⚖️ DISBARRED AND FEATHERED
About a year ago, you were asked to pull up a chair for the story of attorney Connie Reguli. Afterward, her review of that story was less than favorable. In considerably less polite terms than will be repeated here, she declared this page full of idiots, blocked it, and went on about her business.
Fair enough. Everybody gets to decide where they doomscroll. Justice, however, has always had other plans. So friends, pull that chair back up. The Reguli saga has reached its conclusion.
As recently as this past March, Reguli was still telling the public the same story she’d been telling for years. It sat pinned to the top of her Facebook page: “For 36 years I have stood up for families and children against government gangsters. They fought back. They made up a fake crime. They destroyed my reputation. They shut down my law practice.”
Boy, whoever THEY are, they sound like real jerks.
She went on. They “sent emails to every judge in Tennessee telling them I was a convicted felon.” They “shattered my campaign for judge.” They “lied to the jury.” They “wanted me to go away and be silenced.” Then she posed what she framed as the ultimate question: “Can government gangsters make up fake crimes to destroy political and ideological opponents?”
Last Monday, the Tennessee Supreme Court answered.
The disbarment itself wasn’t the surprise. Reguli had already been suspended after the Court unanimously concluded she posed “a threat of substantial harm to the public.” She’d accumulated years of disciplinary findings, a criminal case, allegations of dishonesty, and a campaign against sitting judges substantial enough that the final opinion needed nearly one hundred pages to explain how everyone got here.
But the real surprise is what the Court said along the way.
Appellate courts usually speak in pressed shirts, saying conduct was improper, arguments were unpersuasive, findings were supported by a preponderance of the evidence. Even describing spectacular behavior, they tend to sound like a librarian asking someone to lower his voice.
This opinion did not lower its voice.
Briefly, the infamous yet tried-and-true “Dummy of the Week” moniker came to mind for this subject. But that would suggest a temporary lapse — perhaps a regrettable seven-day stretch where judgment wandered off and left the screen door open. But no... this is not a week. This is, in the Court’s own words, a “years-long orchestrated effort.” And, one page later, in the Court’s own words, a business model.
Buckle up. The Tennessee Supreme Court is driving this bus.
The opinion names the destination on page two, before most opinions have finished explaining who appealed what: "No judicial response short of disbarment would be acceptable." Then, borrowing a phrase from an earlier discipline case, the Court described what Reguli had built: "A business model of sorts, based on fear."
To hear the Court, the product was intimidation. The customer was anyone inside the justice system who might decide that ruling against her wasn’t worth what came next: “[Reguli] engaged in this long pattern of disruptive and intimidating conduct in order to succeed in related litigation by coercing judges and judicial system personnel into standing down to avoid personal mortification and possible physical danger for them or their families.”
That's perhaps one definition of advocacy. It also happens to end careers.
Among the methods was doxing. The Court didn't merely condemn it; it described it as something almost outside the profession itself: “It is unheard of for a lawyer to dox judges and other participants in the justice system.” Reguli argued she had every right to publish a judge’s disciplinary complaint, an argument the Court said made doxing “sound as though” it were “normal lawyer behavior.”
Its answer ran three words.
“It is not.”
The Court then explained exactly how the tactic works: "In a doxing campaign, the initial post will often be innocuous... But the intent behind the post is... clear: it is a request for internet trolls to harass the named individual." And the Court put a name on that intent: "Savvy in the ways of the internet, Ms. Reguli clearly intended her Facebook posts as a form of cyber-harassment."
Then the opinion steps outside ordinary disciplinary precedent and quotes Chief Justice John Roberts on threats against judges: “Doxing also can prompt visits to the judge’s home, whether by a group of protestors or, worse, an unstable individual carrying a cache of weapons.”
The comparison was explicit. Chief Justice Roberts was largely describing the conduct of people outside the legal profession. The Tennessee Supreme Court concluded it had found the same conduct in one of its own. “To encounter this type of conduct by a lawyer is nothing short of astonishing.”
And if you thought Reguli was sufficiently bodied at that point, you’d be wrong. The opinion then turned to the night Reguli helped a client evade a protective custody order by hiding the client’s daughter inside Reguli’s own home: “In carefully planned defiance of the court’s protective custody order, Ms. Reguli went so far as to supply Ms. Hancock with a burner phone to enable her to evade detection by law enforcement, as she hid her daughter inside Ms. Reguli’s own home. Such conduct directly poisons the well of justice and is deserving of severe sanction.”
If the argument was that the conviction disappeared, so did everything underneath it. The Court had bad news: “Ms. Reguli did what she did, regardless of technicalities that resulted in reversal of the conviction.” Then it removed any remaining ambiguity: “[T]he reversal of the conviction does not erase the shocking underlying conduct by Ms. Reguli that gave rise to the conviction.”
When the Court weighed what counted in her favor against what counted against her, it found seven-plus aggravating factors — prior discipline, a dishonest and selfish motive, refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing, and false evidence submitted during the disciplinary process among them. The mitigating factors, the reasons for mercy? Zero. None were found.
Tough room.
In the end, there was no closing note of reflection in the record. No sense that perhaps the judges, the disciplinary panel, the trial court, the witnesses, and now five Supreme Court justices had all somehow gotten the same woman wrong. Instead, the Court looked back to its own 2023 finding that she posed a threat of substantial harm to the public, and closed the record with this: “Nothing in this record suggests that threat has abated.”
For years, Reguli insisted vindication was coming — that the system had fabricated a crime and destroyed her practice. This week, the system had the last word: permanent disbarment, the profession's harshest sanction, with the costs of the appeal taxed to her on the way out.
It has been about a year since Reguli was first mentioned here, and it wasn't for sport. She was brought up for the company she keeps. She was once Michelle Foreman's attorney, and just a few short years ago, the two of them sat at the center of the drama that turned a Tennessee Republican Assembly convention into a spectacle ending with police responding and the chapter voting no confidence. We said then that character has a habit of traveling in packs. A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court filled in the rest.
There’s a German word for the small, uncomfortable pleasure of watching certainty collide with reality: schadenfreude. Civil instinct says to resist it. But schadenfreude is easiest to resist when the ending wasn't self-inflicted. This one was. It was authored, line by line, by the only person who could have prevented it.
But the point was never the spectacle. The Court explained the purpose of disbarment in a single sentence: it exists “to remove from the profession a person who has proven to be unfit or unworthy of being entrusted with the duties and responsibilities accorded to those who have gained the privilege of a law license.”
Both Connie Reguli and Michelle Foreman have asked you for the same thing — your trust. Reguli asked you to trust her innocence. Foreman is asking you to trust her with your vote. One of those requests has now been answered, unanimously, by the Tennessee Supreme Court. The other will be answered by you.
