Advent Veteran: Renee Perry Deposition
On January 27, 2025, I walked into a state representative’s office at the Oregon Capitol to ask a simple question: had she looked at the military civil rights bill I wanted introduced? I’m an Iraq veteran, and I’d worked on that bill, unpaid, for months.
That same day, state police were called on me. Within two weeks I was barred from her office, and soon after, restricted from the Capitol. I sued. My lawsuit alleges that Representative Shelly Boshart Davis and her chief of staff, Renee Perry, retaliated against me for petitioning my government. I've finished processing the deposition of Perry, the Government has deposed me, and I have Davis' deposition two days after Veterans Day.
Nothing is decided. These are allegations, and Perry’s transcript from her recent deposition is still in its review period. But in October I questioned her under oath for the first time, and what she said is worth telling you.
[deposition video coming soon]
There was no rulebook. I asked whether any written policy told her office when it could ban a constituent. She said no. It had never happened before, and she agreed they were improvising. She doesn’t believe the letter told me how to appeal, and she knows of no one who told me a ban was under consideration. You can argue about whether an elected official should ever close the door on a citizen. But nobody should be shut out by improvisation, with no notice and no way to answer.
The danger story has holes. Perry says I leaned over her desk and frightened her. I dispute that. Under oath, she told me no one else saw it, and she couldn’t say where in the audio recording it happened.
The rest of her account sits awkwardly beside that claim. That morning, on video, OSP Trooper Brian Kolacz asked whether she wanted me removed. Perry said "No," I was a constituent, and I had a right to be heard. She described me as calm when the troopers arrived. She told me she didn’t call police herself that morning, though that day she texted a legislative aide in another office that police had been called on me twice. She now says she “misworded” it.
She said the idea of banning me first came up that morning. When I came back in the afternoon to drop something off for her colleague, she pressed the panic button the moment I left, because she’d been told to if she saw me again.
After that day, all I did was write. Perry agreed that between late January and February 21, the only new event was my emails; one three days later and another after my bill had been introduced by Sen Thatcher. I never came back to the Capitol in person. Nonetheless, she asked for troopers on her floor, citing my “continued demands and e-mails,” which were part of a public records request. I asked how a records request threatened her safety. She said she "didn’t want anything to do with" me.
The office ban letter stated that I could still reach the representative by email. But Perry testified that she forwarded my emails to state police and the legislature’s lawyers, mostly without reading them. A channel nobody reads isn’t a channel, it's an assumption of surveillance.
The missing phone. The texts at issue came from her personal phone, and she deletes her own texts. In her deposition, I learned that phone is gone. First she said it was stolen, then that it was missing, but there’s no police report. She couldn’t say whether it vanished before or after I asked the state, in July 2025, to preserve evidence. The state’s lawyer instructed her not to answer whether anyone had searched her devices.
What I’m after
I don’t think Perry is a cartoon villain. She told me she was afraid, and I believe she felt it. The question is whether fear alone is enough to lock a citizen out of The People’s House with no process.
Public offices need rules for this: a stated reason, notice, a time limit, a hearing, an appeal. They need staff trained on petition rights and de-escalation, and a rule against routing citizens’ emails to police without cause.
A judge may eventually decide what the law requires. I’d rather the state fix it first. I will let you know if and when it does.