The Pattern 

Written by Jenna Bulis

By 2023, I had no interest in continuing conflict. The lawsuit filed against me had been dismissed. I wanted to move on. I was focused on building ICAPA Network and pursuing systemic reform. The work was gaining traction. We were taking meetings with policymakers. Momentum was finally building again.

But the attacks did not stop.

On April 18, 2023, Katherine McNamara, also known as Katie Mac, subpoenaed Chelsea Filer into her ongoing lawsuit against the Breaking Code Silence nonprofit. Chelsea was not a party to that case. She was not involved in the dispute. The subpoena demanded discovery of every communication between Chelsea and me. It was not aimed at evidence relevant to the claims. It was aimed at our private lives.

Then in June 2024, Katie Mac’s lawyer escalated. I received a formal demand to preserve evidence. The letter included a warning that I might be involved in a lawsuit for malicious prosecution. It was designed to intimidate me into silence. I responded in legal terms that made my position clear. I would not be bullied.

Just a month later, something powerful happened. On July 11, Teen Torture Inc: The Dark Side of Discipline premiered on HBO Max. The documentary gave survivors a platform to tell their stories, and it traced the roots of the troubled teen industry. ICAPA Network’s name appeared onscreen. My own voice was there, brief but present. I used that moment to speak to a national audience. We are fighting for systemic reform, and the biggest obstacle is not just the institutions, it is the people who protect them.

In December 2024, Katie Mac resurfaced again. She posted in the Facebook group that once belonged to Breaking Code Silence, announcing plans to file another lawsuit and again naming me. On December 24, I made a public statement asking her to stop and to allow everyone to move forward. I knew she would not.

The following month, in January 2025, Katie Mac launched a website called WWASP Survivors Truth. Multiple pages, personal details, distortions. This was the fourth time I had been doxxed. See The Protection Order for the fuller record of what that site contained and what the courts ultimately recognized it as.

Laid end to end, the sequence tells you something a single incident never could. The subpoena was supposed to make me hand over my private life. It did not work, so a preservation letter came next, threatening litigation I had no part in. That did not work either, so a website went up under my name, built to do in public what the courtroom could not do. Legal pressure, then public pressure. Private communication used as leverage, then public exposure used as leverage. The throughline connecting all of it is control: an attempt to determine what I could say, who I could talk to, and what story would be told about me, by someone who could not get that control through the truth.

One claim on that site I will address directly, because the record allows me to. For years, my mental health history has been used as a weapon, built around a bipolar diagnosis from a 2020 hospitalization. I have already written in Pink Slip about the hyperthyroidism that caused those symptoms and the circumstances of that hospitalization. What I can add now is the documentation. A psychological evaluation dated January 22, 2021, five months after that hospitalization, diagnosed PTSD, not bipolar disorder. That diagnosis has remained consistent in my clinical record since, including in a 2024 assessment. A diagnosis from a single crisis hospitalization is not the last word on a person’s mental health. A later, more thorough evaluation is. Mine has held for years.

There is something else on that site I want to name plainly, without getting pulled into arguing its contents. Material from my family court case appears there, framed to support a particular story about me. I am not going to relitigate that case here, point by point, in public. Anyone who has actually been through family court, anyone who has sat across from a judge or an arbitrator while their parenting, their finances, and their character were dissected by people with their own agendas, knows that those records are not simple, and they are not the whole truth of a person or a relationship. They are adversarial documents produced in an adversarial process, and using them as ammunition outside that process is not accountability. It is a violation of my children’s privacy as much as mine, and I will not return the favor by litigating private family matters in public, no matter how tempting it is to set the record straight detail by detail. My focus has been, and remains, co-parenting well and protecting my kids from exactly this kind of exposure. That will not change because someone else decided it should.

I will not try to rebut every false claim made on Katie’s websites. There are too many, and most of them do not deserve the dignity of a point by point response. People have their own reasons for not liking Katie, and most of those people have never worked with me. I do not coordinate campaigns against anyone. If she has a problem with how the public has responded to her own actions, that is a conversation for her to have with the public, not a debt for me to pay.

There are no posts showing me harassing Katherine McNamara. Her claim of harassment is false. I did not dox her, threaten her, or encourage anyone else to. But I also know that once a public fight like this exists, it stops belonging only to the two of us. That is the cost of a fight going public, and it is one more reason I would have preferred this stayed private from the start.

Doxxing is not advocacy. Legal abuse to access someone’s private life is not justice. Filing lawsuit after lawsuit against other survivors does not protect survivors. It brings shame on the cause everyone involved claims to serve. These tactics do not just harm the people targeted by them. They teach every other survivor watching that speaking up is dangerous, and that is the actual cost here, far larger than what has happened to me personally.

What happened inside Breaking Code Silence is a cautionary tale, not about one person or one conflict, but about what happens to a movement when control becomes more important than collaboration, and personal agendas start wearing the mask of principle.

What we built still matters. Breaking Code Silence opened a door that had been locked for decades, and survivors walked through it and spoke, many of them for the first time in their lives. None of that gets erased by a website or a lawsuit. This was never about winning an argument. It is about making sure the next survivor has a clearer path than we did, and that the next generation does not inherit a movement that eats its own.

To anyone who has been targeted, discredited, or isolated while trying to tell the truth: I see you. You are not alone, and your voice still matters. To anyone still standing in this work: keep going. Keep telling your story. Keep pushing for change. The road is hard, but it is worth it.

And to the movement itself: Remember who you are. Remember why we began. The fight was never just about the past. It has always been about the future.