Dear Ms. Palombo,

I wanted to apologize for the freewheeling voicemails I left your assistant Quanda sometime early Sunday morning. I’m not sorry for having left them, but for not finishing what I started there, and for not being as coherent as I would like. I was very tired and very uneasy all weekend because the GPS ankle monitor makes it almost impossible for me to sleep.

I got a good night’s sleep last night and am back at it. As I said in my voicemails, I want you to do something about this situation. If that means “filing for the special election tomorrow”, then let’s do it.

(Or has the filing already taken place? The Board of Elections website says NOTHING about this “election”. Nor do the General Statutes (as far as I can tell) have anything to say about several crucial details. If I don’t know the answers, who does? Mr. David did a whole program on WHQR where he pretended to answer questions from my estranged friend Ben Schachtman, but they conspicuously did not explore the possibilities of a “truly competitive special election”.)

It is here where I point out that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States is a former prosecutor, indeed a woman prosecutor. Say what you will about me, but I know something about that sort of thing. And you know, it may not count for much, but for my part, I lived on both sides of San Francisco Bay while Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California. If nobody in the godforsaken realm of “Lower Cape Fear” wants to help me, that’s fine. I’ll just sit tight and wait for President Kamala Harris to come to my rescue. And of course I already took the liberty of writing to US Attorney Mike Easley Jr., so we are already on our way to “going Fed” with this business.

(As Jay Z puts it (in his “freestyle with Big L”):

“Jigga incredible / even my thoughts is federal / like kidnapping, extortion and corruption…”)

And in fact I plan for everything, Alex. What if Donald Trump wins? Well, it so happens that I have been writing to one of Trump’s lawyers, Will Scharf, (who I know from prep school at Phillips Academy) since 2020, in fact that was before Trump called him to ask him to help with the “immunity defense”. It also appears that my cousin Edward, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, that he and his wife know people who know Wilmington native Lara Trump quite well. Between Lara Trump and Will Scharf I suspect I could figure out something here. After all, is there anything Donald Trump hates more than Democratic prosecutors?

And I wonder what JD Vance would think about the fact that not only did I read his book Hillbilly Elegy while jailed at the NHCDF in 2018, but that it was that book, which is about (to use a title of one of Isabelle’s poems) “Appalachian fatalism”, which prompted me to start writing to Isabelle Shepherd from jail. This was one year before she got her 50C order. So that’s my “JD Vance story”, like, whatever.

And perhaps I don’t even need to look that far afield. If you want to ignore me, go ahead. But know this. ADA Jason Smith was in the DA’s office this time in 2014 when I had my “special internship”. The summary of why I walked away from that internship, thus embarking on the road which leads to today, is that my gift for the law did not have a place in your offices.

On the one hand, I was asked to write “the Victim-Witness assistants manual of best practices”. That proved not only impossible, but unnecessary: my conclusion was that “these women don’t need a manual”. I wrote a short lyrical text about the role of the “VWA”, and turned it in to Lillian Salcines Bright.

But the “VWA manual” was not my only assignment. The other part of the “special internship” was “legal research”. At that time, as today, I did not have my Bachelor’s degree from UNC-CH, and was certainly not enrolled in “law school”, but I was 26-going-on-27 years old, and my assignment was obviously different from the “undergrad interns”. Because this took place when law schools were in classes, there were no “law student interns”. So it was Dawson who was told to do the “legal research”.

I hope you follow me. The thing which troubled me is that there was very little “legal research” to do. I was told to wait for the ADA’s to come to me with questions. A few did, but not enough to keep me busy, which left me to spin my wheels about the “VWA manual”. But if my memory serves me, ADA Jason Smith was one of the ones who asked me to do “legal research”, as in “locating the pertinent case law in LexisNexis”. In his campaign statements, Mr. Smith speaks of how he likes to “mentor young lawyers”, and I think I can remember him treating me in this way even though I was clearly not going to go to law school.

So I believe Jason Smith will be able to remember me as someone who had the knack for “legal research”, and who was able to get himself a “prosecutorial internship” without applying for it, and who did not seem to want nor need to attend “law school”. How does that reality square with a finding of “incapable to proceed”, or for that matter a long history of “DV and stalking charges”? Is something not right here? Opinions diverge, but who is going to be District Attorney?

So. If Rebecca Donaldson does not want to acknowledge this situation, I will throw the “special election” to Jason Smith. In fact I might do that anyway. Period, full stop, end of story, game over. Does it occur to you that my attorney Mr. Goolsby, with whom I have worked for more than six years, and who is in practice my mentor in the law, do you think I might know how to appeal to Republican lawyers, should the need arise?

I write these letters in one sitting, press send, then change directions and keep moving. That’s not schizophrenia, and it’s not harassment, it is the legal equivalent of “guerrilla warfare”, though of course it is non-violent and utterly lawful. Say what you will about me now, some day they will say of me: “And yet he persisted”. I don’t just persist, Alex, I insist. For that, as Jeff Magnum sings:

“…there is no sorry to be sorry for”.

Yours truly,
Dawson Gage