Lawsuit threatened over Dubois County Councilwoman’s statements
Last Tuesday, Property Rights Alliance President Jason McCoy filed a protective order with the Dubois County Circuit Court and stated he’d be taking further legal action against Dubois County Councilwoman Deena Lewis after her remarks at the regular council meeting on Monday, April 27.
The actions come in response to comments made by Councilwoman Lewis during the discussion portion of a motion to approve an ordinance withdrawing from the Mid-State Corridor Regional Development Authority. Before casting her vote, Lewis read a statement outlining some support she had received for staying in the RDA, as well as criticisms of the polls conducted by groups opposing the Mid-States Corridor, founding member of the Coalition Against the Mid-States Corridor Mark Nowotarski’s involvement in the opposition and McCoy’s involvement in creating the “MSC Intelligence Dossier” with information and allegations regarding the process involved in moving the project forward.
You can listen to her comments in the YouTube recording of the meeting below. Mr. Nowotarski’s response to Lewis’ comments begins at around the 1:31:00 mark in the meeting, and Mr. Hochgesang follows. Mr. McCoy was not in attendance at the meeting.
The filing stems from comments in which she attributed authorship of the 50-plus page document to McCoy. Lewis, who cast the lone dissenting vote against the county’s withdrawal from the RDA, said McCoy had used the document to malign an innocent woman — a reference to Ann Seitz, the deceased first cousin of Gov. Mike Braun — as a means of connecting her to Lewis through Lewis’s marriage to Terry Seitz.
McCoy has stated he was not the author of the dossier, though he submitted information for inclusion in the materials prepared for distribution to the Indiana General Assembly during the session earlier this year. He also handed the dossier to the Dubois County Commissioners and the media at the March 16, 2026, meeting, referring to it as a document outlining collusion and corruption between the Regional Development Authority, the Lochmueller Group and other businesses and individuals in the community.
Here is that moment in the meeting.
In filing for the protective order, McCoy wrote, “Respondent made several untrue + extremely inflametory [sic] comments designed to impune, [sic] + defame me personally + my character.”
He asked the court to instruct Lewis not to make any more public statements designed to incite actions against him nor impugn or defame his character.
The petition for a protective order filed by McCoy was subsequently denied by Judge Nathan Verkamp. In his decision, Verkamp outlined the requirement for multiple incidents of harassment:
“Harassment” (Indiana Code § 34-6-2-51.5) means conduct directed toward a victim that includes, but is not limited to, repeated or continuing impermissible contact (highlight from the decision): That would cause a reasonable person to suffer emotional distress; and that actually causes the victim to suffer emotional distress.
He wrote, “The Petition filed herein avers only one incident of harassment occurred on April 27, 2026. Without more, the Court cannot find repeated or continuing impermissible contact occurred to warrant the issuance of an Order of Protection.”
In his interview with the Free Press on Wednesday, April 29, McCoy acknowledged contributing information to the document but stated he had not read the dossier in full before handing it to the commissioners. He maintained that Lewis’s public attribution of authorship to him was nonetheless false and that he intends to pursue the matter legally after the primary election.
“I am myopically focused on the primary right now,” he said. “This is a distraction. This is a mild distraction for me.”
Lewis declined to comment for this story, citing the threat of pending legal action by McCoy.
