The Sequim School District Ban They Hid From You: Why is This Man Trying to Sue Us Into Silence?
The ink was barely dry on our latest victory for the First Amendment when the next attack arrived.
Just weeks after The Olympic Herald successfully defeated an egregious attempt to levy a coercive, publication-killing $2,000-per-day fine to silence our reporting, Benjamin Mavy—a former member of Brent Basden’s LDS ward—has launched a second, heavily escalated legal strike against this newspaper.
Mavy’s newest motion takes issue with our recent reporting on the Sequim School District, QVSD, and Carl King. He bizarrely claims that our articles accused him of child rape and accused him of “being the same as Ted Bundy.”
The First Attack: The $2,000-Per-Day Gag Attempt
To understand the sheer audacity of this second attack, one must look at how spectacularly Mavy’s first attempt failed.
Earlier this year, Mavy filed a motion under the guise of a civil anti-harassment proceeding. His goal? To force the Olympic Herald to delete over thirty deeply researched articles.
These pieces investigated a sprawling web of local power, scrutinizing Clallam County Judge Brent Basden, Port Angeles attorney Lane Wolfley, former Commissioner Parker, former ER doctor Josiah Hill, and others.
Mavy’s filings specifically demanded the removal of his own public courtroom testimony from a December 2025 trial. During that trial, Mavy was caught on the court record stating: “Judge Basden and I share one of my closest friends.”
Because we dared to publish this exact quote, Mavy claimed we were engaging in “stalking” and “unlawful harassment.”
The proposed penalty for our journalism was a financially ruinous $2,000-per-day fine, designed specifically to bankrupt this publication into submission. Mavy also demanded jail time.
On April 16, a visiting judge from Kitsap County, Judge Houser, held a hearing regarding this motion.
We were represented by attorney Rasham Nassar, a fierce defender of the First Amendment who is no stranger to battling entrenched local power.
In open court, Nassar expertly dismantled Mavy’s attempt to use the civil court system as a backdoor for unconstitutional prior restraint. She emphasized that the targeted articles are heavily protected First Amendment speech.
The vast majority of the articles Mavy sought to delete did not even mention him and those that did relied strictly on ethically sourced information from public records, trial testimony, and open court databases.
The court agreed. Judge Houser formally denied Mavy’s motion, delivering a resounding victory for the press and refusing to penalize the Herald for fulfilling its fundamental duty to the public.
A Playbook of Institutional Betrayal
Mavy’s legal harassment does not exist in a vacuum. As the Olympic Herald recently exposed in our reporting on the Quillayute Valley School District, Clallam County suffers from a pervasive culture of institutional betrayal.
Across our local institutions, bureaucratic rules are routinely twisted to shield those in power. When a local mother attempted to hold QVSD abusers accountable, the administration confiscated her paperwork under the guise of protecting “student privacy.”
Similarly, Mavy is attempting to weaponize civil anti-harassment laws to confiscate the press’s documentation of public corruption.
The tactic is identical: use the language of protection and victimhood to enforce the concealment of systemic failures.
A Terrifying Escalation
A reasonable individual would have accepted the court’s April ruling. But for a network reliant on concealment, an independent press is an existential threat.
Instead, Mavy has decided to double down, submitting a new 171 page “Supplemental Declaration” and a proposed order demanding sweeping restraints against me.
Scheduled to be heard by Judge Houser on May 14, 2026, this new motion asks the court to permanently gag this publication and rewrite the rules of journalism.
In his proposed order, Mavy demands that the court restrain me from publishing statements that “identify the protected persons by unique contextual details even if not by full legal name.” Furthermore, he requests a blanket judicial ban on “publishing identifying information.”
The chilling implications of this demand cannot be overstated. Mavy is not just asking to censor his name; he is demanding a ban on the very concept of investigative reporting.
By requesting that the court outlaw the reporting of “unique contextual details,” he is asking the judiciary to prohibit the Olympic Herald from describing factual events, referencing public documents, outlining legal histories, or reporting at all on his documented ties to the highly controversial actions of Judge Basden.
If a journalist cannot publish “contextual details” about individuals operating within the orbit of a sitting Superior Court judge, then the press is rendered entirely toothless.
It is a textbook example of unconstitutional prior restraint, explicitly designed to protect the powerful from public scrutiny.
Historical Echoes
Historically speaking, the echoes of this tactic are deeply disturbing.
In 1844, the Nauvoo Expositor—a newspaper established to criticize the leadership of the LDS Church and Joseph Smith—was physically destroyed by a town council operating under Smith’s command.
They declared the newspaper a “public nuisance” to justify silencing its dissent.
Today, in 2026, Mavy is not bringing a sledgehammer to a printing press. Instead, he is asking a Washington state court to wield the gavel to achieve the exact same result: the eradication of a publication that dares to question the conduct of the powerful.
A Bizarre Legal Strategy: Outing Himself to the Court
Perhaps the most revealing—and frankly, absurd—element of Mavy’s latest legal filing is how he attempts to prove this so-called harassment.
In his supplemental motion, Mavy includes screenshots of recent Olympic Herald articles, including a piece exploring the “Bundy Precedent.”
That article examined the psychological link between animal cruelty and escalated violence, noting how Bundy’s LDS ward ignored his warning signs.
The article then stated that Judge Basden’s courtroom appeared to be “shielding a man who is allegedly exhibiting similar terrifying precursors to lethal violence.”
Crucially, the article never identified anyone. It spoke broadly of someone “with a documented history of dangerous behavior” being shielded by shared religious loyalties.
Yet, in his sworn declaration to the court, Mavy attached this exact article and complained that it was part of a targeted campaign against him.
Improperly citing case law, Mavy argued that the court must gag this publication because “the context overwhelmingly identifies me as the target.”
He formally complained that a reasonable person would understand the unnamed man in the Bundy comparison to be him. By making this argument, Mavy achieved something remarkable: he legally outed himself.
He formally complained to a Superior Court judge that when a newspaper describes an unnamed man with a history of animal cruelty being shielded by an LDS judge, the shoe fits him perfectly.
Instead of proving harassment, Mavy inadvertently proved the absolute necessity of a free press.
The Cross Country Coach
And the truth of who he is trying to protect is staggering. This isn’t the only time Mavy’s own filing exposes the horrifying reality of the network he is trying to protect.
In his supplemental motion, Mavy complains to the judge that the Olympic Herald has targeted a cross country coach as one of these supposed victims of press harassment.
He presents this as evidence of unwarranted cruelty. But who exactly is the cross country coach that Mavy is so desperate to shield from public scrutiny?
As Sequim parents know all too well from our recent investigation, the district has spent decades operating as a pipeline for predators, routinely looking the other way to protect its own.
We exposed an entrenched administrative culture that shielded individuals like Dennis Peterson and Jerry Jeff Pedersen, while deploying a bureaucratic “shell game” to protect toxic leaders and punish whistleblowers.
It is within this exact compromised system that Mavy found his “victimized” cross country coach: Paul Brinkmann.
In 2012, Brinkmann was arrested and faced two counts of first-degree child molestation, four counts of second-degree rape of a child, three counts of third-degree rape of a child, and one count of second-degree rape by forcible compulsion.
The alleged victim refused to testify at trial—a tragically common occurrence in abuse cases. The charges were ultimately dismissed without a trial.
Some Sequim parents were outraged to learn that the administration had handed Brinkmann the keys to the high school cross country team.
The Sequim School Board formally approved Brinkmann’s retirement last week, on May 4, 2026.
Now, Mavy is using a civil court filing to formally complain that an investigative newspaper is “harassing” this coach simply because the press dared to report on him.
Mavy is actively defending the very administrative rot that Sequim parents have been fighting to root out.
Banned From the Classroom
Yet, the ultimate irony lies in his relationship with the administration he is now championing.
While Mavy uses his legal filings to defend a Sequim School District coach, public records reveal a stunning irony: Mavy himself was banned from volunteering in the very same school district.
Given the Sequim School District’s documented history of ignoring red flags and shielding dangerous individuals from accountability, one has to wonder: just how alarming must Benjamin Mavy’s behavior have been for this specific administration to quietly ban him from district property?
According to public records and court records obtained by the Herald, Mavy was quietly removed from his volunteer role in classrooms at Helen Haller Elementary School.
The timeline of this removal is telling. On January 16, 2024, Mavy sent an email to one of his children’s teachers, Saxon Holt, abruptly stating: “I just wanted to let you know I won’t be volunteering in your class for the indefinite future.”
According to a sworn declaration from Holt dated August 14, 2024, she was surprised by Mavy’s sudden departure and followed up with the school’s principal.
The principal explicitly confirmed the truth: Mavy “was no longer able to volunteer on district property.”
When Holt gently broke the news to Mavy’s young child, expecting the child to be sad, the reaction was chilling.
Instead of being upset, the child gave the teacher “a hug and a smile... as if she thought I had somehow arranged it.” The teacher noted she was “perplexed” by the child’s obvious relief.
Months later, the facade completely dropped. In a September 2024 email to the school’s principal, Mavy finally admitted to the ban, complaining: “I have not been told who made the complaint or what the complaint was that caused me to be banned from volunteering in my kids’ classes last school year.”
He further acknowledged in writing that “accusations and conflict are likely to follow [him]...for at least another 9 years.”
The alarms didn’t stop with school administrators.
In a November 2024 sworn declaration filed by Mavy himself in family court, he described a chilling encounter with an eight-year-old child from his daughter’s former class in Sequim.
According to Mavy, when the young child saw him, she immediately became concerned and explicitly warned him: “You’d better not hurt [his daughter].”
The fear surrounding Mavy escalated to the point of requiring police intervention.
According to Sequim Police Department body camera footage obtained by the Herald, law enforcement was forced to intervene at the Sequim YMCA on May 1, 2025.
The footage shows Mavy arguing with a Sequim police officer because his teenage son, whom Mavy admitted he hadn’t seen in 19 months, had sought refuge inside a YMCA office from Mavy.
Crucially, the officer explicitly informed Mavy why the child had fled there: Mavy had previously been at Sequim High School—in the exact same district where he was already banned from volunteering.
School staff had asked him to leave the premises, prompting his terrified child to escape to the YMCA to get away from him.
The officer explicitly informed Mavy that his actions were causing the child “angst and stress”—a fact Mavy casually brushed off, replying on camera, “Yeah, I’m sure that’s true.”
Mavy even attempted to argue that the YMCA staff were illegally keeping his son, prompting the officer to clarify that they were simply providing the child a safe place to be.
An affidavit signed by a YMCA staff on May 13, 2025 regarding the incident stated that Mavy’s “presence [was] very unsettling and [the staff] felt that he was trying to be intimidating.”
The Irony of the Spotlight
There is a profound, self-inflicted irony to Mavy’s relentless legal campaign. By filing a 171-page declaration and initiating these proceedings to supposedly stop the press from writing about him, he is achieving the exact opposite: drawing massive public attention to himself.
To prove he is a “victim” of journalism, Mavy has voluntarily entered his own police encounters, elementary school bans, and a dozen CPS investigations into the permanent, public court record.
By trying to sue us into silence, he is dragging his own history into the spotlight, ensuring that the very behavior he wants hidden is now a matter of immense public scrutiny.
Who Is Funding This Proxy War?
Mavy’s relentless, escalating legal assault raises a glaring, unignorable question: How is he paying for this?
Civil litigation is an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. Filing sprawling motions, drafting supplemental declarations, and pursuing permanent injunctions against a publication requires significant capital and resources.
Yet, the reality of Mavy’s financial situation paints a starkly different picture.
During a recent court proceeding, I testified regarding Mavy’s living conditions, noting that he was residing illegally in a condemned camper trailer parked next to a former drug house in downtown Port Angeles. Mavy complains about this testimony in his most recent filing.
In response, Mavy took to the stand and confirmed the setup, haggling over the details by testifying that his travel trailer was connected to a garden hose in the backyard rather than visible from the road.
The reality of these living conditions goes far beyond a trivial dispute over a garden hose. Bizarrely, during that same December 10, 2025 trial, Mavy voluntarily played a 911 recording to the court.
The tape featured a nurse from the Olympic Medical Center Children’s Clinic requesting a welfare check on Mavy’s children.
The nurse reported that the children—who were at the clinic suffering from a virus, vomiting, and fevers—told staff they had no running water, heat, or food at their father’s home.
Even more disturbing, despite clinic staff suggesting the severely ill children go home with their mother, Mavy insisted on taking them back to that freezing, waterless environment simply because it was his scheduled custody time.
It is against this backdrop of extreme deprivation that court records from a Trust and Estate Dispute Resolution Act petition expose a staggering financial paradox.
While Mavy plays the impoverished victim living in a camper trailer in some courtrooms, in others, he is accused of hoarding millions in a controversial, self-controlled trust.
According to the TEDRA filings, Mavy created the “Applegate Irrevocable Trust” in November 2021—just 11 months before he filed for divorce, according to court records.
As the “Trust Advisor,” Mavy holds absolute, unchecked power over the trust’s assets. The petition alleges that prior to filing for divorce, Mavy fraudulently transferred $282,190.70 of marital funds into the trust’s bank accounts. According to court records.
The hypocrisy is devastating.
Furthermore, exhibits within the court records show Mavy weaponizing his unchecked authority to arbitrarily declare three of his own children “estranged,” cutting off their access to trust benefits.
According to the TEDRA petition, he did this in direct retaliation just weeks after two of the children filed a police report with the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office alleging he committed assault with sexual motivations against them.
The cruelty of this financial cutoff is matched only by its extreme secrecy.
In a March 5, 2025 declaration filed in the TEDRA proceeding, one of the targeted beneficiaries described being kept completely in the dark, testifying:
“When it comes to the trust, I have received no explanation as to why I can’t benefit. I’ve never received any accounting of any kind about what is going on with the trust, what decisions are being made and by whom, what it contains, or how it’s supposed to work. I’ve never even received a copy of the trust itself.”
This creates a deeply disturbing financial reality. How does a man who was living in a condemned camper afford a high-stakes legal campaign against an investigative newspaper? There are only two logical conclusions, and both are damning.
Either Mavy is illicitly draining the disputed trust—the very funds he shielded from his alleged victims—to finance his legal vendetta against the Olympic Herald. Or, he is acting as a proxy.
The court filings themselves provide a glaring clue as to who might be backing him.
In the TEDRA action over his trust funds, Mavy was represented by attorney Kenneth Wolfley.
Kenneth is the son of Port Angeles attorney Lane Wolfley—a man deeply entrenched in the local LDS stake who was previously awarded a lucrative court contract by his longtime friend, former business partner, and former LDS Stake President, Judge Brent Basden.
Given Mavy’s on-the-record boasts of sharing a “closest friend” with Judge Basden, and his reliance on the Wolfley law firm to protect his assets, the circle is entirely closed.
Are the entrenched power players of Clallam County quietly bankrolling this hit job?
If the institutional rot in Clallam County runs as deep as our investigations suggest, Mavy’s lawsuit is a well-funded, coordinated hit job orchestrated by those who have the most to lose from the truth.
The Real Target: Protecting Judge Basden and the “Good Old Boys” Network
Why go to such extreme, unconstitutional lengths to silence a local newspaper? Because this relentless legal campaign is not, and has never been, about “harassment.” It is about concealment.
The Olympic Herald has spent months untangling the complex, deeply concerning relationships operating within the Clallam County justice system. The focal point of much of this reporting has been Judge Brent Basden.
As we previously reported, Judge Basden is currently facing a formal investigation by the Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
The allegations center around the accusation that Judge Basden has utilized his courtroom to grant leniency to Mavy, all while actively discouraging cooperation with law enforcement and Child Protective Services.
This leniency reached a terrifying peak when, according to court records, Judge Basden officially intervened to shield Mavy from professional scrutiny.
On March 8, 2024, Judge Basden outright denied a court-appointed evaluator’s recommendation that Mavy undergo a psychosexual exam.
How did Mavy avoid this critical evaluation? By hiring an “expert” with a deeply troubling history—one uniquely favored by Judge Basden.
Court transcripts reveal that Mavy hired controversial psychologist Dr. Marsha Hedrick to recommend against the exam.
In trial testimony from August 20, 2024, Hedrick was hired by Mavy to testify, explicitly stating on the record that “it is a mistake to refer somebody for a sexual abuse evaluation.”
As the Olympic Herald previously exposed, Dr. Hedrick is a highly controversial figure whose foundational theories have been widely discredited by her own co-author, and whose professional orbit includes architects of the Catholic Church abuse cover-ups.
The reach of her training is so extensive that it has been cited on the credentials of evaluators whose work appears in high-stakes Department of Justice records, including the Jeffrey Epstein matter.
While there is absolutely no indication that Dr. Hedrick had any direct association with Epstein, the presence of her training network in such deeply controversial, high-profile abuse cases underscores the exact type of “expert” Mavy brought into Clallam County.
Yet, Judge Basden is a vocal fan.
We previously obtained courtroom video showing Judge Basden praising Hedrick from the bench, calling her testimony “fascinating” and actively recommending her to his judicial colleagues.
When a litigant hires the exact debunked expert that the presiding judge openly admires to shield himself from a sexual abuse evaluation—and the judge complies and denies the exam—it goes beyond leniency. It is a closed-loop system of protection.
Our reporting has revealed that this judicial leniency overlaps heavily with church authority. Basden previously served as Tammy Leask’s Stake President and notably did not recuse himself from her criminal proceedings.
Judge Basden was also caught on video stating that law enforcement deepens the problem when interviewing victims.
And the real-world consequences of this protection are devastating. Because Judge Basden intervened to block professional scrutiny in March 2024, the situation was allowed to escalate unchecked.
It is precisely this judicial shielding that paved the way for the chaos that followed—culminating in a terrified child fleeing to a YMCA for police protection in May 2025, and Mavy ultimately amassing a staggering 12 Child Protective Services investigations, according to his most recent supplemental declaration.
When an individual amasses a dozen CPS investigations and causes children to flee to the police for safety, public scrutiny is inevitable. And that is exactly what this lawsuit is designed to stop.
When a sitting judge publicly undermines dedicated police officers and prosecutors, while simultaneously participating in a religious network that lobbies for legal loopholes to conceal abuse, it becomes a matter of urgent public interest.
Mavy’s supplemental motion is a desperate, transparent attempt to stop the Herald from uncovering these deeply intertwined relationships.
If Mavy can convince a visiting judge that investigative journalism is legally synonymous with “stalking,” then every critical article, every public records request, and every exposure of Clallam County’s “good ol’ boys” network becomes an actionable offense.
As one of our readers recently commented, Clallam County has historically operated on a system where politicians, judges, and connected individuals evade accountability. For decades, if you weren’t in the club, you were out of luck.
The Olympic Herald was founded to break that cycle. Mavy’s lawsuit is the establishment’s attempt to reinforce it.
The Paper War: Why I Need Your Help Today
The systemic failures in Clallam County depend entirely on the quiet, sustained compliance of the broader community.
When institutional power is concentrated in overlapping school, church, and judicial leadership, pushing back carries immense social and personal risk.
Benjamin Mavy and his associates are banking on that silence. But they picked the wrong newspaper to intimidate.
On May 5, 2026, Mavy dumped a staggering 171-page “Supplemental Declaration” on me, filled with self-created, uncertified transcripts and pieced-together exhibits. He is attempting to bury this publication in a mountain of paperwork.
This document dump was perfectly timed to overwhelm me.
Just three days later, on May 8, I faced a hard deadline in the Washington State Court of Appeals, where I filed a 76-page appellate brief fighting to overturn terminated court commissioner Brian Parker’s original, unconstitutional order.
This is paper terrorism, explicitly designed to exhaust my resources. And right now, it is taking a toll.
Defending the First Amendment against entrenched local power is extraordinarily expensive.
Because of the sheer volume of Mavy’s escalating filings, and the ongoing appeal of his previous orders in the Washington State Court of Appeals, I have temporarily exhausted the funds necessary to continue retaining my attorney, Rasham Nassar.
Earlier today, I filed a Motion for Continuance, asking the court to delay the May 14 hearing so I have the time to raise the funds necessary to bring my attorney back into this fight.
I cannot face Clallam County’s “good ol’ boys” network alone. To defeat this unconstitutional gag order, I need an expert First Amendment litigator by my side.
To help me re-retain my legal counsel and fight back against this 171-page attempt to bankrupt and silence the press, please consider making an urgent donation to my GoFundMe or upgrading to a paid subscription today.
We defeated their attempts to silence us once. With your help, we will do it again.
I’m donating because I believe in you and the work you are doing. Thank you!!