(415) 921-8719
July 27, 1992
I have been in constant litigation against Dr. Laurence E. Badgley since May, 1976, when he filed the first of five lawsuits against me. I have never sued Dr. Badgley, but he keeps suing me.
Dr. Laurence Badgley is none other than the infamous "Dr. Feelgood", who traveled around with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones during the early 1970's, distributing free pills and drugs to teenaged girls and boys backstage at Rolling Stones concerts. I myself was given special box tickets to a Rolling Stones concert by Dr. Badgley during this period.
In an article by Andy Warhol in "Rolling Stone" for April 12, 1973, page 39, Truman Capote was quoted as saying the following about Dr. Badgley:
"They had this doctor on the plane who was a young doctor from San Francisco, rather good looking. He would pass through the plane with a big plate of pills, every kind you could imagine, everything from vitamin C to coke ... It developed that he had a super-Lolita complex. I mean 13-, 14-year-old kids. He would arrive at whatever city we would arrive at, and there would always be these hordes of kids outside and he would walk around ...... and say 'You know I'm Mick Jagger's personal physician. How would you like to see the show from backstage?' ..."
This article went on to describe a pornographic film made on an airplane of Dr. Badgley having sexual intercourse with a female high school student. This film was later made into a suppressed popular movie called "Cocksucker Blues".
I know about this Rolling Stone article because Dr. Badgley proudly showed it to me himself. However, Dr. Badgley now tries to deny that he was the original notorious Dr. Feelgood, even though he was quite proud of this at one time. He finds it more difficult to deny more recent adverse publicity about his "pain-killing machine", which he called "Acu-Stim". This was the subject of a newspaper article in the San Mateo Times on November 11, 1984. Permission to market this device was denied by the FDA. After that, Dr. Badgley became known for his claims to have found a cure for AIDS through what he calls "natural therapy". He has written a book about this entitled Healing AIDS Naturally (ISBN 0-941523-00-4). However, in an article in "The San Francisco Progress" for January 13, 1988, entitled "Medical Community calls Natural AIDS therapy 'quackery' ," Mark Madsen, the Director of the Department of Physical Education for the California Medical Association, called Dr. Badgley's claims "borderline quackery".
My nightmare with Dr. Badgley began in July, 1973, when I agreed to take him in as a partner in a 27-room landmark house built in 1896 and known as "The Bourne Mansion", which I was already in the process of buying. Dr. Badgley was my boyfriend at the time and we were planning to live together. According to the deed dated July 13, 1973 and recorded in book B787 page 288 of the San Francisco Recorder's Office and signed by both of us: "Subject property is to be used solely as a single family residence."
However, at the same time, Dr. Badgley got his lawyers to prepare a separate document dated July 10, 1973 which provided that in the event that either party defaulted and failed to pay his or her share of the mortgage, the other party would pay the entire amount and "the burdened party shall refrain from suit against the defaulting party upon the resulting liability for a grace period of eight months." This agreement, which we both signed, further provided that the house would be used "for parties, gatherings, creative seminars, doctor's offices and such other uses as the parties shall from time to time select." I did not realize at the time of this agreement that Dr. Badgley had been the male stud in various pornographic movies showing at the local theatres and that he intended to use our house for movie making and for sex and drug parties.
I broke up with Dr. Badgley shortly after this agreement was entered into and he moved out of the house altogether on December 31, 1975, during the middle of a raid being conducted by the Narcotics Division of the San Francisco Police. He never returned to live there and more than two years passed before he even asked to return to live in the house. However, he continued to enter the house from time to time, until nearly one year later, when I finally changed the locks on the doors after I discovered that a tenant (who was possibly among those hired by Dr. Badgley to spy on me) had been stealing.
Six days after moving out of our house, I received a letter dated January 5, 1976 from Dr. Badgley's lawyer demanding that I sell the house to Dr. Badgley for a nominal sum. A few months later, he filed the first of his five suits against me. In his lawsuits, he has repeatedly accused me of doing things which he himself actually did. For example, he accused me of throwing wild parties in the house, although in general the parties cited were actually organized by him and his associates, one of whom stayed on as a tenant after he moved out.
The end result of this is that since 1977, Dr. Badgley has not paid one penny towards the mortgage, maintenance or upkeep of the house. Immediately after he moved out of the house, Dr. Badgley embarked on a campaign of harassment of me. He reported me to every governmental agency imaginable, including the Zoning Administrator, the Chief Building Inspector, the Franchise Tax Board, the IRS, the FBI, the vice squad and various housing and planning commissions. When I parked my car in my driveway, it was vandalized or the police were called and asked to give me a ticket or to tow me away. He hired a private detective in the office of Harold Lipset , who came to the house pretending to want to rent a room. The detective met my 16-year-old daughter, pretended to be a big-time movie producer, and offered her a job in motion pictures. He offered to give her and her girlfriend marijuana and finally offered them money for sex, which they wisely declined. Later, when I married, Dr. Badgley had men call my husband on the telephone and claim that they were having an affair with me. Dr. Badgley also sent a woman whom he paid to have sex with my husband. The woman often stood in front of my house waiting for my husband to come out. That woman was later found to have AIDS. Dr. Badgley also got newspaper articles published about me, including one of the front page of "The San Francisco Progress" dated December 15, 1982, entitled "Donnybrook around Landmark Mansion", in which Dr. Badgley claimed, on page A6, col. 1, that the house was in my "iron fist" and featured parties attended by "several hundred black people ... with their skin painted pink."
In 1987, Dr. Badgley obtained a court order requiring me to produce my financial records pertaining to the house in court. On October 22, 1987, the morning of the court date, I walked out of the front door to the mansion, only to find that my Mercedes had been stolen, along with all of my financial records, which had been in the trunk. The car was discovered abandoned a few days later, having been towed by a tow-truck, but the financial records, including receipts for repairs done on the house, were missing and have never been recovered.
Later, a Mr. Kenneth Wang, another tenant who had been hired as a spy by Dr. Badgley, was arrested and spent a week in jail for the theft of the car ( SF criminal case no. 132986). Just prior to this incident, I had left the financial records in the office of Dr. Badgley's lawyers for several days, during which time they admit that they had all of the records photocopied by a commercial copying service. After being arrested, Wang confessed that he had been hired by Dr. Badgley to steal the car and to remove the financial records. He was released on bail and skipped bond, later to be found to Florida. He later testified that he had put some of the boxes of financial records, including cancelled checks and the like, by the trash pile in a car wash.
The financial records were never recovered. Dr. Badgley's lawyers refused to let us have back the photocopies they had made of my original records, prior to the theft. Had they been willing to give us those photocopies, the theft of the records would have been irrelevant. Thus, I was compelled to serve subpoenas on banks and vendors, trying to reconstruct my financial records over a 16 year period when, all along, David Birenbaum, Dr. Badgley's lawyer, had complete photocopies of all of my records in his office. These records included receipts for more than $646,000 that I had spent on the house, including $104,799 just to repair leaks and to fix the roof of the house. Dr. Badgley had refused to agree to pay his share to have the roof fixed, even though he had told "The San Francisco Progress" in an interview published on December 15, 1982, page A6, that the house "must leak like a sieve".
On two occasions in 1980-81, Dr. Badgley got a receiver appointed by the court to manage the building. On both occasions, the receiver resigned shortly thereafter, because Dr. Badgley had refused to contribute any money at all and had insisted that all of the money must come from me. The receiver had refused to proceed on the basis of a one-sided contribution of funds from just one party to the joint venture, at a time when "the other party does not contribute a compensating amount".
Finally, I have recently learned that Dr. Badgley has rented an apartment just across the street from my house, on an upper floor, which gives him a clear view directly into the bedroom window of my house, although he lives elsewhere.
One thing which you must understand is that I am a financially well-off person. Not many people other than myself would be interested in owning a house like this, which is expensive to maintain. Long before I first met Dr. Badgley, I was the owner of several apartment buildings in San Francisco. In view of Dr. Badgley's interest in having sex with 13-year-old girls and boys, and from the other events which have since transpired, it is now clear that Dr. Badgley's interest in me from the beginning was only to get my money. Nevertheless, he gets favorable one-sided publicity for his meritless case in the press, because I refuse to be interviewed.
Now, Dr. Badgley has finally hit it big with a ruling of the San Francisco Superior Court which, in effect, has made Dr. Badgley into an overnight millionaire. In a decision handed down in March, 1992, the San Francisco Superior Court ordered that I must pay him $562,077.50 (including attorney's fees) plus I must give to Dr. Badgley the keys to the house and must allow him to move back into the house with me. This ruling has now forced me into bankruptcy.
The point to this letter is that Dr. Badgley himself filed for bankruptcy in 1984, while his lawsuits (case No. 706719, filed on May 21, 1976, consolidated with case no. 745339, filed on November 1, 1978) which eventually resulted in the $562,077 judgment, were pending. He was discharged from bankruptcy in 1986. I was never notified of any of this. I never received a proof of claim form in the mail or anything of that nature. I have not seen the bankruptcy petition, but I feel certain that he did not list his lawsuit against me as an asset nor did he list my cross-complaint against him as a liability. Had I been notified, I would have diligently attended every meeting of creditors and every court hearing, and I am sure that he knew that I would have been there. In addition, I feel certain that he never notified the bank which held the mortgage to our house that he was in bankruptcy because, otherwise, had the bank been notified, they would have said something to me about it. The mortgage to the Eureka Federal Savings and Loan of San Francisco, which he and I both signed, is a recorded instrument and can be found at book B787 page 288 of the San Francisco Recorder's Office.
In short, it is clear that Dr. Badgley is guilty of bankruptcy fraud and that, as a result of this fraud, he has been discharged of his liabilities and I have been forced into bankruptcy.
Now that I am in bankruptcy (case no. 92-3-2965 LK), I am starting to become aware of all of the procedures which a bankrupt person must go thorough. This has made it very clear to me that Dr. Badgley never complied with any of these procedures. He never listed his share of the mortgage on the house as among his liabilities. Had it been known that he was in bankruptcy while, at the same time, he was prosecuting a lawsuit against me, his creditors would have contacted me and tried to settle that case to their benefit. Since he did not tell his creditors about his five lawsuits against me, they lost their opportunity to get some money out of Dr. Badgley and I lost the opportunity to settle this case.
I have repeatedly, over a long period of time, tried to settle this suit. I am willing to pay him money, not because I believe that I owe him anything, but because I am a very private woman who wants to be free of this harassment by Dr. Badgley. In short, I am willing to pay him some blackmail money, just to get rid of him. However, the suit cannot be settled because of his outrageous demands. Although he has never put an offer in writing, I can tell you that I have offered to give him at various times a half million dollars just to get him out of my life, (although his lawsuit against me is utterly without merit and, indeed, in reality he owes me money) and he has made it clear that he will accept no less than one million dollars.
It must be pointed out that Dr. Badgley wants this more than one million dollars, even though his total investment in the house is less than $38,000. All of the mortgage payments were made by me since 1977. He has never contributed one penny towards the house since 1977.
More than that, the sole basis for his claim against me is that he alleges that I "forced" him to leave the house in 1975. In fact, however, I had no idea that he was intending to leave until he walked out the door. He abruptly moved out of the house on December 31, 1975, at the very moment that narcotics investigators from the San Francisco Police were entering the house to investigate a complaint that Dr. Badgley was supplying drugs to teenagers. The police tried to search his bags on his way out the door, but he made good his get-away. Dr. Badgley has always since accused me of calling the police on him. On this ground, he claims that he was forced by me to leave the house and that therefore I must pay him rent. However, it was later established that it was actually a housemaid named Judy who had been sexually approached by Dr. Badgley who had summoned the police.
Finally, I must inform you that since March, 1988 alone, I have paid my lawyers a total of $290,000 (two hundred ninety thousand dollars) to defend the various lawsuits filed by Dr. Badgley against me. I somehow suspect that my lawyers have not done a top notch job.
In 1985, my lawyer at the time spent a full week negotiating a settlement of this case with the lawyer for Dr. Badgley. At that time, I told my lawyer that I had heard a rumor that Dr. Badgley was in bankruptcy. My lawyer asked his lawyer if this was true, but his lawyer initially denied this. Later on, I received a bill for ten thousand dollars for legal fees for the one week during which my lawyer negotiated with his lawyer.
Now that I myself have been forced into bankruptcy, with Dr. Badgley being my major creditor, I realize that Dr. Badgley's lawyer lacked the legal capacity to negotiate a settlement of this litigation and that my $10,000 was wasted. The proper person to settle this case would have been the trustee. However, I did not know at that time and still to this day do not know who that trustee was.
I really have no idea what to do about this now. I am throwing myself on the mercy of the court. However, what seems logical to me is that it is clear that Dr. Badgley has committed a fraud against me, against his other creditors and against the bankruptcy court. Therefore, in my opinion, all of the state court proceedings on behalf of Dr. Badgley should be brought to a halt by this court. I believe that also a declaration should be made that the house now belongs entirely to me, especially since I have made all of the mortgage payments since 1977 and have spent more than $646,000 of my own money on the upkeep of this house, and he has contributed nothing.
I wish to emphasize that the only reason that I am in bankruptcy now is the money judgment in the amount of $562,077.50 in favor of Dr. Badgley. If this liability is discharged, as I believe that it should be due to his bankruptcy fraud, I will no longer be insolvent.
Very Truly Yours,
Arden Van Upp