The state board that monitors lawyers wants a Hastings attorney suspended for a long list of offenses, including filing suits in bad faith and harassing judges and others with religious slurs.
The lawyer, Rebekah Nett — who has represented a Wisconsin group that former members say is a religious cult — has 20 days to respond to the allegations. The Minnesota Supreme Court will then decide what discipline, if any, should be imposed, which could range from reprimand to disbarment.
In a petition for disciplinary action, the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility said Nett, 36, had engaged in a longstanding campaign of unprofessional conduct in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“(R)espondent has engaged in an extensive pattern of bad faith litigation,” board director Martin Cole and first assistant director Patrick Burns wrote in their petition filed with the Supreme Court, dated Aug. 8 and made public Thursday, Aug. 16.
“In the course of prosecuting these litigations, respondent made herself, and filed on behalf of her clients, statements and affidavits that she either knew to be false or were made with reckless disregard as to their truth or falsity concerning the integrity of judges, adjudicatory officers or public legal officers,” the petition said.
Nett did not immediately return a call for comment.
She gained notoriety in Minnesota’s legal community late last year when she filed pleadings in a bankruptcy case in which she called the judge a “black-robed bigot.” She accused U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher and other court officers of being part of a Catholic conspiracy bent on destroying a Wisconsin group now known as the Dr. R.C. Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology, or SIST.
On tax forms, SIST calls itself an educational organization, but former members say it is a religious cult. Nett grew up as a member of the group, which meets on weekends in Shawano, Wis. She has spent a good part of her legal career representing the group or its subsidiaries.
The group was founded by an Indian immigrant who now goes by the name Avraham Cohen. Former followers say he preaches a brand of theology that resembles Judaism, but with a belief in Jesus as Christ. His teachings are ardently anti-Catholic.
Although Nett’s filings in the bankruptcy case of Yehud-Monosson USA Inc., a SIST subsidiary, gained attention for their language, it wasn’t the first case in which she had included such rhetoric or criticized a judge.
The lawyers’ board petition cities Nett’s filings in the Yehud-Monosson case and four others, and notes that in March 2011, a federal judge in Wisconsin fined her $5,000 for comments she included in pleadings in a case in his court.
She wrote, among other things, that the judge in Green Bay ruled against her client for political reasons and that the judge treated the company the same way Nazis treated Jews.
Another case involved a SIST-related company, Midwest Oil of Minnesota. In a motion and legal memorandum asking U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel to step down from the case, Nett wrote that the judge “obviously upholds his Catholic religion before his duty to law and country.” She also called him a “religious bigot.”
David Hanners can be reached at 612-338-6516.
