Federal judge orders release of woman who was jailed for civil contempt with LA Fitness
Mental health professionals visited the Orange County federal courthouse on Wednesday to meet with Leah Alspaugh, who has been incarcerated for six weeks.
A woman who has been jailed for six weeks on a federal civil contempt warrant for a years-long dispute with LA Fitness will be released on Friday to the care of mental health professionals.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered Leah Alspaugh’s release Wednesday night after mental health professionals met with her privately at the courthouse and arranged a care plan.
“May I advise you that I’ve been in jail for almost 54 days?... I think it’s extremely unfair for you to hold me one more day here. Extremely unfair,” Alspaugh told the judge.
Alspaugh has been in federal custody since early February after repeatedly trespassing at LA Fitness gyms and confronting employees in violation of a court order. It’s her second stay in jail for contempt of court related to a federal trademark lawsuit LA Fitness filed against her over a years-long, cross-country harassment campaign that her public defender says is driven by mental illness.
Carter finalized the details of Alspaugh’s release about 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday after a five-hour on-again, off-again hearing in which the judge sought advice from Orange County attorney Brooke Weitzman, who is experienced with mental health services through her nonprofit organization ELDR Center.
Two representatives from Telecare also joined the hearing after Carter said he was worried about Alspaugh returning to custody without a mental health evaluation.
“Let’s get those folks over here right now,” the judge said. He said he favored “taking the chance of releasing her over objection” so long as Alspaugh voluntarily agreed to a plan.
Carter said an “incarcerated state” indefinitely is not acceptable, but he also said he’s worried about the violence Alspaugh displayed in her most recent confrontations with LA Fitness employees. She was arrested in late January after an incident at a gym in La Habra and has three misdemeanor charges pending in Orange County Superior Court, at least one of which relates to LA Fitness.
LA Fitness lawyer Christine C. DeMetruis of Yoka & Smith, LLP told the judge she plans to contact the Orange County District Attorney’s Office about police reports related to three additional incidents but, “We certainly don’t want to stand in the way of Ms. Alspaugh getting any help that she needs,” DeMetruis said.
The sudden urgency followed weeks of uncertainty about Alspaugh’s situation, which has been festering in federal court since LA Fitness lawyers sued her for trademark infringement in October 2022. Her lawyer, Deputy Federal Public Defender Samuel Cross, said in a recent court filing that Alspaugh has an “unshakable, delusional belief that she owns or works at Fitness gym locations,” but she never underwent a competency exam before she represented herself in a three-day jury trial last year.
The jury ordered Alspaugh to pay $602,400, in damages for trademark infringement, unfair competition, common law fraud, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and intentional interference with contractual relations. The verdict includes $401,600 in punitive damages. Before it was reached, jurors asked if they could award punitive damages “such as mental treatment or otherwise.” They also asked, “Does the defendant’s mental or medical condition factor in our decision-making process?”
The case file does not include a record of how Carter answered the questions.
Lawyer Melissa Petrofsky-White, a dean at Irvine College of Law, said she’s interested to know how the court answered the jury’s question about whether to consider Alspaugh’s mental or medical condition because “it got to the heart of the meaning of intent in those civil actions” for fraud and intentional interference.
“If she truly believes she’s an employee or owner of LA Fitness that negates an essential element of those causes of action involving the intent to defraud,” Petrofsky-White said in response to my article on LinkedIn. She called Alspaugh’s case “disturbing.”
Cross was appointed to defend Alspaugh after she was arrested last July on a contempt charge for violating an injunction Judge Carter issued after the trial. The injunction bars Alspaugh from coming within 50 feet of LA Fitness gyms and offices nationwide, prohibits her from contacting company employees and presenting herself as one, and restricts her from using business names similar to LA Fitness and its brands.
It also required her to submit statements and other information for bank accounts she opened in names related to LA Fitness, including proof that she’d closed them.
Cross said in a recent filing that Alspaugh “will likely never be able to pay even a small part” of the $602,400 judgment, nor can she comply with the injunction because of her mental illness.
“Her continuing detention, however, rests not on whether Ms. Alspaugh will agree to comply with the Permanent Injunction, but on what steps the Court can take to allow her to regain competence, or, alternatively, to protect her because she is incompetent,” Cross wrote in a March 1 ex-parte application for Alspaugh’s immediate release.
The filing said representatives of Wellpath, the Santa Ana Jail’s medical services provider, was refusing to evaluate Alspaugh, despite Carter’s order that they do so.
Carter declined to release Alspaugh during a 30-minute hearing on March 12. He told Cross and DeMetruis to try to talk to a Wellpath representative, then contact his clerk to schedule another hearing. Cross said he’d be seeking a writ from the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and Carter said he welcomed the court’s input.
Carter scheduled Wednesday’s hearing after my article published on Tuesday.
Reporter’s notebook
I wrote Tuesday’s article because what I saw in court last week haunted me. Alspaugh’s despair as the hearing ended and she realized she wasn’t getting released was horrific.
And when she turned and looked at me and repeated fantastical falsehoods about LA Fitness? That really got me. I have to be able to sleep at night, and I know I can use my skills and audience to try to do good in this world. I have the ability to help Alspaugh by telling her story. So that’s what I tried to do by diving into the case file and spending the weekend writing an article about Alspaugh’s situation. I planned to finish Sunday night and publish early Monday, but I pushed publication back a day to ensure I had time to fact check everything and write the article in a way that was not only accessible to readers, but fair to everyone involved.
The article drew a lot of attention, and I was glad to give Alspaugh a voice and alert so many to her situation, including mental health advocates. I also was glad to see Judge Carter spend so much time trying to help her.
I don’t plan to get into the details of Alspaugh’s care plan, but I plan to continue following the case, including for any possible 9th Circuit filings.
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Wow. $600,000 seems like an awfully large sum of money for a court to award to a Plaintiff who sues an incompetent person. But what happens afterward is comedy if it were not so tragic.
A federal court judge has the absolute discretion to hold anyone in contempt. It is laughable that he is now struggling to release a person that he jailed. He is looking for every outlet, including referral down to the state, as a justification.
One other thing is abundantly clear from this story. "Talk therapy" is worthless in dealing with those who are ill. This judge made that mistake twice, and he continues to lean on a bureaucracy filled with such therapists. If the government would stop hiring such people, we'd have a lot fewer problems, and money leftover to actually care for the mentally ill.
There is no mention in the story whether the Defendant has a family. Where are they?
She is very fortunate to have a lawyer who hasn't forgotten about her.