Liberty & Equality

I spent five years legally erased from my own life.

In February 2020, a series of injunctions, wrongly secured by my business partner and ex-husband with assistance from his loyalists, did more than muzzle me. An appellate court would eventually revoke them but, for five years they surgically removed me from my entire professional existence. I was forbidden to enter my own offices in the company I co-founded almost thirty-five years earlier. Forbidden to speak to my own employees. Forbidden to contact my clients, or anyone who might ever become one, and since every home-based business and commercial tenant on earth is a potential client, that final prohibition accomplished exactly what I believe it was designed to accomplish: it severed me from the entire business world in a single stroke. I was barred from my life's work and forbidden to speak freely about my own life. Tell me, in what world does that not equal the denial of a person's pursuit of happiness? Those injunctions were finally overturned on December 9, 2025. The education they gave me is what this essay is about.

But before the lesson, the cost, because I was never the only one who paid it. To wage the campaign against me, it was apparently necessary to go through nearly everyone close to me and to the company we had built: co-workers, friends, family, reduced one by one to collateral damage in a war only one man declared. There is no such thing as acceptable loss when it is measured in people. Families fractured. Friendships and work-family bonds of decades severed in an afternoon. People who had poured years of loyalty, hard work, and sacrifice into Fischer watched loyalty repaid with wreckage. That, in my humble opinion, is evil. And there are others still, good people who placed their trust in me and who paid dearly during the years I was forbidden to support and protect them, in ways they never chose or deserved. I am not yet free to speak their names, and I doubt I know the full roster of the harmed. Sealed proceedings protected the people responsible. Sunshine will do the opposite. The truth always surfaces.

I will say plainly what I have come to believe: that corporate officers and directors, and attorneys sworn to uphold the law, including some of my own, facilitated serious misconduct or looked away from it; that their actions and inactions, inside my companies and around courtrooms, shielded the wrongdoers; and that the compounding result was a receiver-controlled sale, for pennies on the dollar, that was anything but the transparent, arm's-length, third-party transaction it is purported to be. The very system built to deliver justice served, in my experience, to shield the wrongful and the powerful instead.

All of it, the injunctions, the betrayals, the enforced silence, was a personal catastrophe. It was also an education no classroom could sell at any price. It taught me what liberty and equality actually are, and what it costs when they fail. I do not write about these words as theory anymore. I have lived on both sides of them.

Before those years, "liberty" and "equality" were words I saluted without examining. Afterward, I understood they are not slogans at all. They are profound, often competing ideas that press against each other in every life and every law, and depending on the context, they can mean almost opposite things.

Take a claim I first read with resistance. In The Unruly Monkey, John Train writes that "liberty and equality are contradictory, since only heavy government control, meaning reduced liberty, can prevent the able and energetic from rising to the top and staying there." My instinct was to disagree. Then I saw what he was actually naming: not equality before the law, but equality of outcome. And on that, he is right. You cannot flatten the natural differences between people, in talent, effort, character, drive, without a heavy hand forcing the flattening. The hand is the problem. Every inch of enforced sameness is paid for in freedom.

I believe deeply in the other liberty: the freedom to use your God-given gifts to build, create, and pursue happiness. The years I was restricted from doing exactly that were among the saddest of my life. And I have come to believe my rights were violated in part because of real flaws in our legal system, power that polices itself, authority without adequate check, justice that is not equally available to everyone who needs it.

Which is why the other half of the equality question matters so much to me. Train draws a distinction worth keeping: "Equality is an important legal conception, not a fact of anthropology." Equality before the law is not in tension with liberty. It is the thing that guarantees liberty. When it fails, when power tilts the scales, it is always the vulnerable who pay, regardless of the facts or the law. I know, because I watched it happen to me.

So here is the distinction it cost me five years to learn. There are two equalities, and they are not friends. Equality before the law protects freedom: the same rules for everyone. Equality of outcome consumes it: the same result for everyone, which someone powerful must always force, at the price of the very freedoms that let people rise in the first place.

The founders understood this. They declared all men created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, then built separation of powers and checks and balances to protect the liberty that would inevitably produce unequal results among free people. The Fourteenth Amendment later wrote equality before the law into the Constitution itself. They held both ideals at once, on purpose, in tension, because a free country needs both and can be destroyed by too much of either.

When liberty is stripped away, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible. When equality before the law is compromised, the pursuit becomes a rigged game. Real liberty requires genuine equality under the law, and it cannot survive the aggressive pursuit of equality of outcome, which always ends by sacrificing the freedoms it claims to serve.

Set aside the equality of outcomes, and I no longer see liberty and equality as enemies. They are two halves of the American experiment, and I have learned the hard way how much wisdom, restraint, and vigilance it takes to hold them in balance. I have learned one thing more, and I would not wish the tuition on anyone. You never truly know the weight of liberty, or of equality, while you still hold them. You learn it in the silence after they are taken, when you reach for your own voice, your own work, your own life, and find them gone.

I know that weight now. I will spend the rest of my days making sure others never have to.

I was forbidden to enter my own offices in the company I co-founded almost thirty-five years earlier.

“liberty” and “equality” ... are profound, often competing ideas that press against each other in every life and every law

“Equality is an important legal conception, not a fact of anthropology.”