#family law attorney in san diego

[doppeltandforney]

Protecting Your Parental Rights in San Diego: Insights from a Family Law Attorney

The parent-child relationship is one of the most significant bonds in life, and when legal issues arise, maintaining that bond becomes a priority. In San Diego, family law courts emphasize the best interests of the child, but for many parents, safeguarding their parental rights can be a complex process. Whether you’re going through a divorce, facing custody challenges, or dealing with relocation issues, understanding how to protect your rights as a parent is essential.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore various aspects of protecting parental rights, provide insights from family law attorneys, and explain what San Diego parents should know about the family law process.

In California, parental rights are legally protected, but maintaining these rights can become challenging during family disputes. Courts in San Diego follow guidelines aimed at ensuring the child’s welfare, yet various factors can affect a parent’s ability to retain custody or visitation rights. Protecting parental rights is a complex process that involves understanding legal guidelines, fulfilling parental duties, and addressing any challenges or disputes that may arise.

This guide will cover what parental rights entail in San Diego, the importance of legal support, and practical steps parents can take to secure a favorable outcome.

Understanding Parental Rights in California

In California, parental rights refer to the legal responsibilities and privileges parents have concerning their children. These rights include making important decisions on behalf of the child, such as their education, healthcare, and religious upbringing. Parental rights also cover custody and visitation, granting parents the opportunity to actively participate in their child’s life.

San Diego family courts prioritize arrangements that serve the child’s best interests, considering factors like stability, parental involvement, and the child’s well-being. This focus underscores the need for parents to demonstrate their ability to meet their child’s needs consistently.

The Importance of Legal Representation for Parental Rights

Navigating the family court system without an attorney can be difficult, especially when complex custody or support issues are at stake. Family law attorneys help clarify legal rights, guide hearings, and advocate for fair custody arrangements. They can also provide strategic advice for handling contentious situations, like disputes with the other parent or accusations of neglect.

Legal representation is particularly crucial for parents dealing with high-conflict custody battles, move-away cases, or allegations of abuse, where an experienced attorney’s support can be instrumental in protecting parental rights.

Types of Parental Rights Cases in San Diego

Child Custody and Visitation

Custody and visitation are central aspects of parental rights cases. California law differentiates between legal custody (decision-making power) and physical custody (where the child lives), and each can be awarded solely to one parent or shared jointly. Visitation rights allow non-custodial parents to spend time with their children, contributing to their upbringing and well-being.

Parental Rights in Divorce

When parents divorce, the court determines custody based on the child’s best interests, taking into account each parent’s involvement, stability, and ability to provide a nurturing environment. Divorce often necessitates legal support to ensure fair custody arrangements, particularly in cases involving disputes or high-conflict situations.

Relocation and Move-Away Cases

Relocation cases occur when a parent wishes to move with the child, often impacting the other parent’s visitation rights. San Diego courts assess whether the move aligns with the child’s best interests, considering factors such as the child’s relationship with both parents, the distance, and the reasons for relocation.

Parental Alienation and Co-Parenting Issues

Parental alienation occurs when one parent attempts to distance the child from the other parent, often through negative remarks or discouragement of the relationship. Courts take parental alienation seriously, as it affects the child’s emotional health and relationship with both parents.

Key Considerations in Protecting Your Parental Rights

Documenting Involvement in Your Child’s Life

Maintaining a record of your involvement can be valuable, especially in custody cases where one parent disputes the other’s role in the child’s life. Documentation can include visitation schedules, attendance at school functions, and participation in healthcare decisions. These records demonstrate your commitment to your child’s well-being and may support your case in court.

Understanding Joint vs. Sole Custody

Knowing the distinction between joint and sole custody is crucial, as these arrangements affect your legal rights. Joint custody allows both parents to share decision-making responsibilities, while sole custody grants authority to only one parent. An attorney can help parents understand their rights under each arrangement and determine what best suits their situation.

Handling False Allegations

In some custody disputes, one parent may face false allegations of abuse, neglect, or substance abuse. These accusations can jeopardize parental rights, making it vital to address them through legal representation. A family law attorney can assist in gathering evidence, defending against false claims, and maintaining the parent’s reputation and rights.

How a Family Law Attorney Can Help

Guiding You Through Custody Hearings

Custody hearings can be intimidating, especially if you’re unfamiliar with family court procedures. A family law attorney can prepare you for the hearing, present evidence on your behalf, and advocate for your rights. This legal support is invaluable when attempting to secure favorable custody and visitation terms.

Developing a Co-Parenting Plan

A co-parenting plan is a legal document that outlines each parent’s responsibilities and the child’s schedule. Family law attorneys assist in creating a practical, detailed co-parenting plan, which can be essential for minimizing disputes and ensuring consistency for the child.

Defending Against Parental Alienation

If you’re dealing with parental alienation, an attorney can help gather evidence, document instances of alienation, and present your case in court. Addressing parental alienation is crucial, as it can severely impact your relationship with your child and affect their emotional health.

Assisting in Relocation Requests

A family law attorney can guide parents through relocation requests, helping them present their reasons for the move or argue against it if it disrupts their relationship with the child. Attorneys understand the factors that courts consider in relocation cases and can build a compelling case to support their stance.

Choosing the Right Family Law Attorney in San Diego

Selecting a family law attorney to represent you in parental rights matters is an important decision. Here are some criteria to keep in mind:

Experience with Parental Rights Cases: Look for an attorney who has handled cases involving custody, visitation, relocation, and parental alienation.

Local Knowledge of San Diego Courts: Familiarity with local judges, mediators, and family court procedures can be advantageous.

Positive Client Feedback: Testimonials and reviews can provide insight into the attorney’s competence and client satisfaction.

Clear Communication: The attorney should explain legal terms and strategies clearly and provide honest advice tailored to your needs.

Common Challenges in Protecting Parental Rights and How Attorneys Help

High-Conflict Custody Disputes

In high-conflict cases, parents often struggle to reach agreements on custody and visitation. Family law attorneys can mediate between parties, helping to reduce tension and keep the child’s best interests at the forefront.

Parental Alienation

Parental alienation is a serious issue that impacts both the parent and child’s emotional well-being. Attorneys assist by documenting evidence, seeking court intervention, and working to preserve the parent-child relationship.

Managing Relocation Conflicts

Relocation cases are challenging due to the potential disruption of the parent-child bond. An attorney can present evidence to support or oppose the move, based on factors such as the impact on the child’s stability and the existing custody arrangement.

Final Thoughts

Protecting parental rights is essential for maintaining the bond with your child and supporting their development. From custody battles to relocation cases, understanding California’s family law system and having a knowledgeable attorney on your side can make all the difference. Family law attorneys in San Diego offer guidance, representation, and strategic support to ensure parents can preserve their rights and continue to play an active role in their child’s life.

Navigating parental rights cases can be complex, but with the right legal support, parents can confidently advocate for their relationship with their child and secure a positive outcome.

To learn more details contact with us

Name of Law Firm: Doppelt and Forney Law Firm

Address: 16466 Bernardo Center Dr #260, San Diego, CA 92128, United States

Phone: 858-312-8500Website URL: https://www.sandiegodivorcelawyerhelp.com

[primusfamilylaw]

Building a Strong Foundation for Your Family’s Future: Family Law San Diego

Families are the cornerstone of our lives, and ensuring their stability and well-being is crucial, especially during times of legal uncertainty. Whether you're navigating a challenging divorce, planning for your child's custody, or seeking guidance on spousal support, a knowledgeable attorney specializing in family law San Diego can help guide you through these important decisions.

If you want to know more, read the full blog.

[asmithlawyer]

Their main responsibility during the consultation is to give you accurate, comprehensive, and understandable information, but they can't do that until they have the complete picture.

To obtain the image, a multitude of documents are required. They require your proof in addition to your narrative.

Due to the fact that divorce lawyer consultation is frequently expensive, it is imperative that you come prepared. You must have certain documentation available in order to guarantee that no time—or money—is wasted.

Dive into infographic for an extensive list of the paperwork that you need to arrange before you consult a divorce lawyer.

Confused about what to bring to a divorce consultation? Choose to consult a divorce attorney in San Diego at Mesnik Law Firm. Mesnik Law Group is unswerving to provide each client with principled, efficient, and capable representation. They are committed to handling your l through to the end and will help you devise a litigation strategy within your budget.

[offender42085]

Post 0636

Richard Sepolio, California inmate, born 1992, incarceration intake in May 2019 at age 26, released November 2020

DUI Manslaughter, DUI causing injury

In November 2020, a 28-year-old former inmate, was released early after serving less than three years (including jail and prison confinements) of a nearly 10-year sentence, partially because of the COVID pandemic. Sepolio also received a reduced sentence for good behavior and for working in a prison fire camp.

He was involved in a DUI crash on October 15, 2016, a crash that killed Annamarie Contreras, 50, and Cruz Contreras, 52, a married couple from Chandler, Arizona; and Hacienda Heights residents Andre Banks, 49, and Francine Jimenez, 46.

When it was announced Sepolio would be released, San Diego County District Attorney, Summer Stephan said, “This very early release is unconscionable''.

Stephan further stated, "Department of Corrections decision is re-victimizing the family and friends of the four people killed and seven injured who have been devastated by their loss and continue to deal with the financial, emotional, mental and physical trauma caused by the defendant. This inmate continues to deny and minimize the crime by refusing to admit he was speeding and denying being impaired while arguing with his girlfriend on the phone, which resulted in the devastating crash.''

In addition to having drinks prior to getting behind the wheel, Sepolio was arguing with his girlfriend on the phone just moments before losing control of his truck on the bridge, the prosecutor said.

Sepolio testified he was driving on the transition ramp -- a route back to Coronado that he had driven more than 90 times before -- when he sped up to merge in front of another car and lost control.

Prosecutors said he was driving between 81 and 87 mph when the crash occurred.  His truck plunged over the Coronado Bridge in October 2016. It dropped about 60 feet onto crowded Chicano Park. 

In May 2023, the inmate petitioned the court. He sought to have his parole terminated early and his convictions for vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and DUI causing injury erased through a new law that allows inmate firefighters an expedited path to purging their criminal records.

The law, which went into effect in 2023, aims to provide a smoother path for formerly incarcerated volunteer firefighters to obtain employment. Inmates released from custody can now apply for such relief if they successfully complete fire camp and judges can grant those requests if the expungement is found to be “in the interest of justice.”

While now discharged from the Navy, he elected to wear his Navy Uniform in his court proceeding.

This was his second attempt after the first attempt was denied earlier by the court. The second petition was denied.

3g

Last reviewed August 2024

[nerdykingbasement]

The Importance of Evidence Gathering in Auto Accidents: A Perspective from Moseley Collins Law

Introduction

Auto accidents are an unfortunate reality for many individuals and families. They can lead to severe injuries, significant financial burdens, and emotional distress. Understanding the importance of evidence gathering in https://maps.app.goo.gl/NRTDekvonFVVs9t57 auto accidents is crucial—not only for the victims seeking justice but also for the effective representation provided by legal professionals. Here at Moseley Collins Law, we recognize that collecting and preserving evidence can make or break a case. In this comprehensive article, we will explore various aspects of evidence gathering in auto accidents from the perspective of our experienced team of San Diego car accident lawyers.

The Importance of Evidence Gathering in Auto Accidents: A Perspective from Moseley Collins Law

The significance of meticulous evidence collection cannot be overstated when it comes to auto accidents. Evidence is the backbone of any personal injury claim, helping establish liability and supporting the claims made by victims. Without sufficient evidence, even a strong case can falter, leaving victims without compensation for their injuries and losses.

Why is Evidence Important?

Evidence serves several essential purposes in an auto accident case:

Establishing Liability: Determining who was at fault for the accident is paramount. Clear evidence can point to negligent actions such as speeding, distracted driving, or failure to obey traffic signals.

Determining Damages: Evidence helps quantify the damages incurred by the victim, including medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering.

Strengthening Legal Arguments: Well-documented evidence supports claims made by attorneys in court or during negotiations with insurance companies.

Credibility: Solid evidence enhances the credibility of a victim's testimony or that of witnesses.

Preventing Fraud: Thorough evidence collection helps deter fraudulent claims and ensures that genuine claims receive their due consideration.

Types of Evidence Collected in Auto Accidents

Understanding what types of evidence are critical can equip victims with knowledge before they approach legal professionals like those at Moseley Collins Law.

1. Photographic Evidence

Photos taken at the scene provide a visual account of the accident's circumstances:

Damage to vehicles Road conditions Weather conditions Traffic signs 2. Witness Statements

Eyewitnesses play a pivotal role in providing unbiased accounts that may corroborate or contradict claims made by involved parties.

3. Police Reports

Law enforcement officials typically file reports on serious accidents, detailing their observations and conclusions regarding fault.

4. Medical Records

Documentation from healthcare providers establishes injuries sustained during the accident and treatment received thereafter.

5. Digital Evidence

This includes any relevant data from vehicles (like black box data), cell phone records that show distracted driving activity, or social media posts made around

[lawbyrhys]

BREAKING: Usha Vance Leaves Law Firm

Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of newly announced Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, has left her firm Munger, Tolles & Olsen, shortly after her husband was announced as the former President and 34-time convicted felon's running mate on Day 1 of the Republican National Convention.

Raised in San Diego, California, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, she was an associate at the firm up until the announcement was made.

"Usha has informed us she has decided to leave the firm. Usha has been an excellent lawyer and colleague, and we thank her for her years of work and wish her the best in her future career."

- the statement released by a firm spokesperson to Bloomberg Law regarding her departure.

Vance cited aim to "focus on caring for [her] family," as the reason for her leave. The firm was swift to remove Vance's biography from their website.

Apparently, she met JD while attending Yale Law School, later going on to clerk for judges such as Kavanagh and Roberts before landing her latest position at the aforementioned firm.

Leading up to the announcement, her Ohio senator husband has been doing rounds on the conservative media circuit, making some fairly shocking comments about this country while praising Viktor Orbán in the process. Look it up.

Everything above is factual; below are opinions.

So, why do we think she left the firm? The way the reporting is rolling out, it's beginning to appear as though Usha was unaware of her husband's position in the race until it was announced at the convention. Do we think she left the firm because she knows being tied so closely to this chaotic duo is sure to hurt her practice? Any attorney that steps within fifty feet of the former president seems to lose all legal credibility almost instantaneously; with key members of his former counsel facing penalties as severe as disbarment for their work on, and association with, the various unlawful and unconstitutional acts committed on the former's behalf. Maybe she didn't want to face that humiliation and ridicule. On the other hand, though, Alina Habba seems like she just loves her job representing him, so maybe I'm wrong here. Alina's definitely not strapped for work—as long as she considers that work a charity case since payment is unlikely, but I digress. Seriously, though, I don't know what's up with Usha, but if my partner took on such a role alongside such a man, after I swore an oath to uphold the laws of this land and defend the justice of all of its citizens—you know, the oath they have all of us take to be members of our respective bar associations—I'd probably step away from my practice too. There is no way a wholly good, honest, and ethical practice in law can be conducted within any proximity to that.

That's all I have for right now, though. Nothing stated below the cutoff of this post is claimed to be factual; it's just my opinions and speculation as is my protected First Amendment right to share. I hope you are all having a fantastic week!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gisselle Palomera at Los Angeles Blade:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1955 into effect on Monday, banning forced outings in California schools after facing fierce opposition. The signature comes after Newsom faced pressure to sign, leaving many to question his stance on LGBTQ+ issues after vetoing a bill that would have considered parents’ acceptance of a child’s identity or orientation in legal custody battles. The bill, proposed by Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego) earlier this year, bans schools from creating or enacting policies that would out students to their parents about their gender, pronouns, name change, or sexual orientation. “This comes from a growing national attack on LGBTQ+ people and in particular transgender individuals, with several California school districts and other states enacting policies that explicitly compel teachers to tell parents that their child identifies as transgender,” said Ward during a hearing last month.

“Forced outing policies harm everyone: parents, families, and school staff by unnecessarily compelling the staff to involve themselves in family matters and removing the opportunity for families to build trust and have conversations on their own terms.”

The introduction of the bill follows a string of policies that force parental notification policies, requiring counselors, administrators, teachers, school staff, and anyone else at school to notify parents about their child’s transition or change of pronouns. This potentially puts LGBTQ+ children in danger, risking that these children are under the care of anti-LGBTQ+ family members or guardians.

AB 1955 supports the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act (SAFETY Act) in preventing schools from enforcing or enacting forced outing policies. “As a nonbinary educator working at a middle school, I definitely feel relieved to have some solid protection at the state level, and I feel empowered to continue advocating for my LGBTQ+ students,” said Amanda Estrada, a middle school teacher at Los Nietos Unified School District. Lawmakers were discordant last month at a hearing that erupted in emotions over the issue. Following the hearing, legislators sent the bill to Newsom to stop these policies against LGBTQ+ students, families, and educators who felt passionately about the issue. Last summer, Chino Valley Unified School District began enforcing the policy notifying parents of any requests “to change any information contained in a student’s official or unofficial records.” The policy was later blocked in court, sparking a civil rights lawsuit from California, bringing in Attorney General Rob Bonta to advocate against the policy.

Earlier this year, the school district revamped the policy, leaving out terms like gender, biological sex, and bathrooms but continues to push for outing students based on any changes they may request. Existing law regarding the polarizing issue requires the State Department of Education to develop school-based resources and update previous resources that aim to support LGBTQ+ students. The new law now requires the State Department of Education to develop community-based resources for LGBTQ+ students and their families as well.

Good news: California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB1955 into law that bans schools in the Golden State from enacting student safety-endangering anti-LGBTQ+ forced outing policies.

Hopefully more states enact policies similar to AB1955.

See Also:

AP, via The Guardian: California bans rules requiring schools to tell parents of child’s pronoun change

NBC News: California law bans 'forced outing' parental notice policies when a student switches pronouns

[rileytakeda]

— BASICS

Name: Riley Takeda Age / D.O.B.: 30 / September 9, 1993 Gender, Pronouns & Sexuality: Nonbinary, She/they, & Queer Hometown: San Diego, California Affiliation: Government Job position: Staff Attorney at the Bronx County Public Defender’s Office Education: Bachelor’s in Political Science from NYU, and J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law Relationship status: Single Children: None Positive traits: Resourceful, Compassionate, Perceptive, Ethical, Fair Negative traits: Obsessive, Hedonistic, Argumentative, Blunt, Stubborn

— BIOGRAPHY

TW: Child abuse, parental death

Riley’s parents were career military officers, having met and started their relationship while they were both serving overseas with the Marines, and they started their family while stationed in Camp Pendleton. She grew up half on that base, though her mother insisted that she also attend public school, so she had exposure to the world outside of the armed forces. It was honestly one of the only good things that her mother did for her because it made Riley realize that she didn’t have to follow in her parents’ footsteps, even if it was obvious that they expected that of her, and it gave her an opportunity to explore interests outside of their supervision.

As she got older and learned more about how the world operated, she began to challenge the worldview that she had been raised under, much to her father’s consternation. He was a traditional man who demanded respect in the form of total obedience from his wife and child. He had made it obvious from her childhood that he was disappointed she hadn’t been a boy, and had little interest in being involved in her life outside of making sure that she wasn’t a disappointment to him. To bring home anything less than perfection would earn her a backhand or lashes with a belt, under the guise of trying to prepare her for the military, but really just trying to exert whatever control he could over her.

The first time that she learned these systems weren’t worth shit, Riley was 13 and she had worked up the courage to tell one of her teachers about the abuse. When CPS showed up at her home, they took one look at the medals decorating the family home and were effortlessly charmed by the all-American military man. After they left, he broke Riley’s arm in two places as punishment for running her mouth. He warned her that people would never believe her over him and now she had proof of that.

From that day forward, Riley threw herself into her studies because it had the dual effect of keeping her father off her back and also setting her up to be able to get out. She got a scholarship to NYU, leaving shortly after graduating high school and never looking back. She took out loans and worked third shift to put herself through college, and on a professor’s encouragement, she went on to law school in the area.

Learning about the state’s and country’s legal systems radicalized Riley further. It was proof of what she had known since they were 13: that justice was not the priority of most of those who had the power to do something about it. With her grades, she could have gone to any law firm in the city and worked a cushy corporate job, and she was certainly recruited for the diversity points, but Riley went to law school to help people and that’s what she intended to do.

She’s been with the Bronx County Public Defender’s Office for nearly three years at this point and she’s earned a reputation for being a stickler for the rules but also fighting to be fair. They’re just starting to get a little more responsibility in their cases, taking the lead on simpler matters while making it known that they want to work on the high-profile ones. They still have a bit of an idealistic view of the world, believing that they can stay neutral amongst the various criminal groups while also pissing off the police. Debatable how long that view lasts.

Over the last several months, Riley has taken personal leave from the PD's office to care for her mother who had fallen ill. It's been emotionally difficult, given her strained relationship with her mother, but she also knew that her mother had no one else. The illness progressed quickly, both a blessing and a curse for Riley, and she's finally returned to the city after her mother's death. Being out of the loop for even just a couple months has set her more off-balance than she expected, and is trying to re-establish herself within her office and the fabric of the city.

update (5/12/24)

Due to Riley's budding relationship with Theo Langley, and a perfect storm of events that culminates in Theo's arrest during a protest, Tristan taps Riley to get him out of jail. This is their first true understanding of the organization both Theo and Tristan are a part of, and a leap of faith to become part of it. They still maintain their position with the public defender's office for the time being while trying to keep their head above water in a world they were only tangentially involved with up until this point.

— WANTED CONNECTIONS / PLOTS

CLIENTS - People whose legal matters she’s handled over the years. These could be gang members, civilians, anyone who doesn’t have the money to hire private defense. They could be happy she saved them from getting railroaded by the DA’s office, or they could be pissed because she didn’t do enough to get them off. Riley has a bleeding heart and always wants to believe the best in her clients, even when they might not deserve it.

PROSECUTORS - Lawyers on the other side of the table or the “Dark Side” as they like to affectionately call them. More than likely, despite representing different interests, there will still be some professional overlap, potentially old classmates or co-workers, etc. They can be cordial, butt heads, have rabid theoretical discussions, be really nerdy about law things, and more.

COPS/LAW ENFORCEMENT - Probably something more antagonistic here, regardless of whether they’re corrupt or not. On one hand, she’s fighting to defend “criminals” and on the other, she might be throwing a wrench in carefully-laid plans. But she could also use some allies on that side of the system, someone who either also believes in working through the system, or someone who is willing to take advantage of her shortsightedness.

MANIPULATORS - Riley is in a very specific place in her life where she still has some of the bright-eyed optimism of saving the world while also becoming increasingly more jaded at how slowly the system works. While she currently still believes there is justice to be had by playing by the rules, it’ll only take one or two big things to sway her in one direction or the other. Having an up-and-coming public defender in their pocket would be a boon to anyone playing the long game.

ACTIVISM - While a lot of their life takes place in the white collar sphere, Riley tends to prefer a more down to earth lifestyle in their day to day. She’s been known to knock on doors for local politicians or lend her voice to protests, happy to provide relevant insight if her expertise is helpful, namely getting protestors and other activists out of jail and reminding them of their rights.

[the-grey-hunt]

The quote is from this article:

TL;DR Entangled Press (best known for their Red Tower imprint, which publishes the Fourth Wing books) is being sued on the allegation that an agent used a former client's manuscript to help Tracy Wolff write the "Crave" books (or at least the first one).

article copied in full below the cut for people who get paywalled:

In the autumn of 2010, Lynne Freeman, a family-law attorney and an unpublished author, put the final touches on her first novel, “Blue Moon Rising.” The story revolved around a teen-age girl named Anna who falls in love with a werewolf and learns that she has magical powers. It was a fantasy, but it drew on Freeman’s own experiences growing up in Alaska. For years, Freeman had been fiddling with the material, imagining and reimagining characters, revisiting childhood memories. She even dreamed about the idea, and kept notes on it in a shoebox in her bedroom. In 2002, after becoming pregnant with twins, Freeman lost one of the babies and gave birth prematurely. Long nights lay ahead. She spent them caring for her son and working on her book.

A few months after she’d finished, in December, 2010, Freeman signed with an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, the founder of Prospect Agency, a small firm based out of Kim’s home, in New Jersey. Kim, a slight woman with a youthful aura and a bright, clenched smile, struck Freeman as a kindred spirit—she’d launched her own business, just as Freeman had, and she’d even briefly attended law school. For the next three years, Freeman and Kim worked together to expand and refine the manuscript.

Kim sent pitches of “Blue Moon Rising” to more than a dozen publishers. The results were discouraging. “I thought the writing, the storytelling, in this manuscript was simply wonderful,” one e-mail read, but “we are . . . looking for things that fall into a newer territory.” Another editor wrote,“While the writing is really great and Anna was a very likable heroine, I worry that there are not enough new and different elements to the story here that would set it apart from the rest of the novels in the competitive paranormal/romance/YA market.” By March, 2014, all but one of the publishers had rejected the book, and Kim and Freeman parted ways. Freeman withdrew her outstanding submission from the final publisher, a press called Entangled.

In 2021, Freeman and her son, now a senior in high school, stopped at a bookstore in Santa Barbara on the way to receive their COVID vaccinations. Freeman, lingering in the young-adult section, picked out a book called “Crave,” by the author Tracy Wolff. She liked the cover: black with a large, bloodstained white flower in the center. It reminded her of “Twilight.” By the time she got home, she was already noticing muscle pain and fever from the vaccine. She began reading the novel, which was published by Entangled, and experienced a panic attack, the first she’d had in five years.

Freeman immediately spotted similarities to her own unpublished book. The main character was named Grace, not Anna, and her love interest was a vampire, not a werewolf, but in both stories the heroine moves from San Diego to Alaska after members of her family are killed in an accident. She lives with the only two relatives she believes she has left, both of whom are witches. A female rival slips her drugs. There’s an intimate moment under the northern lights. In a climactic scene, an evil vampire kidnaps her, and she ends up accidentally freeing a different vampire, whose return is said to herald the end of the world. (In Freeman’s planned sequel and Wolff’s actual ones, this vampire replaces the previous hero as the main character’s primary love interest.)

In addition to what Freeman felt to be the books’ obvious similarities, “Crave,” to her mind, contained details that could only have come from her, from her life. The novel’s opening scene describes flying in a puddle jumper above the Alaskan landscape. Freeman’s grandfather had been a bush pilot: she recalls reminiscing to Kim about what it had been like to go up in his tiny plane. A fantastical chessboard figures early on in “Crave”; a wall-size painting of a fantastical chessboard hangs in Freeman’s office. Wolff’s heroine is revealed to be a gargoyle. Freeman collects gargoyles—they guarded the path to the front door of her former home.

A Google search revealed that Tracy Wolff was a nom de plume for Tracy Deebs, a star client of Freeman’s former agent, Emily Sylvan Kim. Kim had introduced Freeman and Deebs at a Romance Writers of America conference in 2012. (Wolff and Kim claim to have no recollection of this meeting.) The name Stacy Abrams, which appeared in the acknowledgments section of Wolff’s book, was another pinprick. Abrams was the editor who had fielded Freeman’s book submission at Entangled. Freeman grew convinced that Kim and Liz Pelletier, the publisher and C.E.O. of Entangled, had shared the manuscript of “Blue Moon Rising” with Wolff and used it as the basis for the “Crave” series.

On February 7, 2022, Freeman, who had hired a lawyer, sent a letter threatening legal action to Kim, Wolff, Entangled, the company’s distributor Macmillan, and Universal Studios, which had optioned a film project based on the “Crave” books. “I really assumed that they would just apologize and fix it,” Freeman said. But, two days later, the Entangled counsel issued an icy response stating that “neither Pelletier nor Wolff ever heard of Freeman, read her ten-year old manuscript nor were aware of any details concerning the Freeman work.” The attorney added, “The agent, Kim, recalls nothing of this manuscript.” Freeman’s allegations were “speculative, unfounded, and easily rebutted as fanciful.” A month later, Freeman filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit. The litigation, which is ongoing, has cost Freeman several hundred thousand dollars and the defendants more than a million dollars.

The “Crave” series belongs to a powerhouse genre known as “romantasy”—romance plus fantasy. Stories have mingled love and magic for centuries, but the portmanteau crystallized as a market category during the pandemic. Works such as Sarah J. Maas’s novel “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” about a nineteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a fae high lord, surged in popularity, offering escape to readers stuck at home, often with company that was harder to view as enchanting under the circumstances. “The genre really caters to this perspective of, ‘If your life were going to be different, if you were plucked out of this reality, what would your dream reality be?,’ ” Emily Forney, an agent who works with young-adult and fantasy authors, told me. Romantasy sells a lightly transgressive form of wish fulfillment that holds out the enthralling promise of sex with vampires, manticores, werewolves, and other types of monsters and shape-shifters. (There’s even a “cheese-shifter” paranormal romance, by the author Ellen Mint, in which characters can turn into different types of cheese.)

In the past several years, the genre has attained a remarkable fandom. Print sales of romance novels more than doubled between 2020 and 2023. Meanwhile, the number of romance-focussed bookstores in the United States, with whimsical names such as the Ripped Bodice and Beauty and the Book, has swelled from two to more than twenty. Romantasy is helping to drive that boom. Publishers Weekly reported in October that five of the ten top-selling adult books of 2024 were written either by Maas or by her fellow romantasy icon Rebecca Yarros: the authors, combined, had sold more than 3.65 million copies of their novels in the first nine months of the year. A National Endowment for the Arts survey found that the number of Americans who reported finishing a single book in a year declined about six per cent between 2012 and 2022, but romantasy’s mostly female readers seem exempt from that downturn. They gather at midnight release parties and ardently break down their favorite titles on BookTok, a literary alcove of TikTok, where the hashtag for Maas’s series, #ACOTAR, has earned more than a billion views.

Many of these readers are millennials who grew up on “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” and expected more of the same once adulthood struck. Maas was among the first to acknowledge the sexual maturation of her audience. Although “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” published in 2015, featured mild erotic content by romance standards, it was far steamier than most Y.A. (“We moved together, unending and wild and burning, and when I went over the edge the next time, he roared and went with me.”) Love scenes in the later books went further, often adding anatomical specificity. In 2020, Maas’s publishers changed up their marketing strategy, causing the series to be rehomed in the adult section. “It birthed this genre of romantasy,” Cassandra Clare, the author of the best-selling fantasy series “The Mortal Instruments,” told me, “which to me is books that contain a lot of the tropes that make Y.A. popular but also have explicit sex in them.”

In some respects, romantasy has the feel of young people’s literature. The themes are Pixar-coded—forgiveness, compassion, overcoming adversity, celebrating difference—with a swoosh of black eyeliner. Cat Clyne, an editor at the Harlequin imprint Canary Street Press, described the genre as more welcoming than twentieth-century fantasy, which many readers now see as sexist. Romantasy “is emotion-positive—it’s about communication and falling in love,” she told me. “There’s less emphasis on world-building” and more on representing “strong female characters.”

Despite the genre’s egalitarian spirit, the most prominent romantasy authors are white. A reductive but not entirely spurious industry archetype has emerged, of temperamentally if not politically conservative women, often mothers, who find in their writing a means to success outside a traditional career path. “Twilight,” the precursor to today’s paranormal-romance novels, transformed Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon stay-at-home mother of three, into a millionaire. Yarros is a mother of six and a military spouse who began writing when her husband was deployed to Afghanistan. Like Freeman, Wolff first attempted commercial fiction after her son was born prematurely. Between 2007 and 2018, she published more than sixty romance, urban-fantasy, and young-adult novels, but it was not until she wrote a vampire-gargoyle love story that she shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In April of 2024, Publishers Weekly reported that the six-volume “Crave” series had sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide.

All genre fiction (and arguably all fiction) is patterned on tropes, or received bits of narrative. But tropes have assumed a new importance in the creation and marketing of romantasy. On BookTok, users sort and tag titles by trope (#morallygreymen, #reverseharem, #daggertothethroat), allowing authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online. Entangled, “Crave” ’s publisher, gives visitors to its Web site the option to browse its selection by tropes such as “enemies-to-lovers” and “marriage of convenience.” Entangled editors fill out a form for every work they acquire; on the version of the form I viewed, there were fields in which to specify “tropes,” “paranormal elements,” “authors similar to,” “Heat level” (on a five-point scale from “mild” to “scorcher”), and the ratio of romance to suspense (from a maximum of 100/0 to a minimum of 20/80).

Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. Traditionally, the law protects the original expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A doctrine named for the French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes that must be done,” holds that the standard elements of a genre (such as a showdown between the hero and the villain) are not legally protectable, although their selection and arrangement might be. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative romantasies has complicated this picture. The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balkanized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be tropes—falling in love with a werewolf or vampire, say—are actually subgenres. Tropes operate at an even more granular level (bounty-hunter werewolves, space vampires). And the more specific the trope, the harder it is to argue that such a thing as an original detail exists. For example, the “dark paranormal romance” subgenre mandates physical injury and a brooding, inhuman male lead. In 2018, the author Addison Cain filed a takedown notice against the author Zoey Ellis, accusing her of ripping off Cain’s lupine society of aggressive Alphas and submissive Omegas. Ellis sued Cain and her then publisher Blushing Books, arguing that she and Cain were both practicing the subgenre of “wolf-kink erotica,” which is based on open-source fan fiction. (Blushing Books settled out of court; a second suit Ellis filed against Cain was dismissed.)

Freeman’s suit rests on hundreds of similarities, compiled by Freeman and her lawyers, between her own manuscripts and notes and the “Crave” series. Taken one by one, few examples seem to rise to the level of infringement. The Alaskan setting, which Freeman saw as her intellectual property, is surprisingly common: Pelletier estimates that about ninety-five per cent of vampire novels take place in Alaska, New Orleans, or Las Vegas. Gargoyles have joined the menagerie of trendy paranormals, owing to the “Dark Elements” series, by Jennifer L. Armentrout. Small-plane pilots are standard issue for romance, a genre that loves a man in uniform, and it goes without saying that trysts under the aurora borealis are de rigueur. (One novel memorably features a hunky physician’s assistant who pleasures the heroine as “a brigade of ghostly rainbows jostled in the northern sky.”)

Other similarities are harder to explain away. In both books, the heroine’s parents bind her powers with tea; the male lead is guilty and grief-stricken over his older brother’s murder. I scoffed when I saw that Freeman’s side had listed “shining white courts” as a similarity, referring to the fact that, in both works, the heroine is brought to a marble building with white columns. But the court scenes have more than architecture in common. In each, the main character is transported to a timeless place presided over by a green-eyed woman. The heroine feels a sense of belonging; she is told that this is the home of her ancestors. In Wolff’s version of the scene, there are “thick white candles burning in gold candelabras.” In Freeman’s, there are “candles flickering to life in all of the wall sconces.” You can’t copyright candles any more than you can copyright marble, or ancestors, or green-eyed women. But the composition of these details, the totality of how the obvious or ordinary beats are strung together in each, is startling.

To show copyright infringement, Freeman will have to demonstrate that “actual copying” occurred and that the two texts are “substantially similar.” Because plaintiffs can rarely provide direct evidence of copying, the law allows them to prove it circumstantially, by establishing that the defendant had “access” to the allegedly infringed-upon work, either firsthand or through an intermediary. A problem for Freeman is that none of the 41,569 documents that the defendants were compelled to hand over make any mention of “Blue Moon Rising.” And Pelletier and Wolff both assert that they never saw Freeman’s novel or discussed it with anyone. Without direct proof of access, Freeman will have to take the weaker position that Wolff had a “reasonable possibility” of viewing the manuscripts, given her relationship with Kim. Another problem for Freeman is “substantial similarity” itself, a notoriously slippery standard located somewhere between works that raise suspicions of copying (probative similarity) and works that are almost identical to other works (striking similarity). The defendants argue that the two books feel extraordinarily different in tone, pacing, voice, and style. And “if they feel different,” Pelletier told me, “then they are.”

In romance, the heroine’s H.E.A., or happily ever after, often depends on how smoothly she can adapt to a new situation. The same might be said for publishers of romantasy, who have had to adjust to an unruly landscape of self-publishing that is adjacent to, and increasingly competitive with, mainstream publishing. The reigning principles of this indie world are “more” and “faster.” Because Amazon’s search algorithm appears to favor writers with larger backlists, there’s an incentive to flood the platform with titles—and to pad those titles with as many pages as possible, as Kindle Unlimited distributes royalties to the creators with the highest number of pages read. (This has spawned an epidemic of “page-stuffing,” in which authors load their novels with bonus material; authors have also been accused of using bots to artificially inflate their reader tally.)

Although many of the romantasy agents, writers, and editors I spoke to were not concerned about the field’s frenetic pace, a few felt that it could be overwhelming. “I think it puts authors in an impossible position,” the award-winning fantasy novelist Holly Black told me. “No one wants to cut corners on quality, and so you have to do this kind of heroic thing to get your book to be how you want it in a time frame that’s pretty much impossible.” The same conditions that promote speed can also foster “a pressure toward clickbait,” she added. Authors identify the most irresistible tropes and reproduce them as efficiently as possible. The book blogger and author Jenny Trout told me that, “in romantasy, copycats are commonplace. Authors are giving the people what they want, but it’s also like you’re reading the same book over and over again.”

To stand out, Entangled combines a careful attention to the physical look and feel of its novels—its deluxe editions, with adornments such as foil and stencilled edges, pop on Bookstagram—with a strategic, at times unconventional production process. The house accepts manuscripts from authors with a clear concept of what they want to write, but it also works collaboratively on special projects, in which “we are invited into the author’s process from day zero and continue in that spirit throughout editing,” Pelletier told Publishers Weekly. Entangled’s biggest romantasy titles, including Yarros’s “Empyrean” series, now come from its Red Tower imprint, whose model falls somewhere between that of a book packager and that of a traditional publisher. Book packagers assign teams of writers and editors to create content for an outside client, who can request specific elements, such as “the fae” or “hockey-themed romance.” Often, the writers receive a flat fee for their work (“work for hire”), sign over their I.P. rights, and are not entitled to royalties. Packaged titles are relatively safe bets for publishers, offering agility and responsiveness to subtle changes in market demand. Still, many houses want to avoid the perception of either working with packagers or packaging themselves, so as to attract prestigious authors and dodge accusations of predatory contracts.

Pelletier denies engaging in book packaging, but acknowledged, through her attorney, that, “unlike some other traditional publishers, Entangled tends to work more with its authors at the ideation stage to try to organically bake in a high concept.” “Crave,” according to the defense counsel, was “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff in writing the main plot, location, characters, and scenes, and actively participating in the editing and writing process.” On the phone, Pelletier, a former software engineer, insisted that her approach isn’t particularly different from those of “publishers in New York.” (Entangled has no physical office; Pelletier operates out of Austin.) “They do the same thing,” she told me. “I’ve just been very successful at it.”

Opinion on Pelletier in the industry is divided. Publishers Weekly named her its 2024 Person of the Year, citing her “out-of-the-box” thinking. The agent Beth Davey called her “a visionary, brilliant marketer.” Trout, the author and blogger, described Pelletier as “shady” and characterized Entangled as “a Mickey Mouse operation” pushing “nice, nonpolitical white ladies who are good at being pretty in photos and building parasocial relationships online.” One of the more than fifteen writers I spoke to for this piece told me that she’d met with Pelletier to discuss her finished book, but that Pelletier had urged her to develop an entirely different, as yet unwritten, story idea, complaining that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be.” (Through her attorney, Pelletier said she didn’t recall any such conversation and that “Entangled doesn’t rely heavily on hashtags when marketing books on TikTok.”)

Buried within Pelletier’s deposition testimony is an origin story for “Crave.” Toward the end of the twenty-tens, she decided that the time had come for a vampire renaissance. A decade had passed since the “Twilight” movies, and she’d read that fads take about ten years to cycle back around. She’d also heard that teen-age readers weren’t finding the current wave of paranormal heroines relatable enough: the characters were too sure of themselves, too perfect. Pelletier, whose colleagues describe her as a gifted trendspotter, wanted a “fish out of water” story, one that thrust an ordinary girl into a rarefied world.

Early in 2019, an Entangled author was unable to deliver her book as planned, leaving a gap in the schedule. Wolff and Kim both recalled Pelletier needing a writer who could produce good work at a sprint. Wolff is “one of the fastest, but not the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with,” Pelletier said to me. Abrams reached out to Wolff, who responded with five pitches, the second of which featured a sexy, degenerate teen-age monster and a straitlaced scholarship student. With Abrams as an occasional intermediary, Pelletier and Wolff hammered out a basic story shape.

At the time, Wolff was regaining her footing after a difficult period. Her twenty-year marriage had fallen apart a few years earlier, and divorce was not ideal for an author trying to convert fantasies of romantic bliss into rent and groceries. Wolff had written paranormal fiction before, but love stories were her O.T.P., her one true pairing. She was nervous about jumping into the vampire tradition. “I didn’t think I had anything new to bring to the table,” she told the podcaster Hank Garner in 2020. But her doubts lifted when the series’ heroine, Grace, popped into her head and started talking. “She was funnier than I expected,” Wolff told Garner—witty, spirited, a bit sarcastic. In a Q. & A. with the Nerd Daily, Wolff said, “I actually identify a lot with the heroine, Grace. There’s a lot of me in her, including the snarky sense of humor—especially when things get bad.”

The process of putting out “Crave” was chaotic. Wolff wrote a rough draft in two months, from May to June of 2019, but Pelletier didn’t start editing in earnest until December, several weeks before the book was scheduled to go to press. “My editor had a couple of other projects that she was working on,” Wolff recalled on Garner’s podcast, “and then when she came back, she was, like, ‘This is good, but’ ”—Wolff’s voice sped up as if to simulate a torrent of feedback—“ ‘you need to change this, you need to change this . . . you need to add that.’ ” The pair of them revised the manuscript, adding about fifty thousand words in a week and a half. Wolff said, “We were so exhausted . . . the two of us by the end were blithering idiots.” The novel came out in April, 2020. A sequel, “Crush,” followed in September, 2020, and two more, “Covet” and “Court,” appeared in March, 2021, and February, 2022. (During her deposition, Wolff explained that she wanted each title to evoke love, a statement that confused the lawyer, who asked, “What does court have to do with love?”)

Entangled was motivated to push the sequels out swiftly because COVID was catalyzing book sales. Correspondence among Kim, Pelletier, Abrams, and Wolff suggests that, in the hectic days and hours before a book deadline, an already collaborative creative process could become an all-out emergency. It was sometimes hard to tell who added what. “Love ‘our tree of trust is just a twig’ did you write that?” Kim texted Pelletier, about a line in “Crush.” Referring to a different line, Pelletier said, “I wrote that sentence, but I was using Tracy’s voice.” And: “I came up with every header but the first chapter lol.” While closing “Court,” which was on a particularly tight schedule, author, editor, and agent supplied sentences and ideas, all of which swirled together in the various documents being updated in tandem on each of their laptops. Pelletier asked Kim, “Tracy wrote that moonstone description?” Kim texted Abrams, “Tracy and I are team speed writing new scenes,” and “I’ve stopped copy editing because I helped write all this.” (The defense said that Kim’s contribution “was extremely limited and was entirely technical.”)

Wolff seems to find value in a more coöperative workflow. She described herself to Garner as “one of those weird . . . very rare extrovert authors” who “loves to go on writers’ retreats and loves to meet up at, you know, Barnes & Noble and write with their friends.” Like Wolff, Grace is a team player, the center of a big ensemble cast. There are also nurturing Macy, the “cheerleader” of the crew, and tough-as-nails Eden. Wolff told me that she wanted to use her novel to “talk about feminine strength in all its forms.” Her female characters “build the life that they want, not on the shoulders of others, but with others.”

Wolff is an only child. Her father died unexpectedly when she was twenty-two; a few months later, she suffered her first panic attack. Grace, the “Crave” heroine, is also an only child who has panic attacks stemming from the loss of her parents. “I was absolutely channelling some of my own past,” Wolff told me. Her present was impinging, too. She was falling in love with her current partner while she was writing “Crave”; she suspects that some of her elation soaked into the story.

In the “Crave” series, Grace speaks in a knowing, casual, Avengers-inflected tone. Referring to her gargoyle nature, she says, “I sleep like a stone—pun totally intended.” Facing down an abominable beast: “Yep, we’re all going to die.” The series renders the potentially odd and inward aspects of fantasy salable—paranormals are just like contemporary humans, with familiar psychologies, politics, and value systems. They even like the same Top Forty pop songs. World-building details, such as the logistics of being a vampire, are left unexplained. Dénouements can feel duct-taped together, with jarring omissions and convoluted exposition. In the course of the series, characters learn never to underestimate themselves; they grasp the importance of empathy, forgiveness, and friendship; they manifest prolific and appealing forms of feminine power. Most vivid by far are the sex scenes. “Tracy is a romance writer at heart,” Pelletier told me.

Freeman’s manuscript is quieter, more internal. Unlike Wolff, she always knew that fantasy was her genre. She’d immersed herself in Tolkien growing up, and she used to imagine that the people walking around Anchorage were deer shifters or veela, long-haired maidens who called down storms from the sky. She wanted her novel to be as awash in mysterious possibility as her adolescence had been. Her book’s posture toward the natural world is one of respectful awe; reading it, you sense a deeply ingrained isolation.

In “Blue Moon Rising,” Anna is reeling from the sudden loss of her father and his parents. This struggle is drawn from Freeman’s life. When she was four and a half, she and her mother returned from a trip out of state to a completely bare apartment. Her father had left, forcing a split between Freeman and the paternal side of her family. “I wanted to write about a heroine who has tremendous courage because she has panic attacks from loss,” Freeman told me. “She thinks about loss all the time. It’s a thorn in her heart.” Shadowy father figures loom over the story. In one version of the manuscript, Anna’s father is a wise werewolf. In another, he is a cruel vampire prince.

The female characters are foils and antagonists to the heroine. Anna feels judged by her childhood friends: they’ve been “acting moody and unpredictable,” she narrates in one draft. “I felt constantly on edge with them.” At home, the most dramatic conflicts unfold between Anna and her mother, Marcheline, who can be warm and loving but also “controlling,” “obsessive,” “crazed,” and occasionally violent. “It’s like M is schizophrenic with her,” Freeman wrote in one e-mail to Kim, after they had already been going back and forth about the manuscript for six months. “Nice one moment and shredding her ego to bits in the next.”

Part of the reason Freeman was drawn to Kim as an agent, at least initially, was that she seemed to respect the uniqueness of Freeman’s vision. According to Freeman, Kim praised her unusual writing voice, which blended dreamlike imagery with wry humor. (“The moon is full overhead, pregnant with possibilities and none of them good.”) Kim loved the dramatic setting. They spoke on the phone for hours, Freeman says, with Freeman explaining her inspirations, her family and personal life, and her plans for a larger series based on “Blue Moon Rising.” In Freeman’s recollection, Kim would often say that she didn’t have such lengthy or intimate conversations with her other clients. (Kim denies saying this and does not recall any extensive conversations about Freeman’s personal life.)

Freeman was eager to respond to Kim’s suggestions. Kim wanted to see more strength and agency in Anna, the heroine, and Freeman revised the manuscript so that Anna went to greater and greater lengths to rescue her werewolf mate. She produced copious notes, chapter synopses, and character descriptions for Kim; she wrote pitches and taglines and letters for Kim to send to editors. Throughout, she says, Kim insisted that the manuscript was close to being ready. In one e-mail, from June, 2011, Kim wrote, “You’ve been a real pro throughout this revision process so I’d figure you’d want to really wade in those final slogging steps and be rewarded with true greatness!”

But, as the months dragged on, Freeman’s hopes began to wilt. No matter how many times she renovated the main arc, developed a subplot here, updated the lore there, she couldn’t bring the book to where Kim said it needed to be. She believes that she sent her agent at least forty meaningfully different versions of her manuscript. She started to refer to Kim’s edits as “the hydra,” an allusion to the many-headed monster that sprouted two new heads every time one was chopped off.

In September of 2013, Freeman sent Kim a fresh synopsis of her novel. The agent replied in a tone she hadn’t previously used. “My comments don’t always seem to lead your book to the next level,” she wrote. “I really think you owe it to yourself to be really certain you are putting the best book out there.” At the end of the message, she wrote, “I know this email is long and perhaps long overdue. You deserve honesty from me above all else. . . . But the bottom line is you need to move forward and I need to move forward too.”

In Kim’s recollection, Freeman took up less time than some of her other authors—she remembers that Freeman was juggling work and other commitments—but Kim did try to make Freeman feel valued. “Looking back, I feel very proud of the work that I did with her,” Kim told me. “So having that thrown back in my face is very sad,” she said. When we spoke, she stressed that she values “each and every one of my authors so much that it’s just so painful to think that anyone would think that I would do this to them.”

Wolff and Kim were close. Kim’s daughter, Eden, was one of “Crave” ’s first readers, and Wolff named a character Eden in gratitude. Kim’s contributions to the “Crave” series sometimes extended beyond the traditional work of even a very hands-on agent. She helped to create the project’s “bible,” a compilation of names, backstories, and details that Wolff used to keep tabs on Grace’s expansive universe. She proposed plot points: What if two witch characters “are just texting”? What if the magical portals malfunctioned? When Wolff was on deadline for “Court,” Kim sat in a Google Doc with her for nineteen hours, allegedly to provide moral support. “I want to help you rage finish the rest of this book,” she texted on October 24, 2021. Then she suggested that they get coffee “and crash it out.”

Kim didn’t always evince this level of enthusiasm for Freeman. On October 10, 2013, Kim pitched “Blue Moon Rising” to Liz Pelletier, addressing the Entangled publisher as “Lynne.” The language feels boilerplate and impersonal. “If you are looking for something unique in young adult paranormal romance,” Kim wrote, “this is something I think would be a perfect fit for you!” Pelletier forwarded the pitch—without reading it, she claims—to Stacy Abrams, who requested the full manuscript on October 18th. Kim replied on October 23rd. “Hi Stacy,” she wrote. “Sorry for the delay. Here you go! And aren’t you happy about Tracy? I am!” Abrams agreed that she was happy about Tracy, whose new Entangled book was doing well. She also gently noted that Kim had forgotten to attach Freeman’s novel to her e-mail.

An effective romantasy novel conveys the experience of falling in love, but it also touches on themes of talent and purpose, of becoming who you were meant to be. A girl is ordinary and then she is chosen. Her destiny is to wield power beyond imagination. A cold, hard man turns malleable in her hands. Those who dislike her are jealous, those who disagree with her are evil, and those who try to stop her are vanquished—righteously.

A decade or so ago, Y.A. readers telegraphed their fandom by affiliating with types. They picked a Hogwarts house or a Divergent faction to identify with; they declared for Team Edward (the vampire in “Twilight”) or Team Jacob (the werewolf). But romantasy novels are more character-driven, and readers approach them more individualistically. They come to the genre concerned about their own place in the world. “A really good writer makes you feel like a book is about you,” Kim told me. She suggested that maybe Wolff had performed her job too well: Freeman looked into the “Crave” series and encountered her own reflection.

A paradox of romantasy novels is that they express the longing to be unique, but they pour that desire into imitative forms. Many of the genre’s tropes are clichés about specialness. When the heroine is discovered to be secret royalty or the chosen one, readers feel singular, like they are the main character. Both Wolff and Freeman emphasized to me the deeply intimate experiences that fed into their books—falling in love, becoming a mother, struggling to accept the loss of a parent. They lived their tropes. Wolff, a contemporary romance writer who dove gamely into vamps-and-shifter lore, was the normal girl in an alien new world. Freeman was the lost child with an attunement to nature who comes into her power. Maybe these experiences were universal, but they were also personal. If it happened to you, how could it not be yours?

But life isn’t a romantasy novel. For every Sarah J. Maas, there are thousands of first-time or self-published writers toiling away in obscurity. The promise of the genre is transformation—reality into fiction, vulnerability into strength, humans into animals, ordinariness into distinction—but the labor of producing romantasy rarely changes your life. Some authors get picked, and many more do not. The outcomes can feel especially arbitrary when everyone is telling more or less the same story.

The defendants fear that the suit may embolden bad actors to weaponize copyright law against talented and successful authors. Pelletier cautioned that she could see why I might be drawn to a salacious tale of betrayal, but that the real story of the lawsuit was the threat posed by fencing off the creative commons, discouraging writers from crafting their own narratives of alluring monsters or forbidden love. She spoke about a “well” of shared ideas, imagery, and language that irrigates our cultural life and enables our traditions to morph and evolve. “You can’t claim ownership to the well,” she said. “It will stifle everyone’s creativity.” Referring to Freeman, Pelletier added, “She doesn’t own heroes in black jeans, as much as she would like to.”

Black told me, “It’s just true that there are enough things being written, when you’re working with tropes and tradition and folklore, that sometimes you hit some of the same things.” But she dismissed Pelletier’s anxieties about repercussions from the coming verdict, saying, “I don’t think it’s going to create some kind of new standard.” Trout likewise warned against extrapolating too much from a sui-generis situation. “The case with ‘Crave’ and ‘Blue Moon Rising’ is not simply about tropes,” she said. “The books are too similar.”

The defense is right that no one could mistake the experience of reading “Crave” for the experience of reading “Blue Moon Rising.” Wolff’s story is sassy, fun, commercial, and hot. Freeman’s is raw, ruminative, interior, and possibly unsalable, given the murky volatility of the family dynamics and the protagonist’s wariness, bordering on hostility, toward other women. What is strange and spiky in one is palatable and familiar in the other. Freeman strews esoteric asides about Egyptian mythology, Captain Cook, and the passage of Celtic artifacts from New Zealand to Alaska, which have no counterpart in the “Crave” series. (Instead, there are the singer-songwriter Niall Horan, Restoration Hardware catalogues, “Final Destination.”) The mysticism that pervades “Blue Moon Rising” is muted in Wolff’s novels. The sense of phantasmagoria and unreality is gone. Many of the details that overlap are tropes, or close enough. Many more are trivial: the color of a character’s eyes, the title—such as “Bloodletter”—by which she is known.

But the preponderance of commonalities and the sum of how they unfold is harder to discount. Wolff said that she’d been “completely blindsided” and “devastated” by Freeman’s accusations, and that she “hurt for everybody involved in this case.” “I didn’t do what I’m accused of,” she said. Freeman, who has sold her home in Alaska to pay her legal costs, told me that she was fighting in part because she no longer saw herself as unique. “If this can happen to me,” she said, “it could happen to somebody else.” ♦

I admit I always find it funny when people whose entire business is media give on-the-record quotes that sound this much like the villain of a movie about hosting a charity talent show to save the beloved local library.

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[guylevylaw]

Guy Levy Law

Guy Levy Law

9888 Carroll Center Road, Suite 222 San Diego, CA 92126, United States

619-232-9900

At Guy Levy Law, we understand the challenges you are facing after a serious accident. That is why our attorneys in San Diego fight tirelessly for California accident victims. We offer compassionate guidance and aggressive trial advocacy to recover the compensation every injured person needs to make a full recovery and get back on their feet.

In addition to representation in auto accidents, we also represent clients who suffer serious workplace accidents, and families who lost loved one through wrongful death.

Call our San Diego office at 619-232-9900 for your free consultation.

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San Diego Divorce Mediation Legal Counselors: Exploring a Smoother Way to Detachment!

Divorce is often viewed as quite possibly one of life's most unpleasant occasions. However, it doesn't necessarily need to be petulant or ill-disposed. In San Diego, many couples choose divorce from mediation as a down-to-earth option in contrast to customary cases. This cycle, directed by experienced mediation legal counselors, underscores cooperation and shared understanding, offering a less exorbitant, quicker, and friendlier arrangement.

What is the work of San Diego divorce mediation lawyers?

Middle people are not judges and don't pursue choices for the couple. All things being equal, they work with conversations and assist the two players with arriving at arrangements that turn out best for their unique circumstances. San Diego divorce mediation lawyers frequently act as middle people, utilizing their legitimate skill to guarantee the arrangements agree with California regulations.

Divorce mediation is a willful interaction where separating couples work with an unbiased outsider, known as a middle person, to arrange and determine issues like kid guardianship, spousal help, and property division, and that's just the beginning. Unlike a court setting, intervention supports open correspondence and permits the two players to hold more prominent command over the result of their divorce.

The Cost of Divorce mediation in San Diego

The Divorce mediation cost is variable due to court expenses, lawyer hours, and broadened timetables. Intervention costs typically less because it limits court appearances and emphasizes direct discussion. Court timetables can create setbacks, extending divorce cases over months or even years. Mediation permits couples to establish their rhythm, frequently resulting in speedier goals. Intervention meetings are private, unlike court procedures, and this is essential for the freely available report.

This secrecy can be necessary for couples who value circumspection, especially in touchy issues. Divorce can be genuinely burdensome, especially when youngsters are involved. Mediation encourages participation, diminishes aggression, and protects connections—a fundamental variable while co-nurturing is vital. Intervention permits couples to create customized arrangements custom-made to their requirements instead of depending on nonexclusive court decisions.

The Advantages of Divorce in Chula Vista

Even though middle people are nonpartisan gatherings, including a mediation attorney gives extra legitimate knowledge. Divorce in Chula Vista is knowledgeable for family regulations that can help properly. Chula Vista's lawful scene is especially fit for mediation, given Chula Vista's accentuation on no-shortcoming divorce and evenhanded circulation of resources. Intervention legal advisors are prepared to explore these lawful prerequisites, guaranteeing a fair and adjusted goal.

When choosing a divorce intervention legal counselor, thinking about their experience, skill, and approach is fundamental. It works best when the two players will convey transparently and split the difference. It may not be reasonable for couples with enormous power, uneven characters, narratives of misuse, or reluctance to coordinate. In any case, divorce mediation for most couples in Chula Vista offers a reasonable and viable option in contrast to prosecution.

Conclusion

San Diego, separate from mediation, legal counselors assume a fundamental part in directing couples through perhaps life's most challenging, cultivating joint effort and diminishing clash; they assist clients with saving time, cash, and close-to-home energy. Mediation is worth exploring for a more conscious and customized divorce method. Whether you're in the underlying phases of partition-divorcing for choices to court, counseling a talented divorce mediation legal counselor in San Diego could be the most critical move toward a smoother goal.

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Education

School and state leaders propose ICE policies for schools

School district leaders and state lawmakers are shaping policies on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) access to schools.

Last month, the San Diego Unified School District board adopted a resolution reaffirming that it’s a welcoming district for all students. The district also published a webpage with resources for immigrant and refugee students and families.

“We recognize that students bring their whole selves into our classrooms, their cultures, their dreams, their fears, and we have to meet them with unwavering care,” Interim Superintendent Fabiola Bagula said at a Dec. 17 meeting.

The board’s resolution said the district would not permit ICE to access its facilities without a warrant. State lawmakers are proposing additional requirements.

Assembly Bill 49 would require a warrant, a written statement of purpose and permission from a district’s superintendent or a day care center’s director.

“I introduced Assembly Bill 49 to send a message to all of our immigrant students, immigrant families throughout the state of California, that we have their backs,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat who represents the South Bay area of Los Angeles.

The bill would also prohibit ICE from accessing facilities where children are present.

“This can be incredibly traumatic, and so we want to keep our students — first and foremost — front of mind,” Muratsuchi said. “Regardless of how we feel about immigration, about border policy … I'm going to be emphasizing that this is about kids.”

Current ICE policy suggests that officers avoid arrests and searches at schools and other “sensitive locations.” The Department of Homeland Security named other protected areas in 2021, including school bus stops, playgrounds, child care centers, foster care facilities and group homes.

NBC News reported that President Donald Trump plans to end that policy.

“If an ICE agent gets a warrant to come onto campus, that may be an issue that has to be decided, ultimately, in a court of law,” Muratsuchi said. “We want to send a strong message that here in California, we’re going to do everything possible to fight to protect our students.”

Tammy Lin is a professor and supervising attorney for the University of San Diego School of Law’s immigration clinic. She said threats of mass deportation can lead to lower attendance.

“When you have this rhetoric, it scares these communities into not sending their kids to school, which impacts everything else,” she said. “Enrollment rates may drop, which impacts the funding for that school, which impacts the district. It goes all the way down the line.”

Muratsuchi and Lin said it’s important for families to remember that everyone has a right to free public education and due process, even if they don’t have legal status. *Reposted article rom KPBS by Katie Anastas on January 17, 2025