In August of last year (2024), I was taken to civil court by my harasser—my downstairs neighbor’s baby daddy—marking the beginning of a painstaking gauntlet that brought to light how flawed and broken the legal “system” is, just how badly we’re living in a post-facts world where truth and objectivity do not matter. How the local court system is as incapable and capricious as the US Supreme Court is compromised and corrupt.
Earlier that year in March, he came to my door trying to force his way into my apartment with the intent to fight me. This was a short while after I’d embarrassed him into leaving the premises, having been altered by dog of unusual activity out front and stepping out on the balcony to find him yelling at and antagonizing my aforementioned neighbor’s sister and roommate, and subsequently yelling at him in broad daylight that nobody that lived in the building wanted him there, that he was trespassing, and to “get the fuck out”.
A few days later, he had flowers delivered with a throwaway apology on the card. Months later, he initiated suit against my neighbor for full time custody. Knowing that I had a police report on file over that behavior and would be a huge liability to him as a legitimate witness, he falsely alleged that I—and my roommate—had been harassing him, on an ongoing basis from March until July, including but not limited to stalking and threats of physical violence. What ensued was a months-long unwanted crash course in legal process. The initial cases were dismissed without prejudice, the Judge at the time noting my cross-petition was a much closer call. Three weeks later, he began passively harassing me again such that it drove me to file a new case against him.
Though at one point I hired legal representation for the short while I could afford it, I ended up largely self-representing, including the arduous research and drafting of formal Motions for Sanctions against my harasser and his attorney. In the process, I learned just how disadvantaged people are when it comes to these matters. All of the legal aid resources and organizations out there focus on low-income and/or marginalized communities, and their scope of services only includes restraining orders in a Family/Domestic Violence context. When it comes to Civil Harassment Restraining Orders, the only guidance available is if you’re the Petitioner—the initiating filing party—and even that is limited only to how to fill out the form to open the case.
In the end, my case was dismissed with prejudice, the judiciary not only failing to uphold the letter and spirit of the law, but also violating my rights to due process and California Code of Judicial Ethics—indeed, one of the Judge’s post-hearing Minute Orders is a complete fabrication of facts and I have the email from my attorney at the time to prove it. CCP § 527.6 stipulates that restraining order hearings should not exceed 21 days, 25 with good cause; my case ended up aged 138 daysbecause of Judicial negligence.
This unfavorable outcome has left me with two remaining points of action:
1. Administrative Follow Up
I have 60 days from the last hearing date of January 29th to initiate the appeals process, which I very much have the desire and intention to do. However, the priority to and demands from my academic workload make me worry about whether it’s something I’ll be able to accommodate, given that it would be started halfway through the semester and potentially run into final exams timeframe. In an ideal world, I’d somehow manage to find some lawyer willing to take on/assist pro bono, but expectations being grounded in reality, I anticipate it’s something more I’m going to have to study and try to pull off myself.
Regardless of whether or not the appeal itself happens, there are other follow up actions to be taken—filing complaints against the Judiciary and opposing counsel.
2. Publication
The entirety of what I endured is a literal case study on how to abuse the legal process as a means of revenge without consequence, and how the California court implicitly condones and encourages this behavior.
Along the way, this man has given plenty of indications that he is recklessly impulsive and does not think things through. I don’t know what he imagined, that he would pull his stunt and that its effect would be confined to the courtroom in this digital age. Throughout all of this, I consistently tempered the desire to speak publicly about it, being a self-representing first time litigant with utmost concern for the validity and security of my case. Now that the argumentation for those matters has been definitively settled, I’m no longer bound to keep things private.
Right now, my academic efforts have priority when it comes to my focus and attention. Though I would love to be able to dedicate myself to writing the narrative, building the supporting website, and preparing the social media optimized posts/videos to communicate my story, it’s nothing that I realistically have the time or bandwidth to handle. Fortunately, unlike the appeal process, this action isn’t bound by time limits.
Still, after carrying this matter for the better part of and almost up to a whole year, enduring the unnecessary anxiety and emotional distress it caused me to have myself, my roommate, and my dog targeted by this man while trying to earn my Associate’s degree, I don’t have it in me to remain completely mum on this matter until that time comes when I’m ready for a full content push.
For now, at the least, I can start by finally giving this stressful and traumatic ordeal a name and a face: Leonardo Enrique Di Giacomo.
Time really seems to pass a lot quicker the older I get. I’ve been meaning to push an update, but with everything that’s been going on over the last few weeks, even my private journal hasn’t been seeing much action.
Last month’s points of distresses ended up being a massive time-sink for me. In the end, I followed through with attending San Diego State University and accepting the federal student loan being offered, finally entering the world of student loan debt after having successfully evaded it all this time. When it came to registering for classes, I enrolled in 16 units across 6 different courses. Using the university’s degree audit feature, I noted that my 69 units of transfer credits had me starting the equivalent of my third year at 58% completion towards my Bachelor’s and leaving only 51 required for completion—meaning that at a full-time clip of at least 15 units per semester and some infill during the summer/winter intersessions, I could potentially be done and ready to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree at the end of the Spring 2026 semester.
Getting used to having an academic workload again was a bittersweet transition, glad to have the opportunity to keep advancing my studies while at the same time resentful that my celebratory freedom from homework, exams, and that awful Canvas platform had to end up being so short-lived. It was a very “back in the car” a la *Jurassic Park* feeling.
Well, I’m back in Canvas again…
It also didn’t help that the first few days of the semester were lost towards preparation for my evidentiary hearing in my Civil Harassment Restraining Order case. That didn’t play out as it should have, with the letter and spirit of the law upheld. Instead, I found myself at the receiving end of even more judicial misconduct and failure to uphold the law. I have follow up actions planned, some of which I’ll be forced to move on fairly soon, but for the moment am dedicating all my care and focus to my studies first. I have a lot of vested interest—personal, financial, and opportunistic—in at least maintaining if not elevating my cumulative GPA and finishing my Bachelor’s degree with a high academic standing.
Beneath all of these short and long term goals is the pressure to self-actualize, and the anxiety of having a timeframe imposed on it. If all goes according to plan and I do complete my Bachelor’s in under two years, I’m under no illusion that it’s going to be a golden ticket to a prosperous happily ever after; even professionals with graduate degrees are having difficulty finding employment. And with everything going on socially and politically, I don’t even have the assurance that the student loans that afforded me this semester will still be around in the ones to follow. All that in mind, I have it in my head that it’s not finishing the degree that’s incumbent upon me, but also optimizing myself for life afterwards.
In these short two years I’m going to have at SDSU, I’m going to want to make the most of the resources available, from simple things like making connections with faculty/students to the more involved effort of venturing on campus to attend networking and career-focused events. Both of these simple actions, like so many other personal plans and projects, require moving past my hermetic state of being. To bring this long era in my life of keeping a reserved low profile and focusing solely on the required work in front of me to its end. To start assembling an online presence, including fleshing out this blog. To start building a real professional network. To polish my personal elevator pitch and overall image.
Feels like a daunting additional set of things to do, given how much my academic workload is taking up the vast majority of my time and I’m admittedly struggling to keep pace with. But it also feels like I’m still only starting, like there’s still so much more I can get out myself. The closer I get to that ideal personal state, the easier and more manageable things should start to feel, until I’m able to once again live in a confident state of flow I remember having in adolescence.
It’s hard to believe we’re already almost two weeks into 2025—time’s been flying by, and already bleeding together on account of all perpertual stream of bad news. The state of reality as a whole seems like a sick bizarro joke, a satirical take you would have seen in a 90s or 00s movie and brushed off as far too ridiculous to ever actually happen, yet here we are in a timeline where Idiocracy proved to be depressingly prescient. And just as the National political farce capped off a first-week-of-the-year with a preview of the chaos and farce we’re all slated to endure over the next four years, the current Los Angeles wildfires started.
via Time.com An aerial image shows smoke from wildfires including the Eaton Fire and Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 8.Patrick T. Fallon—AFP/Getty Images
I’ve known the fear of uncontrollable wildfires for a majority of my life now, having endured the various ones that have occurred over the years since the “first” one in 2008. For as many as San Diego has seen, they’ve pretty much occurred on the county level, never within the limits of the city proper. Yet it’s not lost on me that it’s really only been a matter of fortunate timing—had the current Santa Ana conditions had been in effect back in November of 2024, the fire in the canyons along Fairmount Ave would have potentially turned into a situtation not unlike the one in Los Angeles presently.
Admittedly, I’ve had a hard time with the balancing act of trying to maintain composure and focus on the pressing matters of my personal life, having very familiar sympathy for everyone affected by the fires, and the fear of both the potential aftermath up in LA and the active awareness it could easily happen to San Diego.
In my recent fledgling attempts to start engaging with social media again, I’ve made mention of the ongoing legal issues I’m contending with. This, along with a frantic job search in an extremely competitive and post-holiday slug environment in tandem with a soon-to-start Spring semester that isn’t financially feasible on offered aid alone has really hampered both my private journaling and blogging efforts.
To the former, I’ve been playing it close to the chest the entirety of its duration. Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to get a head start on opening a can of First Amendment over the situation. But each time, I talk myself out of it due to the nature of the details and the active status of the case. To that end, January 29th can’t come soon enough. As far as everything else goes, it’d be really nice if the flow of time could slow itself down, especially in these last days before the incoming Federal Executive Adminstration. Not only is there the time crunch related to vocational and academic matters, but also the delay in other efforts & projects on the personal front.
So many times over the past two decades have I tried to start a personal website. Some with grand statements of intent, others with introspective rumination over how to try to find an online voice in an ever-changing internet landscape that is so vastly different from its original form and rampant with data leaks, content scrapers, and the evolving dangers of AI. And each time, they’ve all ended the same way: abandoned over the need to prioritize other obligations in life and the doubts over self-expressing online; that’s even circumstantially been the case presently.
But as 2025 begins with the expectation of it being a harbinger year of challenges, from the global levels all the way down to the personal, it also comes with a certain confidence to be had from all the lessons learned and ridiculousness endured throughout 2024, from the national stage all the way down to the individual.
I’ve long joked that I need to find the way to start living life with the unearned confidence of those small breed dogs always willing to scrap way above their weight class. Better and simpler I’m finding it to accept and step into my earned confidence, and committing to leaving the footprint I’ve always wanted to make.
There are already at least three personal essays waiting to be extrapolated from the above, but all in good time; self-patience is an understated key part of operating effectively.
New hosting plan, new WordPress installation, new attempt. Usually one of the first housekeeping items in a new WP install is to delete the “Hello world!” post along with the Hello Dolly plugin, but something in me is responding to it this time around.
Between finally allocating effort into building a personal website & blog again and the disruptive migrations happening across the social networking environment, it really does feel like a digital clean slate for the masses, an opportunity for many to “start over” in a sense.
