Hon. Dennis Montali
United States Bankruptcy Court
285 Pine Street
San Francisco CA

Re: Bankruptcy of Arden Van Upp
Re: Bankruptcy of Dr. Lawrence Badgley

Dear Judge Montali,

It is with great regret that I an constrained to write you this letter, which will possibly cause trouble to several people, including myself, and will likely not do me or anybody else any good either. Yet, I have no choice.

Since about 1992, Arden Van Upp, unable to get credit under her own name, has been using my name to make purchases, sometimes even calling herself Mrs. Sam Sloan. By the way, I have never been married to Arden Van Upp.

In late 1994, while I was in New York, she made several hundred long distance or charge telephone calls under my name. The bill was $358.00. The telephone was disconnected for non-payment. When I asked her why she did this, she said that she had thought that I had gone permanently to New York and was not coming back, so it was alright to use my name. As a result of her doing this, I have not been able to get a telephone under my name in California. More Than that, this unpaid bill for $358 has gone on my TRW Credit report and, for that reason, I am unable to obtain a credit card or make any purchases on credit.

I enclose a copy of my credit report. You will see that the only item on my credit report is this supposed debt for $358. I am a person who pays my bills on time. I have seven children and am always strapped for funds, yet I struggle mightily to be able to say that I do not own anybody in the world any money at all. This is the reason that it is especially harmful when someone like Arden Van Upp charges calls under my name, ruining my credit thereby.

However, that is only the tip of the iceberg. It turns out that Arden Van Upp had been pulling this particular scam for years and years and I am only one of her innumerable victims. As you well know by now, there are 28 rooms to her house at 2550 Webster Street. This used to be a rooming house. She has owned the house since 1973. What she has been doing for the last 24 years is that, when she wants a phone, she calls the telephone company and says that Mr. John Jones has moved into room number 1 and needs a phone. She runs up around $300-400 in bills on that phone. Eventually the telephone company disconnects for non-payment, and then she says that Mr. Joe Blow wants a phone in room number 2. She repeats this through the 28 rooms in her house. It takes several years for the full cycle of 28 rooms to be completed and then she starts all over again.

Arden Van Upp is a heavy user of the telephone. These several hundred telephone calls she made under my name were primarily to her Party Fax subscribers. As you must know by now (because this is an issue in her bankruptcy case) Arden Van Upp runs a service where she faxes a weekly list of parties in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is another small time scam of her's. Her real reason for doing this is so that she can get invited to unlimited parties and enjoy the free food.

Her weekly list involved faxes to about 100 charge call subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area in places like Palo Alto, San Rafael and so on which show up on the telephone bill. When I was in New York in 1994, she ran the Party Fax off of a telephone under my name. I can produce you a bill which will show several hundred calls each month. I do not know any of the people who hold these telephone numbers. These are all Party Fax subscribers.

The reason that Arden Van Upp feels a need to rip off the telephone company in this way it that Party Fax subscribers only pay $50 per year for this service. For this, they get 7 pages of faxed material per week. Each page takes about 1.5 minutes to send. Thus, each fax takes about 10 minutes. In addition, not all faxes go through the first time and there is a need for redials. Simple arithmetic shows that this service will not make any profit at all, unless Arden can get free use of the telephone. She gets this "free use" by putting the telephone under somebody else's name.

The telephone company has apparently not caught onto this scam, even though Arden has been doing this for more than 20 years. I have called the telephone company more than a dozen times to complain, offering to show the technician where the telephone call box had been pried upon to reroute the telephone lines in Arden's house. They either refused to send an investigator, or said that they would, but never did.

Apparently, the telephone company has some awareness of the problem, because Arden is having increasing difficulty getting new telephones in her house. She apparently can no longer use fake names (as she did before), so she has been using the names of real people, like mine for example. She has also used her mother's name, Doris Rich, and her husband's name, Naji Elmalik. In each of these cases, following the familiar pattern, she has run up around $300-400 on the telephone bill, never paid anything, and eventually the phone was disconnected for non-payment.

If you will get a copy of Arden's TRW credit report, you will see the problem. Arden has five pages of bad debts listed on her report. She never pays any bills at all, unless a cut-off of service is threatened. It is by not paying any bills at all, while frequently buying things on credit when she could, that Arden has accumulated a net worth, according to her own statements, of five million dollars.

Of special concern to me is not all the other innumerable people whose credit she has ruined (many of whom may not even know about this) but my friend Richard Bozulich in Japan. Throughout 1995 and 1996, Arden Van Upp insisted that I have a telephone installed in her house, where I was staying. If my friends called on her number, she would tell them that I was not living there. We had constant fights and arguments about this. Every time she demanded that I install a phone in her house, I reminded her that the last time I did this, she ran up $358 on my telephone bill, which she never paid.

Eventually, after constant almost daily arguments about this, plus the fact that nobody could contact me, I explained the situation to Richard Bozulich in Japan and, as a result, a telephone was installed in her house in his name. I actually did not tell Arden about this telephone, but she soon found out about it anyway. When she did, I told her that this was not my telephone, but my friend's, and that nobody, including me, could use it except for his business purposes. Arden promised and agreed not to use this telephone.

As a further precaution, when the telephone installation man had come, I asked him to seal the telephone box so that the wires could not be switched and the telephone lines not re-routed.

Due to a stroke of bad luck, only about one week after this new telephone had been installed, I had to go to New York. Knowing Arden's proclivity to commit larceny in this way, I should have had the service suspended while I was away. However, did not do so, thinking that because I had had so many arguments with Arden about this subject, that she would not dare to use this telephone.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. I stayed in New York much longer than expected. When I returned, I found that the number had been disconnected and that the bill had been $426, more than even the usual quota for Arden.

The bill had been sent to her address, but she refused to give it to me, saying that the cat had urinated on it. I later did find a telephone bill in the trash with cat urine on it. (Arden almost never throws out her trash. Instead, she puts it in a compost pile in the back of her house). I also called the telephone company, and they read off a list of the places to which telephone calls had been made from this phone. They were almost all to places around the Bay Area and to other areas on the United States where Arden has friends and relatives and I do not know anybody, places like Akron, Ohio and Eureka, Missouri. To add insult to injury, she had even called me at my office in New York twice on that telephone.

Arden admits to having made several hundred long distance telephone calls on that phone, but says that I owe her money for other things, specifically her American On-Line ("AOL") bill for late 1994 and early 1995. There is no basis to her claim. I strongly advised her not to subscribe to AOL. However, her friends, especially a friend named Gordon Barberi (if I recall his name correctly) even more strongly advised her to do so. The thing Arden did not realize is that AOL did not simply send a monthly bill and wait for it to be paid. Arden obviously planned to do with her AOL bill just what she does with her telephone bills, not pay them and wait for service to be disconnected. What she did not know was that AOL had a system to directly withdraw her money from her bank account. (This practice, I am told, has since been declared illegal). Still, even after AOL started making monthly withdrawals from her account, Arden did not disconnect the service, which was costing her $60 per month. She wanted AOL because she was using the forums and newsgroups to publicize the case of her mother being taken prisoner and held under house arrest in Vallejo. I repeatedly warned her about problems with AOL (which subsequently were widely publicized in the media). I certainly do not feel that I am in any way responsible for her AOL bill.

Finally, and most obviously, Richard Bozulich in Japan clearly had nothing to do with Arden Van Upp's AOL bill, and she had made several hundred long distance telephone calls on his telephone.

During this time, she had another man named Craig Larsen living in her house. Mr. Larsen had pried open the telephone box and had switched the lines, after I had had the telephone installation man seal the box. Mr. Larsen admitted to me that he had done this. However, Mr. Larsen had also said, in Arden's presence and which she did not dispute, that many times he had gone looking for her in the house and had found her up on the top floor in the back corner of my computer room using the telephone there.

Since you have apparently never been in the house, I need to explain the logistics of this. The house is four stories high. My computer room was in the far back corner. The telephone line had been deliberately installed in the most remote part of the far back corner, to make it the most difficult place in the house to reach. (There are telephone jacks in every room of the house). Thus, in order to use the phone in the name of Richard Bozulich, Arden had to climb three flights of stairs and go to the darkest, dankest and remotest cornet of the house, in order to use this phone. Yet, she used it all the time. On the last day before the telephone was disconnected, Arden had made 13 long distance calls from that phone. She made those calls obviously without having any intention of ever paying for them. Remember, she had two working telephones in her name: (415) 929-7500 and (415) 921-8719. If she had planned to pay the bill, she would have used one of her own telephones.

The reason I am writing this letter to you is, of course, that Arden is in bankruptcy. Therefore, she is immune from suit. I went to your bankruptcy court. They told me that it would cost $120 to file this claim.

I an disappointed at the behavior of Mr. John Hansen, Arden's attorney, in this regard. Mr. Hansen has long known about Arden's proclivity towards small scale scams in this way. I wrote Mr. Hansen a long letter about this telephone bill problem. He never replied. I called him about two weeks ago, just to find out the status of Arden's case so that I could know where to sue her, in federal bankruptcy court or in small claims court. Mr. Hansen said that my allegations regarding Arden Van Upp are "disgusting" and hung up the telephone on me, refusing to answer my question.

I do sympathize with Mr. Hansen's position in one important respect: According to Mr. Hansen, Arden owes him $750,000 in legal fee for his representation of her. Arden has no intention of paying him a dime, if she can possibly avoid it. However, I feel that Mr. Hansen should be thankful to me for the assistance I have given to him in this case. He should probably pay the telephone bill himself, thereby eliminating my need to write this letter, which may jeopardize him getting paid. Many times Arden complained that Mr. Hansen had "screwed up the case". I usually accompanied Arden on her trips to Mr. Hansen's office. In general, when Mr. Hansen and I disagreed on the proper strategy, Arden would take my advice and not his. I am sure that Mr. Hansen found this frustrating. Nevertheless, I am also sure that overall I helped Mr. Hansen greatly in dealing with his extremely difficult client. Many times, she wanted him to take time consuming actions, such as filing frivolous appeals. I was the person who counseled Arden that Mr. Hansen had done a magnificent job of representing her (as indeed he had). I had also told her that it was because of her stupid and stubborn insistence that Dr. Badgley be required to pay half the cost of maintaining her twelve Silver Chinchilla Persian pedigreed cats, on the theory that these cats were needed to catch the rats in the house, when there was only one cat who actually caught any rats (the grandmother) and a tomcat off the street could have been retained for free who it was much more qualified and experienced in catching rats.

It was because of Arden's insistence on claiming compensation for the cats, plus her other equally frivolous and very small claims, that your court ruled against her claim for attorneys fees which, as noted previously, are $750,000 due and owing, plus the retainer of $125,000 which Arden's mother, Doris Rich, paid to Mr. Hansen to start the case in 1992. Thus, by trying to get a few hundred dollars for the Persian cats, Arden has lost nearly a million dollars.

As long as I am writing this letter, I want to say a few other things about Arden Van Upp, some good and some bad.

First, I would like to say that I probably know Arden Van Upp better than anybody in the whole world, with the exception of her mother and her daughter. However, her mother is under a conservatorship and her daughter has such a lack of feeling and sympathy for her mother's problems that she refused to testify in her behalf unless she was paid. I believe that Tammy Van Upp charged her mother $600 for her testimony in your court, on the basis that she charges $600 per day to clients for her modeling and fashion assignments.

I met Arden Van Upp in late 1966 and or early 1967 because I was the President of the Sexual Freedom League in Berkeley and she came to several of my parties (which were sex orgies). To my regret, she did not directly participate, as far as I know. I now realize that she simply goes to every kind of party. She attends parties every night of every kind and variety and the fact that my parties were primarily sex orgies was purely happenstance.

This is why I can say that I have known Arden for more than 30 years. By the way, after I left Berkeley (essentially I was run out of town by City Councilman John DeBonis and Governor Ronald Reagan) Arden rented apartments in her apartment house at 1019 Asbury Street to two now well known tenants, Charles Manson and his Manson Family and Margo St. James and her San Francisco Sexual Freedom League. Arden evicted Charles Manson and he and his family moved to Coles Street. Margo St. James (not her real name) nearly won election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently on the platform of being a former prostitute and a prostitute's rights advocate. (I know from personal experience that Margo St. James was never a prostitute. She gave it away.)

Dr. Badgley obviously knew about this background when he got involved with Arden in 1973. Arden has never kept any of this a secret and talks about it freely. It is clear that Dr. Badgley got involved with Arden because of, not in spite of, this background.

I know for a fact that many things which Dr. Badgley says about Arden are not true. In particular, the main crux of his case against her is that on New Years Eve, 1974, she called the cops on him and tried to have him arrested, thereby making him fearful and forcing him to quit the house.

I know that this is absolutely not true. Arden did not call the cops on Dr. Badgley and indeed would never have done such a thing, for the following reasons:

1. Judy Land, Arden's friend, told me that she called the police and that Arden did not even know about this. I know that she did this because Judy Land always calls the cops at every conceivable opportunity. Judy Land also likes to file numerous lawsuits.

Indeed, you may be surprised to learn that it was none other than Judy Land who won the famous court case which established the principle that the police can be liable for failing to respond to a call. That was a decision reported as Balistreri vs. Pacific Police Department, 901 F.2d 696 (9th Cir. 1990). Judy Land, who has been married several times, was calling herself Judy Balistreri at that time. However, the underlying decision was cited with disapproval and effectively overruled by the United States Supreme Court in DeShanney vs. Winnebago DSS, 489 US 189, 197 note 4 (1989).

Not only does Judy Land have a pronounced proclivity to make calls to the police, plus she says that she did it, but Arden would never do such a thing. Arden was frequently holding parties in her house plus she had roomers living there. Many of her roomers were hippie and beatnik types, like John Wicket, for example. These people were frequent users of marijuana. Although Arden herself is a health food nut and does not use marijuana, she clearly would not have wanted her house to be raided by the narcotics squad. These factors make it clear to me that it was Judy Land and not Arden Van Upp who called the narcotics detail and tried to have Dr. Badgley arrested for possession of marijuana.

However, Judge Land refused to testify and even threatened Arden if she was subpoenaed. Judy Land has her own agenda of numerous lawsuits she is pursuing. This is the reason why you did not hear and will never hear Judy Land testify in your court.

I might add that Judy Land is absolutely the most obnoxious and objectionable person I have ever met.

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