try. My hope is that this clears up misunderstandings and paves the way for healing, collaboration, and advocacy that feels safe again. 

And to anyone outside of our community who simply wants to understand what happened to Breaking Code Silence, I hope this helps. I hope the takeaway is that while things obviously took a turn for the worse, the movement itself lives on. With every survivor still out there raising their voice for change, with every law passed to protect children, and with every program held accountable, I know Breaking Code Silence served its purpose. That legacy cannot be erased.

If you would like to visit our legacy website, the original BreakingCodeSilence.net, we have finally brought it back after years to stand as a lasting reminder of what BCS was meant to be. My hope is that this is what BCS can be remembered for, and that in time, the messiness of the drama and lawsuits will be overshadowed by the good that was done, and by how the movement lives on, evolves, and continues to make a difference.

 

TL;DR:
Breaking Code Silence started as a survivor-led movement to expose and end abuse in the Troubled Teen Industry. It gained traction, especially after Paris Hilton’s documentary put the issue on the global stage. But what should have been a united front for advocacy turned into chaos when Katie McNamara (aka Katie Mac) quit in a fit of drama, hijacked the organization’s accounts, fraudulently incorporated it in her own name, and then sued the original founders for trademark infringement over a name we had created and trademarked.

The lawsuit collapsed in court, but the reputational damage stuck, with my name forever tied to false claims and litigation. Since then, Katie has repeated the same pattern: weaponizing lawsuits, flipping narratives, building smear websites, and dragging people through chaos while painting herself as the victim.

The real tragedy is not just the personal attacks but the cost to the movement. Nearly a million dollars that could have gone to survivor therapy, advocacy, or protecting kids has been wasted on legal battles and drama. Survivors lost momentum, credibility, and community at a time when we had the world’s attention.

This blog is my way of setting the record straight. Not because I want to dwell on the mess, but because I want to put an end to this once and for all.

 

Disclaimer:

The content presented in this blog represents my personal opinions, beliefs, and experiences. It is a response to public claims and defamatory statements published on a website created by Katherine McNamara aka Katie Mac. This blog post exists solely to share my perspective, correct the public record, and defend myself against misleading narratives.

Some statements may reference third-party allegations or events as they have been publicly described or reported. Any mention of such events is included for context and not intended to assert them as verified fact. Where applicable, I have made every effort to distinguish between firsthand experience, opinion, and information relayed from others.

This blog is not intended to cause harm, harass, defame, or misrepresent any individual. It is a good faith effort to respond to public attacks and to exercise my right to free expression under the First Amendment. All statements are made without malice and are protected as opinion under applicable defamation law, including but not limited to the fair comment privilege and the opinion defense recognized in both state and federal courts.

Readers are encouraged to form their own conclusions.