Apple did manage to get a next-day cryptic, non-public, non-recorded, evidence-free "telephonic discovery conference" scheduled for Feb. 20 2026 where I was denied a request to have time to even file an Opposition, and my objections demanding evidence, proper motions and briefing, a Court Reporter and basic Due Process were all implicitly denied.

So basically recreating that Sept. 9 2021 email from Apple's Workplace Violence team demanding I get on the phone with their interrogator and then firing me for "non-cooperation" when I said I wanted a record of the conversation because I thought they were going to hurt me, which of course they were and having a record of them doing that makes it more difficult for them to do with the flare they so enjoy.

I filed three responses today across two federal courts: an Opposition and a Motion to Quash in the US District Court, and a Motion for Sanctions in the Bankruptcy Court for Apple's violation of the automatic stay. They're linked and attached below. There are copies of all of the new NLRB charges attached to the Opposition filing if you'd like to review this incredible progress we're making on documenting Apple's absolutely ridiculous behavior. 

To that point, none of Apple's behavior is surprising. This is what old, crotchety Big Tech employers do when they're not used to employees organizing and pushing back. They clearly think they can get away with unfair labor practices and overt retaliation because they've always gotten away with it. Their entire playbook depends on employees being too scared or too broke to fight.

I also think Apple is flipping out right now because I managed to escape out of that dank submarine cesspool bunker in Boston I had been trapped in for a couple years. I was back in Santa Clara County for only two weeks catching up on many overdue filings and litigation deliverables. Apple's lawyers apparently had become complacent with me being mostly incapacitated, and so they apparently panicked to see me back in action. So they did... this?!

Listen, even if the court or NLRB won't intervene, even if every institution that's supposed to protect workers fails — this is how employees do it. You just keep pushing back. You hold the line. You expose the truth. You call them out. You might get slowed down by personal stuff here and there, but you bounce back. You tell them to eat rocks when they're union busting. You put it all on the record. You make them do their dirt in public. And you don't stop.

When they freak out like this, you file more charges. You document the freakout and you push harder. Someday they're going to have to budge and you swoop in and you get bargaining agreement signed immediately - do not release your pressure for one moment or they will squirm away like the little worms they are. 

Apple's letter complained to the court that I was orchestrating a "campaign" to expose their suppression of worker complaints. Yes. That's what labor organizing is. Welcome to it, Apple. 

​-Ashley 

2/20 - Motion to Quash 

2/20 - Opposition/Objections

2/20 - Motion for Sanctions

The December 16, 2025 Deposition

I was deposed in my federal retaliation lawsuit against Apple on December 16, 2025. The deposition was taken by Apple's counsel (a senior partner at a major firm). What happened during that deposition, as documented in the charge's cover letter and attached transcript excerpts, forms the factual core of the new charge. Apple's counsel questioned me about Apple's misconduct and discipline policy — the same type of policy that was the subject of the prior NLRB settlement. When asked whether I understood that violating confidentiality obligations could warrant immediate termination, I responded that I didn't understand the policy's terms, that they were overbroad, and that "NLRB said those terms were unlawful and that Apple could no longer enforce them and had to withdraw them from their policies."

Apple's counsel responded by immediately designating the entire remainder of the deposition as "Confidential" pursuant to the civil litigation's protective order. The exchange, as quoted in the charge, is striking. When I objected that the designation was premature, Apple's counsel didn't know what I would say next and couldn't pre-designate unknown testimony; then Apple's counsel asserted the procedural right to pre-designate under the protective order and told me to use the order's challenge procedures if I disagreed. When I protested that Apple was "misusing confidentiality terms" to "hide protected statements" immediately after I invoked the NLRA, Apple's counsel called a break, then designated pages 66 through 305 (of a 336-page transcript) as confidential. Approximately 72% of the deposition was designated as confidential.

Seven Weeks of Silence

The blanket designation remained in effect for seven weeks — 50 days!!! — until February 4, 2026. During that period, I was supposedly unable to discuss the substance of my own testimony, including my descriptions of protected concerted activity and my invocation of NLRA rights, with coworkers, the public, or the NLRB.

When Apple finally narrowed its designations, approximately 99% of the previously designated material was conceded to be non-confidential. This is legally significant because the protective order itself prohibited "mass, indiscriminate, or routinized designations" and required that designations be limited to "specific material that qualifies under appropriate standards." A blanket designation covering 72% of a deposition, maintained for 50 days, where 99% is ultimately conceded to be non-confidential, appears to violate the very order Apple invoked to justify the designation.

What Apple Claims to Own

When the narrowed designations finally arrived on February 4, 2026, they came on an unsigned, undated six-page PDF that Apple refused to email to me directly, refused to sign, and refused to date. Apple emailed it to the court reporter and said it was for my "awareness." The final designation list contained over 140 terms. Some were facially absurd — the letter "N," the word "hardware," and generic engineering development phrases. But the designations that matter most for NLRA purposes are the ones Apple applied to the substance of my protected concerted activity.

The charge quotes three deposition excerpts where I testified about my complaints to my supervisor regarding Apple's invasive workplace studies. In these excerpts, I described:

• An ovulation study where Apple asked female employees to measure their cervical mucus
• A bed-sensor study that monitored vitals during sleep and required any sexual partner or co-sleeper to register with Apple and sign an NDA
• An ear scanning study that I declined, describing the physical discomfort and my objection to Apple maintaining a library of employees' ear images

This testimony (an employee describing my complaints about workplace conditions to my supervisor and to coworkers) is textbook protected concerted activity under Section 7. I was testifying about raising concerns on behalf of myself and my coworkers about invasive employer practices directed at their bodies. Apple's active confidentiality designations, as documented in the charge, include: "ovulation study or they were asking females to measure our cervical mucus," "ovulation," "measuring female employees' cervical mucus," "my cervical mucus," and "mucus -- the cervical mucus secretion."

Each of these was individually designated across multiple separate deposition excerpts. This was not a single overbroad designation that inadvertently swept in bodily terminology. Someone at Apple's law firm reviewed the transcript, identified each instance where I described what Apple asked my body to do, and separately flagged it as Apple Confidential.

As I state in the charge: "Apple does not own my vagina, has no legitimate interest in who I have sex with, and its outrageous Apple would even imply it could make these claims."

The April 2025 settlement included several specific commitments that appear to be directly contradicted by Apple's deposition conduct:

• The revised IPA preserves the right to "discuss or disclose information about Your or others' wages, hours, or working conditions." Apple designated testimony about working conditions as confidential.
• The notice posting promises Apple will not "advise you that you are subject to discipline for violating overly broad rules regarding confidential or proprietary information." Apple's counsel asked under oath whether discussing working conditions was "a breach of your confidentiality obligations."
• Apple agreed not to enforce its definition of "Proprietary Information" to cover terms and conditions of employment. Apple's confidentiality designations enforce that definition through the protective order mechanism.

Violation of a Board settlement resolving 8(a)(1) charges is itself an independent 8(a)(1) violation. And the default provision means the remedy upon non-compliance is potentially automatic: deemed admissions, no trial, and ex parte Court of Appeals enforcement.

The "Whitelisting" of Section 7 Rights

Perhaps the most doctrinally significant allegation concerns Apple's counsel's repeated questioning about whether one of my coworkers was "whitelisted" to receive information about working conditions. The deposition excerpts in the charge show Apple's counsel asking whether I was "permitted" to share information with a coworker, whether the coworker was "whitelisted," and — when I stated I didn't understand the question — spelling out: "How about allowed? A-L-L-O-W-E-D?"

This line of questioning establishes a framework where the right to discuss working conditions is conditioned on employer authorization. Under Section 7, that right is unconditional. An employee does not need to be "permitted" or "allowed" or "whitelisted" to discuss wages, hours, or working conditions with a coworker. The right is statutory.

The charge argues that Apple's questioning creates a work rule permitting discussion of employer misconduct only among its victims (those who were also "whitelisted" for the same surveillance) and treating discussion with any other coworker as a confidentiality breach. This is a per se violation of Section 8(a)(1). The Board has consistently held that employer rules conditioning Section 7 activity on prior authorization are unlawful.

24/7 Surveillance from Personal Devices

The charge also alleges that Apple placed my cell phone and iCloud account on a "whitelist" (a different use of the same term) that caused continuous, 24/7 capture and automatic upload of photographs, video, audio recordings, biometric data, and GPS location whenever the camera detected a face — inside and outside the workplace, including in my home and including images in states of undress.

Under National Steel & Shipbuilding Co., 324 NLRB 499 (1997), and Aladdin Gaming, LLC, 345 NLRB 585 (2005), employer surveillance that would reasonably tend to coerce employees in the exercise of Section 7 rights violates Section 8(a)(1). The standard is objective: the question is whether the surveillance would chill a reasonable employee, not whether the employer intended to suppress union activity. The charge notes that the surveillance captured communications with coworkers about working conditions, communications with the NLRB, communications with journalists, and organizing discussions.

This would represent an unprecedented scope of employer surveillance in Board case law — continuous audio, video, biometric, and location capture from a personal device, 24/7, extending into the employee's home.

Garmon Preemption and the Forum Problem

Count 10 of the charge raises a preemption argument that, whatever its outcome, illustrates the institutional trap the case has created. Under San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, 359 U.S. 236 (1959), when activity is arguably subject to Section 7 or Section 8, federal courts must defer to the Board's exclusive competence. Under Lodge 76, IAM v. WERC, 427 U.S. 132 (1976), preemptive jurisdiction extends to conduct Congress intended to leave unregulated as well as conduct it intended to regulate.

The charge argues that Apple's insistence that my "only option" is to challenge the confidentiality designations through the federal court (via memoranda to Apple and escalation to the Magistrate Judge) constitutes a prohibition on filing NLRB charges and an assertion that the protective order stripped the Board of jurisdiction. If the Board agrees, the federal court lacks jurisdiction over these NLRA questions. If the Board disagrees or declines to act, it is effectively ceding jurisdiction over claims expressly about NLRA charges, protected concerted activity, and Board proceedings to a court that (as documented in the same charge) coerced the employee into stipulating to the very protective order at issue while the employer's counsel discussed the foreseeable possibility of driving the employee to suicide.

The Institutional Dynamics

The charge does not exist in a vacuum. As I noted, I previously filed a charge alleging Apple violated the April 2025 settlement through its litigation conduct in the same federal case. The Region and Compliance Office declined to investigate or take action, and refused to state findings in writing. This occurred, the charge notes, after Apple's own former defense counsel was appointed as the new NLRB General Counsel. The charge argues that the Region's prior refusal to act emboldened Apple, and that Apple's conduct has escalated since the first reported violation went unenforced. The charge presents this as a pattern: each time the Board declines to enforce its own settlement, Apple pushes further.

This creates an institutional dilemma that the charge's structure appears designed to exploit. If the Board declines to act on this charge, it will have reviewed a filing documenting Apple designating employees' cervical mucus as confidential business information, interrogating a former employee about whether discussing working conditions with coworkers was a policy violation, and maintaining a 50-day blanket gag order on protected activity that was 99% unjustified (all in violation of a settlement the Board itself brokered) and decided that none of this warranted investigation. 

​What makes this charge notable beyond its individual allegations is its structural design. The charge is simultaneously:

1. An NLRB filing that creates a federal agency record of Apple's conduct;
2. A vehicle for public disclosure of the specific terms and testimony Apple designated as confidential because its absurd and clearly illegal; 
3. A court docket filing via the notice of pendency, placing the material before the judge who controls the protective order; 
4. A settlement enforcement mechanism that may trigger automatic default remedies; 
5. A documented dare — paragraph 48 expressly states that if Apple seeks sanctions for the disclosures in the charge, another charge will be filed. 

Each function reinforces the others. The NLRB filing is protected activity under Section 8(a)(4), making any Apple retaliation for the filing itself a new violation. The public disclosure through the NLRB filing renders the confidentiality designations functionally moot for the disclosed terms. The court docket filing puts the judge on notice of the parallel Board proceeding and the Garmon preemption issue. And the settlement enforcement argument converts each documented violation into a potential trigger for the automatic default provision.

The Limits of Confidentiality as a Weapon

This case, if credited, represents something genuinely new in NLRB practice: an employer using a civil litigation protective order (one the employer selected, insisted upon, and applied) to reimpose the substance of confidentiality policies the employer agreed to rescind in a Board settlement. It is, in effect, an end-run around the settlement through a different procedural mechanism, using the deference courts give to confidentiality designations in discovery to achieve what the NLRA prohibits.

The specific content of Apple's designations makes this more than a procedural dispute. When an employer claims that an employee's testimony about my own cervical mucus is the employer's confidential business information — repeatedly, deliberately, across multiple transcript excerpts — it has moved past any recognizable assertion of trade secret protection into something that more closely resembles a claim of ownership over the employee's body and the employee's right to describe what was done to it.

The National Labor Relations Act was enacted to protect employees' right to discuss their working conditions. When those working conditions include employer-directed monitoring of female employees' reproductive biology, the right to discuss those conditions necessarily includes the right to use the words that describe them. Ovulation. Cervical mucus. Menstruation. These are not engineering specifications or product roadmaps. An employee's right to protest those practices to coworkers, to the NLRB, to the public — cannot be extinguished by placing those words on an unsigned PDF and calling them proprietary.

Whether the current Board will act on this charge is an open question. What is not an open question is that the charge and its supporting materials are now part of the public record — on the NLRB's docket, on the federal court's docket, and in the hands of anyone who cares to read them. The file will outlast every person currently sitting in a position to act on it or ignore it. And the default provision, loaded and waiting, does not expire with any particular General Counsel's term.

Apple's lawyers may have had the procedural right to designate deposition testimony as confidential. What they did not have was the right to designate protected concerted activity as confidential, the right to condition Section 7 activity on employer authorization, or the right to claim ownership over an employee's bodily secretions. The transcript documents them doing all three, on the record, while the court reporter typed.

The charge was filed with NLRB Region 32, on February 16, 2026. The cover letter and attached exhibits are linked below.​

By 1854, the South Bay covered 306 acres. By 1898, it covered only about sixty acres. Today it is a neighborhood. The fill is still there. The garbage is still there. The wood piles are rotting. And the ocean is still trying to come in twice a day through 1,360 miles of Victorian brick sewers that were documented as "ill-adapted" and "usually leaky" in 1885, so is certainly in even worse condition now. They also documented that the groundwater in the fill across the old South Bay is "tidally influenced" meaning the tides are ebbing and flowing through the garbage, ash, sewage, and hazardous waste every day, pushing it inland and moving it all around.

The sewer system serving the South End, Lower Roxbury, and surrounding neighborhoods was mostly built between 1877 and 1894 as combined sewers (meaning sewage and stormwater flow in the same pipes at a per-building level). Buildings constructed before 1877 predate the entire system. (My basement apartment was built in 1864 with sewers built in the 1850s). Where their sewage went originally is unknown. It may have gone into cesspits under the buildings, into old "common sewers" that discharged directly into waterways, or straight into the canal and ocean.

The Roxbury Canal was designated an open cesspool and a menace to public health for over a century. In the 1960s, the City enclosed it in concrete box culverts (twin barrels roughly 10 by 15 feet) and paved over the top. They did not clean it. They did not remove the accumulated sewage. They sealed it in and built on top of it. The conduit has no tide gates. It is hydraulically connected to Boston Harbor. Water levels inside fluctuate 10 to 13 feet with the tides.

The first inspection of the conduit in over sixty years, conducted in 2019, found several feet of sediment that had accumulated over more than fifty years, iron-oxidizing bacteria visible as orange biofilms, and marine worms swimming in murky water. When I visited in Dec. 2025, it is still full of feces... and wheelchairs. I took photos and sent them to the EPA.

Every high tide raises water levels in this system, backing contaminated water up through the connected sewers and into the houses. A 1967 engineering report documented that "because of the extremely poor conditions of the tide gates, regulators, and outlets, lower reaches of the principal sewerage system throughout the city are surcharged by tidewater on flood tides." In the area where I lived, "on outgoing tides, raw sewage is discharged through the tide gates into the harbor each day, regardless of weather conditions." There is no physical barrier between the ocean and the inside of the Victorian row houses. The only things that might slow it are P-traps that can dry out, building sewer valves that are usually missing or broken, and building envelopes that don't exist in 1860s construction.

This has been a known problem since at least 1876, when the Boston Evening Transcript calculated that 8,000 cubic feet per minute of sewer gas was being distributed among approximately 800 houses every day by the tides. In 2026, the City's response to this continues to be a mixture of denial, hostility, and "new phone, who dis?"

I asked the Boston Public Works & Boston Water and Sewer Commission where my sewage went when I flushed my toilet (from ancient buildings, even older sewers, and in one of the most notoriously polluted and neglected areas in Boston). Based on the sparse records I could find, it appears that for over two years, my sewage went directly into the ocean where my neighbors were swimming and fishing, if its not just now part of the sludge lining that canal. Everyone refused to answer this question & their refusal was informative.

The Boston City Hospital was opened in 1864 on what the City's own history describes as "agricultural fair grounds" that flooded at high tide, where "a large portion of the site was water flats, largely of dock mud." The old Roxbury Canal, carrying Roxbury's raw sewage to tidewater, ran through one corner of the hospital grounds. The basements were built 3.5 feet below ground level without any building envelope to exclude moisture, producing "a great deal of dampness." The hospital's sewers created "seepage of ooze and flow of tides in some parts of the building."

The City's own Medical Staff documented that "all patients with surgical open wounds who were assigned to beds near the air inlets invariably had erysipelas, pyaemia, or some other septic complication, many of whom died." The ventilation system was designed in such a way that "air vitiated with sewer gas" was "pushed into the wards." The City's own institutional history acknowledged that the Roxbury Canal was "a villainous site for a hospital ward."

The City opened its first Infectious Disease department around 1865, creating a separate facility on the banks of the South Bay and the Roxbury Canal. The hospital's basement laboratory, where "extensive bacteriological experiments were made of the air," found "innumerable colonies of moulds." That laboratory was approximately 830 feet from the Roxbury Canal and less than 500 feet from where I later lived in another unfinished Victorian basement, with no building envelope or drainage, actively water intrusion and holes in the walls directly to the exterior, and connected by dozens of utility lines, pipes, and conduits.

Between 1935 and the 1970s, approximately half of all patients who died from bacterial infections at the hospital acquired those infections at the hospital. On average 20 days after admission, people dying approximately 15 days after the first positive blood culture. The hospital had a documented, decades-long epidemic of hospital-acquired infections and never disclosed the ongoing sewage hazards or the proximity to the cesspool as a potential contributing factor.

There are 160 years of discharges of infected bodily fluids at that location, seeping into my living room and bedroom. The adjacent South Burial Ground contains hundreds if not thousands of bodies of people who died from typhoid, smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever. All of it draining through the same combined sewers, into the same conduit, into the same harbor, and backing up into the same houses twice a day with the tides, including mine.

New England Nuclear Corporation (NEN), later acquired by DuPont, was one of the largest commercial producers of radiolabeled compounds in the United States. It occupied at least seven buildings across three streets in the South End (on Albany Street, East Canton Street, and East Dedham Street) manufacturing tritium, carbon-14, sulfur-35, phosphorus-32, iodine-125, and other radiolabeled compounds at production scale. Its NRC license covered "any byproduct material with atomic numbers 3 through 94" which was a blanket authorization covering essentially every radioisotope from lithium through plutonium.

NEN discharged radioactive waste from holding tanks into the Boston combined sewer system as a routine disposal practice. Those are the same combined sewers that overflow untreated into Fort Point Channel during wet weather. NRC inspection records documented 25 million liters per year of water use at the Boston site, all discharging to Deer Island via the combined sewer. Radionuclides captured in treatment sludge also went to the harbor. Radionuclides that leaked through century-old sewer pipes went into the shallow groundwater at approximately 5 feet below grade.

Meanwhile, the City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center operated one of the largest continuously operating medical radioisotope facilities in the northeastern United States, on the same site, above the same shallow groundwater, discharging to the same combined sewers. NRC enforcement records document decades of violations: lost materials, stolen materials, mis-administered radioiodine (accidently injecting patients with radioactive substances and then saying "whoops"), the hot lab door left open with 200 millicuries of technetium-99m unsecured, radioactive material tossed into the trash and buried in landfills, and sewer lines that had to be removed due to radioactive buildup. Boston University, Harvard University, and the City Hospital also burned hundreds of radioactive dogs and emitted the waste into the air across the South End neighborhood and onto the Roxbury Canal cesspool, with no abatement controls or monitoring.

The same sewers that carried bacterial counts of 790,000 to 2,600,000 per cubic centimeter in 1905 later carried NEN's radiochemical waste stream (tritium, carbon-14, iodine-125, and cesium-137) through fill that also contains off the charts levels of TCE, lead at 38,000 mg/kg, coal tar PAHs, and reactive sulfide. All of it discharging through the same outfall into the same harbor. All of it backing up into the same houses.

My CERCLA petition documents a systematic pattern of concealment by the City and the Commonwealth. The Roxbury Canal was removed from the City's own records. Geographic features were renamed (for example, a portion of the Roxbury canal was given the same name as a river in another city, "Bass River") so that searches for these sites would return incomplete and misleading results. The Commonwealth's wetland maps omit the Site. The Commonwealth claims there are no natural resources at the Site. Boston's landfills, dumps, and waste management facilities at the Site are unreported. The Commonwealth invented a "historic fill" legal exemption and applied it dozens of times at the Site to immunize itself from the federal environmental laws these actions violate.
​
The City operated a municipal incinerator for over 25 years without air emission controls, creating "black rain" that fell across the South End. It refused to stop even after the EPA and the courts ordered it shut down. The incinerator ash (containing pollution like heavy metals, dioxins, and furans) was used as "fill" material for the development of buildings, including residential. This is the same ground where people now live. And Boston is currently building dense residential housing on top of all of it, again, with no mitigation and no disclosures.

I moved to Boston in late 2023. I lived in a basement apartment at Worcester Square. It was an unfinished 1864 Victorian cellar one block from the former City Hospital, directly over filled tidelands connected to the Roxbury Canal through the combined sewer system and so close that it would have been part of the high tide "cesspool." Boston's zoning code forbids basement apartments in South End and South Boston. The City granted a variance anyway in 1991. When I asked Boston for records about why basements are forbidden they claimed to have no records or documentation and to not remember why.

The apartment had no modern building envelope, legally insufficient ventilation, active water intrusion, and recurring sewage backups. The air was thick with sewer gas and hydrogen sulfide. I reported these conditions starting in July 2025. The City documented many violations (holes in the walls, crumbling walls and brick, insecure counters, cross-metering, broken floor tiles, etc.) but refused to document anything related to sewage, plumbing, ventilation, mold, or drainage. The Mayor's Office even sent a task force who confirmed the apartment was unsafe, confirmed violations while concurrently stating the City would not cite them, and then asked me why I didn't just leave — as if it were my burden to fix and/or absurd for me to tolerate conditions they refuse to condemn. 

I was sleeping 14 to 18 hours a day. I had sinus pain and rashes. My hair was falling out. My teeth were deteriorating, a chunk of my molar fell out. My body smelled like "death." 

I purchased a microscope. I was covered in bacterial growths. I identified organisms that should not exist in a residential building: Mariprofundus ferrooxydans, an iron-oxidizing bacterium first described from deep-sea hydrothermal vents; Beggiatoa, a sulfur-oxidizing bacterium whose presence proves hydrogen sulfide is reaching living space; Thioploca, which requires both nitrate and sulfide; Thiolava veneris, a pioneer colonizer of volcanic substrates first described in 2017; and cable bacteria capable of centimeter-scale electron transport that produced electrical shocks strong enough to stun me and leave my dog unable to walk for two days.

I also discovered a wall void with dissolution patterns consistent with biogenic sulfuric acid corrosion — the mechanism that destroys concrete sewers — with Beggiatoa colonizing the edges. The void functions as a chimney from the subsurface to occupied living space.  My hair samples came back substantially Gammaproteobacteria. My blood was consistent with colorful filaments and iron-oxidizing bacteria in my bloodstream — organisms that eat iron for energy, in my blood, which is iron-rich and oxygenated, which is functionally identical to their natural habitat at a hydrothermal vent. The extreme fatigue quickly improved with beef liver iron supplementation and Trametes versicolor powder for Beta-glucan polysaccharides. They organisms thrived on these substances when cultured, confirming I was replacing what they had been depleting. While scientifically validating, this is also emotionally horrifying. 

I brought samples to medical providers at Boston Medical Center, located one block from my apartment. This was the successor institution to the City Hospital, the same hospital that had been discharging infected bodily fluids and radioactive waste into the shared sewer system one block from my apartment for 160 years, the same hospital that had a decades-long epidemic of hospital-acquired infections it never explained. Clinicians examined my microscope photos of several of the organisms and their own sample under microscopy, admitted they were novel and not in existing reference materials, and refused to provide medical care, botched labs, harassed me, and intentionally mis-coded the medical visits, or didn't send it to insurance at all, leaving me with a $1k+ debit and helping drive me into Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where I am now. The hospital that helped create the conditions refused to treat the consequences, and took every action available to avoid documenting its own misconduct, obstructing witness reports, and hiding evidence of their wrongdoing. 

When the City finally cited a ventilation violation at the unregistered rental property (that there was illegally insufficient ventilation and light in the basement apartment), my landlord's partner (a person I had filed a police report against for breaking and entering and threatened assault) was permitted to appear at the City's hearing and argue that the zoning variance exempted the property owner from providing tenants with oxygen, even if I might die. When I objected and asked for his removal, City officials told me to shut my mouth, let him talk, and only speak when called upon. The City upheld the violations, cancelled the reinspection, took no enforcement action, and refused to provide me copies of the defendants petitions and communications. 

I found this baffling and it was what caused me to drop everything and start looking into the environmental conditions in this area. There had to be a reason everyone was going to such lengths to cover something up and I wanted to find out what that something was. It took two months and most of it is documented in the Petition/Notice but there was even more. In addition, I found other issues.

Like, the geology - this is the part that took me the longest to be certain about, and the reason the petition took much longer than it should have. The geological evidence in the petition presents a case that the Boston Basin is a bolide impact site — specifically, a ground-zero impact site for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, dating to approximately 12,900 years ago. If confirmed, this would be the first identification of such a site and would make the Boston Basin an irreplaceable resource for scientific research.

The evidence includes: basin-wide kaolinization of bedrock to depths exceeding 200 feet along fault-controlled pathways, requiring temperatures of 175–350°C with no volcanic or tectonic heat source in over 400 million years; a thermal decay curve from over 700°C down to below 200°C; a mineral suite that matches the predicted alteration products of an ordinary chondrite meteorite mixed with sedimentary target rock, including at least three titanium-bearing phases representing one original mineral in multiple stages of post-impact alteration; Rock Quality Designation of 0% at virtually every boring in the basin center; platinum group elements at five times background that are not decreasing after cessation of anthropogenic sources; and a damage pattern that is inverted (shallowest rock most destroyed, deepest rock least damaged) the opposite of every natural metamorphic process and exactly correct for an impact from above. 

I only found this because I had to define the geology and hydrology for my CERCLA and Clean Water Act complaint, Boston's geology and hydrology is described as notoriously "complex" and "unknowable," and most of its key features use mythological terms invented by a very questionable Harvard University professor in the mid and late 19th century insisting that anything unknown must be explained by glaciers. These Elvish-like concepts (drumlins, tillite, moraine, till, erratic boulders, etc.) have always been generalized theories often seen as contentious and debated. As time passed, especially over the last few decades, advances in science were able to put forward evidence-based explanations for many glacial-related formations and the explanations were often included causation not related to glaciers at all.

However, Boston held on to the glacial explanations with a white-knuckled grasp, and left me in an impossible situation because as a prior Engineering Program Manager and a lawyer, I refused to recite unsubstantiated glacial Elvish and ignore a significant amount of evidence (from articles, borings, assessment, etc.) that is facially impossible to explain with glaciers (for example, glaciers cannot cause heat-shock alternations because they're cold, not hot). Comparing Boston's evidence to modern impact analysis, a bolide impact explains everything that is supposedly unexplainable. Further, the Younger Dryas research advancement over the last five years and the already admitted overlapping timing of Boston's features with that timeline, confirm this isn't any bolide swarm impact zone, it appears to be the first identified "ground zero" for a Younger Dryas impact to the Laurentia ice sheet over New England and would thus validate the hypothesis. 

If true, it would also significantly change any environmental analysis, remediation planning, and risk assessment for the pollution noted above. It also would have introduced its own pollution and hazards. The impact-generated sulfide mineralogy appears to be actively producing acid mine drainage, dissolving metals from the hydrothermal ore assemblage, and discharging them into Boston Harbor via groundwater through a fracture network. If so, every conceptual site model in the basin is built on incorrect geological assumptions: the marine clay is not a reliable confining layer, the till is not glacial sediment, and the bedrock is not an impermeable base. The bedrock is itself an active contamination source that no remediation plan has ever accounted for, and the communities most affected — Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston, South Boston — are disproportionately low-income communities of color built on the most severely impact-damaged substrate, receiving the highest flux of naturally leached metals from below. Accordingly I argued the bolide impact was also a CERCLA release and under the CERCLA petition statute, EPA will be required to assess this as an impact site (likely in partnership with USGS and NASA). 

You can sign a Change.org petition calling for an full re-assessment of the Boston Basin's geology here: Petition: A Formal Reassessment of the Geology of the Boston Basin

The petition names the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard University, Boston University and Boston Medical Center, E.I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co., Procter & Gamble-Gillette, and organized crime entities operating through condominium associations at the Site (long story; go read the complaint if you have questions). The full list and the basis for each party's liability is in the petition but its just a starting point and the government has a year to investigate themselves before I'd have to take action. 

The petition requests that the EPA conduct a mandatory preliminary assessment for NPL listing, with cross-agency coordination with the Army Corps of Engineers and ATSDR. If the South Bay is not on the NPL and actively being restored to a functional marine ecosystem within one year, I intend to file a citizen suit in federal court and have a judge order them to clean up their mess.

The full CERCLA petition is available below and at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18634019.
​
You can sign a Change.org petition supporting the CERCLA complaint here: The South Bay Needs a Superfund Investigation

I didn't want to have to write any of this. I only moved to Boston for a job - the only job offer I could get after Apple fired me. I ended up in a basement full of hydrothermal vent bacteria, teaching myself BLAST, publishing fifteen papers on evolutionary biology, and piecing together the geological history of a 12,900-year-old impact event from boring logs that nobody had ever assembled — all while litigating against Apple, navigating bankruptcy, and trying to get someone, anyone, in the City of Boston to care that I couldn't breathe in my own apartment.

What I found is that, generally, the City of Boston has been a stupid little brat about its environmental obligations for approximately two-hundred years. It filled a bay with garbage, burned radioactive dogs over the neighborhood, ran an open cesspool for a century, burned the city's trash while releasing the garbage fumes unabated and covering the neighborhood and bay with "black rain," sealed the evidence under even more garbage, removed it all from the records, renamed it so you can't find it, got the Commonwealth to invent a ("historic fill") legal exemption so you can't make them clean it, and is currently building luxury housing on top of it. When someone got hurt (when I got hurt) the City's hospital now run by Boston University refused to treat me and helped bankrupt me, and the City's code enforcement told me to shut my mouth about it. 

There have never been any NPL sites in the City of Boston.

That changed today.

Now, back to Apple. 

-Ashley 

Download a PDF of the complaint here: 

View a txt-only version here. 

View the case schedule here or linked below. 

​View the case docket here.

The Jury Trial is scheduled for five-days and will be in person in San Francisco. 

It's happening!
​
-Ashley ​

View the creek aerial photo album on Flickr here.

2016 CALIFORNIA DTSC CONSENT AGREEMENT 

In 2016, Apple entered a hazardous waste Consent Agreement with the California EPA over hazardous waste violations at two different Apple facilities in Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The agreement was for at least five years and covered all Apple hazardous waste activities in California. The agreement similarly found that Apple was violating hazardous waste laws under both federal and state laws including many of the same issues at 3250 Scott Blvd including operating without required permits, failing to properly label and mark hazardous waste, and unlawfully transporting hazardous waste without required manifests or records (including unlawfully exporting hazardous waste to other countries). DTSC fined Apple $450,000. 

View the 2016 Complaint, Settlement Agreement, and Announcement. In 2016, Apple's environmental team told Reuters that "This matter involves an oversight in filing paperwork... We've worked... to ensure that going forward we have the proper permits for our current site. As we do with all our facilities, we followed our stringent set of health and safety standards, which go well beyond legal requirements." (See, California EPA says settled with Apple on hazardous waste claims). The Consent Agreement could only be terminated if Apple demonstrated compliance with hazardous waste laws at all of its facilities. At the time Apple was able to obtain a termination of the agreement in 2020, Apple was admittedly in violation of federal hazardous waste laws at 3250 Scott Blvd. If the 2017-2025 RCRA violations had been identified and reported, those violations likely would have prevented the termination of the 2016-2020 California EPA Consent Agreement. 

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or requests for information.

​-Ashley ​

In Santa Clara County in the 1970s and 1980s, the County (including City of Santa Clara) became ground zero for semiconductor manufacturing disasters. Reckless industrial practices led to toxic waste dumps, groundwater contamination, chemical spills, deaths, evacuations, and toxic clouds. The result: Santa Clara County ended up with the most Superfund cleanup sites in the nation.

Congress looked at what happened in Santa Clara County and enacted the federal environmental laws at issue in this case. RCRA, CERCLA, CAA, CWA, and EPCRA exist largely because of what happened here. Local regulations created in response to Santa Clara County disasters—like the Toxic Gas Ordinance and silane-specific safety regulations—were later adopted nationally in the International Fire Code.

The semiconductor fabrication facility at 3250 Scott Boulevard uses some of the most dangerous chemicals in industrial manufacturing including arsine, phosphine, mercury, silane, and extensive industrial solvents while sitting extraordinarily close to residential housing. The facility is also adjacent to two city-owned parks: Meadow Park and Creekside Park. Both parks are advertised on the city's website and feature playgrounds, BBQ facilities, and fitness equipment. The city invites the public to use these parks.

The city knows these specific chemicals have caused deaths and mass casualties. The city knows the community has fought for decades against locating these facilities near homes. The city cannot claim ignorance or good faith.

In 2023 and 2024, the EPA conducted inspections and found RCRA violations at the facility. According to EPA records, the facility reported releasing 16,083 pounds of air pollutants annually and its currently facing multiple air pollution violations from the Bay Area Air Quality Mgmt District. Beginning in at least 2020, multiple residents filed complaints with the city about chemical exposure. The city did nothing.

The City of Santa Clara voluntarily became a Certified Unified Program Agency (CUPA). This means the city demanded exclusive control over enforcement of federal hazardous waste laws at the local level. Only three cities in Santa Clara County chose to take on this responsibility. The city positioned itself as the local enforcer of RCRA, CAA, CWA, and EPCRA.

According to the city's own 2025 Operating Budget, Santa Clara employs just 3.95 full-time equivalent employees for CUPA administration and enforcement for the entire city. The budget reveals the city's enforcement priorities:

• CUPA enforcement penalties issued: $9,087 (FY23-24)
• Other environmental penalties: $6,590 (FY23-24)
• Bingo enforcement fines: $25,984 (FY23-24)

The city's total annual fines for violations of federal environmental laws amount to roughly 35% of what the city collects from Bingo gaming violations.

Between 2015 and 2017, the city approved the development of over 2,000 residential units at the Santa Clara Square Apartments location. During this approval process, the city kept the semiconductor facility's operations out of the Environmental Impact Report. The city never disclosed to future residents what was next door. This violated the city's own General Plan, which requires restricting "the use and storage of hazardous materials for industrial uses within 500 feet of existing residential uses."

When residents began experiencing chemical exposure, the city concealed information. In 2020 and 2021, I and other residents filed complaints with the city. I spoke directly with the Mayor Lisa Gillmor and Gary Welling, the Water and Sewer Director, about the chemical exposure. Other victims of chemical exposure also contacted both of them. The city did nothing, disclosed nothing, and stopped nothing.

Instead, the city concealed ongoing violations rather than reporting them to CalOES or EPA as required. The city refused Public Records Act requests. The city may have even tipped off the facility about an unannounced EPA inspection—which would constitute a federal crime. In response to my Public Records Act request, the city stated it has no documentation of ever enforcing the Toxic Gas Ordinance—an ordinance created specifically to prevent catastrophic disasters at facilities exactly like 3250 Scott Boulevard.

We're also holding a rally & press conference at the public sidewalks next to the facility on August 16 2025 at 12pm - 2pm PT. If you're in the SF Bay Area come show the government & Apple that people don't want Apple dumping toxic waste on playgrounds! ​

These additions include no names, no dates, no documents, no policy citations, and no context — only broad, conclusory language with no factual grounding.

​Even in its revised “failure to mitigate damages” defense, Apple simply states that it is “currently unaware” of whether I sought other employment and is preserving the defense pending discovery. This defies the Court’s instruction to include some factual basis to justify asserting the defense.
​
You can view the Microsoft Word "diff" of the first and second version here (and excerpt below).

Apple’s filing fails to comply with the Court’s order. Courts require more than legal conclusions — especially after being told exactly what’s missing. Apple appears to have simply copied the Court’s language back into the pleading without supplying the required facts.

The Court’s Prior Instructions:

• “Apple should still provide some concrete allegations… to support the defense.”
• “The Court strikes the defenses only because Apple has not provided concrete facts.”
• “This information is, at least in part, within its possession, custody, or control.”
• “Concrete allegations are needed.”

Yet, Apple’s response simply recites: “Plaintiff disclosed confidential product-related information… failed to cooperate… violated Apple policies…”

That is not compliance — it is deflection. Further, Apple also:

• Continues to allege misconduct without citing any underlying facts;
• Vaguely accuses me of providing “inaccurate and/or incomplete information to government entities and the public” — a veiled claim of perjury, with no support;
• Asserts that I “requested” paid leave — again, with no citation — despite my contemporaneous public statements of the factual basis for the scenario, and federal findings indicating the leave was an unlawful suspension.

If the Court strikes these defenses again:

• Apple loses its "failure to mitigate" defense — meaning they can’t argue I should’ve just “got another job.”
• It loses the “offset” argument — no deduction for imaginary earnings.
• It loses the “unclean hands” and “after-acquired evidence” defenses — no smears, no post hoc justifications.
• And it loses its final procedural weapon — the threat of dragging this out endlessly with vague innuendo.

This narrows the case. It tightens discovery. It makes the damages math simpler. And it removes one of the few remaining litigation levers. And the risk for Apple, if it refuses to resolve this, only compounds.

This amended Answer does not reflect a good-faith attempt to cure pleading deficiencies. It reflects a deliberate retreat from factual litigation altogether.

Apple was given 14 days to revise its defenses after the Court struck them for being conclusory and unsupported. The Court explicitly instructed Apple to plead concrete facts — names, dates, events, documents. Instead, Apple submitted a filing that merely repeats legal conclusions, substitutes the Court’s own illustrative language as if it were factual pleading, and copy-pastes boilerplate text across multiple defenses — likely assembled in under 30 minutes.

This is not a legal defense strategy. It is a procedural maneuver — unusually cautious, and concurrently reckless.
​
Apple has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for aggressive litigation. It filed nine motions to dismiss, repeatedly sought sanctions, and briefed complex jurisdictional and preemption issues. Since 2023, Apple’s litigation teams have fought my detailed allegations of environmental violations, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and antitrust violations. It is represented by multiple top-tier law firms with national reputations, and its internal legal department rivals most federal agencies. To suggest this filing reflects negligence or inexperience defies credibility.

There is only one plausible explanation for this level of risk aversion: Apple did not want to tie itself to any factual narrative. More specifically, it appears Apple may have been preparing to plead “facts” derived through extrajudicial influence — and was ultimately forced to abandon that plan.

In the days leading up to this filing, I raised concerns — through protected speech and formal agency communications — that Apple appeared to be interfering in parallel government proceedings, seemingly to engineer official findings to then cite in its civil Answer. I notified both government officials and the public (albeit cryptically) that if Apple exploited premature or coordinated agency action to shape its defense, it would face immediate and appropriate legal response from me.

It is now especially notable that Apple’s Answer:

• Makes no reference to new findings;
• Omits mention of any material public facts central to its asserted defenses;
• Affirms no facts it is already on record as knowing; and
• Introduces vague, recycled allegations — while leveling a new, unsubstantiated claim that I “misled government entities and the public.”

This last allegation is not just unsupported — it is reactive. It appears crafted to preemptively deflect from the very type of interference I warned about. This is not coincidence. It is confirmation.

To underscore the point: Apple appeared to have coordinated with a major news outlet to publish a story reinforcing its planned defense narrative — timed to support a position in another proceeding. I became aware of this effort in real time. I contacted the outlet and, in precise legal terms, explained what Apple was doing: attempting to manipulate press coverage to manufacture evidentiary material. The article was pulled. It was never published.

This isn’t the strategy of a company trying to win on the merits. It’s the strategy of a company trying to control the record — and failing.

Containment is not a legal strategy. It’s reputational triage.

And in litigation — where discovery, testimony, and trial timelines exist to surface the truth — triage almost always fails. Apple’s refusal to plead facts is now part of the evidentiary record. Its use of boilerplate in place of fact is part of the litigation history.

If this Answer represents the collapse of a pre-fabricated narrative — forced to detour after exposure or internal panic — then what you’re seeing is not defense strategy: it’s collapse.

​-Ashley​

Diff of Apple's First Answer and Amended Answer:

The full Gjovik v Apple case Docket is here: 
​www.courtlistener.com/docket/67772913/gjovik-v-apple-inc/

These types of motions are rarely granted — especially when filed by plaintiffs, and especially when you’re doing it without a lawyer against one of the most powerful companies on Earth.
​
By granting this motion:

• The judge forced Apple to remove legally unsupported attacks from their Answer.
• Apple now has to re-write their legal defenses, and can’t rely on vague excuses or future fishing expeditions.
• ​The court even reminded Apple that if they want to seek sanctions, they need to do it formally — not through threats in footnotes.

​
This ruling isn’t flashy. But it cuts the noise, forces Apple to engage honestly, and strengthens the foundation for what’s coming next.

What makes this win especially unusual:

• Courts rarely grant 12(f) motions, especially to strike defenses, especially from a plaintiff; 
• Judges almost never grant them in cases already this complex, with dozens of underlying claims;
• And courts almost never grant them when the plaintiff is pro se — and has been under repeated threat of sanctions from the Defendent.

The order struck over half of Apple’s affirmative defenses as “conclusory,” “unsupported,” or “improper under Rule 8(c).” The court didn’t issue sanctions against me (despite Apple’s demands) and acknowledged the need for clearer positions from Apple moving forward.

These motions often lose. Mine didn’t. That alone should tell you something.

Apple tried to argue:

• That I somehow “deserved” what happened to me,
• That my claims were procedurally defective even after five rounds of amendment,
• That they might someday find new facts to justify what they did,
• And that my case should just be shut down entirely.

The judge threw those defenses out.

This ruling matters because these defenses aren’t just legal moves — they’re weapons companies use to intimidate and discredit workers who speak up.

By forcing Apple to drop these arguments, the court helped make sure the focus returns to the real issues: Retaliation. Harassment. Toxic exposure. Misuse of legal systems to cover up misconduct.

That’s not just a win in court. It’s a step toward fairness — for me, and for anyone who’s ever been told their story didn’t matter because the company said so.

​Apple now has 14 days to refile their Answer. We’ll see what they do with it. Meanwhile:

• I’m hopeful for a favorable ruling from the Ninth Circuit in my appeal — challenging dismissals of my RICO, toxic tort, civil rights, and IIED claims.
• I’m still pushing for fairness, accountability, and clarity — inside and outside the courtroom.

This was just one step. But it was a step in the right direction.

To the workers, whistleblowers, legal nerds, journalists, and fellow survivors following this case: Thank you. I fight harder because I know you’re watching, learning, and sometimes fighting, too.

Hang in there. Keep watching. The truth is coming out.

-Ashley 

Dockets:

• US District Court
• US Court of Appeals

May 19 2025 Decision & Order:

Read Apple's Motion here. 

Read my response here & below: