A state appeals panel has determined an attorney, who is also a member of a suburban school board, can’t escape paying sanctions to cover the legal costs for parents she sued over false accusations of race-based attacks and physical threats.
In March 2021, Renea Amen, who serves on the Woodland District 50 board in Gurnee and Gages Lake, filed three lawsuits in Lake County Circuit Court against parents with whom she clashed over the K-8 district’s education policies amid Covid-19 mitigations. Her allegations involved Facebook comments, both in groups like “Woodland D50 for In-Person Schooling” and on individual pages. Amen also said the women she sued obtained her home phone number and address despite that information being otherwise undisclosed.
Amen represented herself at an emergency hearing, at which Lake County Judge Reginald Mathews denied her request for emergency relief. The next month, LaTonya Burton represented Amen at a plenary hearing. Amen was re-elected in April, and in June 2021, sought to voluntarily withdraw her petitions seeking stalking and no-contact orders against the women: Deb Attiah, Heather Rand and Shari Green.
Renea Amen
| Bur-Men Law Group
The women then filed motions for sanctions and legal fees. Attiah’s lawyer, Laura Horner, said the statements in Amen’s filings were “speculative, unsubstantiated, untrue and/or so vague a claim cannot be substantiated. The claims in the petition are generalizations of conversations either in person or on a public Facebook group. Had the allegations been true of written posts, the best evidence would have been the post itself. No copies or screenshots of the Facebook messages were attached to the petition or offered into evidence.”
Horner noted Amen’s allegations included a post made on her own, private page, but she did not include evidence of such a post. Attorney Jason Mercure represented Rand and Green, who also alleged the filings were frivolous.
In July 2021, Judge Matthews recused himself because of concerns about a text and phone conversation with Amen in May. Judge James Simonian took over the cases and in November 2021 granted the motion for sanctions.
“These respondents were not doing anything threatening or harassing,” Simonian wrote. “They were doing the most encouraged of American activities: getting involved in their communities. They were talking with neighbors about the best things for their school system. Some communication was serious, others farcical. Not one bit of it was threatening or harassing. Petitioner's reference to them as racists with zero evidence was obviously more out of bounds as harassing than anything respondents did, though petitioner's conduct in that part of this analysis is not the issue.”
After Simonian denied a motion to reconsider, Amen challenged the sanctions before the Illinois Second District Appellate Court.
Justice Susan Hutchinson wrote the panel’s decision, issued Feb. 24; Justices Robert McLaren and Ann Jorgensen concurred. The order was issued under Supreme Court Rule 23, which may limit its use as precedent.
On appeal, Amen said Simonian should not have conducted a single hearing without formally consolidating her three petitions. But the panel said Amen and Burton failed to object to the consolidation when given the chance. Amen also said Simonian should have excluded each of the women from the hearing when they weren’t acting as a witness.
“This contention is particularly baffling to this court,” Hutchinson wrote, noting Simonian did agree to bar from the courtroom anyone who would later be a witness and Amen registered no objection. As a result, she forfeited the issue on appeal.
The panel also said Amen couldn’t challenge Simonian’s denial of her motion for a directed finding on the defendants’ pleadings because she proceeded to present her own evidence and rejected her arguments about admission of evidence because she failed to show an abuse of discretion.
Amen also argued the women should not have been allowed to testify as expert witnesses regarding Facebook’s technical aspects, but the panel said they had not been, explaining “there was no testimony to anything outside of the knowledge possessed by any normal user of the platform.”
The panel further rejected Amen’s arguments about which types of questions Judge Simonian allowed at the hearing and said the record shows no rulings adversely impacted any party, “let alone constituted a manifest abuse of discretion.”
Ultimately, the panel endorsed Simonian’s finding that Amen “used her status as a public official to intimidate ordinary citizens” and filed her petitions one day after one of the women asked the school board to take action on Amen’s Facebook conduct.
“Someone who dares to fight City Hall should be able to do so without fear of meritless litigation,” Simonian wrote. “It’s not lost on the court that (Amen) labels herself as a criminal defense attorney and civil rights attorney while seeking this claim against ordinary citizens, though her status as an attorney is not essential to the court’s finding.”
According to an online biography, Amen is a partner and managing attorney at the law firm she founded, Bur-Men Law Group in Waukegan. According to the bio her "practice areas include criminal defense, civil rights litigation and family law matters, focusing on father's rights."
According to the bio, Amen teaches business law as an adjunct professor at Columbia College of Missouri.
Amen has been admitted to practice law in Illinois since 2016 and has no public records of discipline or pending proceedings against her, according to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.
The panel also rejected Amen’s argument that Simonian improperly calculated the legal fees owed to Rand because Rand’s prior attorney, Alan Lecynski, didn’t offer his own sworn fee statement. Hutchinson said those fees were documented and then authenticated during Rand’s testimony under questioning from Mercure.