I started running for Pasco Clerk of Circuit Court in 2011 to stop the corruption that I knew existed from a personal standpoint. This included my opponent, Paula O’Neil, who abused her position by maliciously and with total lack of integrity, sabotaged my education, degree, career and reputation, based on false allegations. I was so shocked that a public official would do what she did to anyone, not alone, one of her constituents.
This came about in the fall of 2011 when I interned at the clerk’s office for a total of one week and during that time, O’Neil and her select employees, were spreading gossip and lies about me and rushed to get me out of the clerk’s office faster than I went in. That made me believe they were in a hurry to get me out because I made no bones about speaking out against corruption. After all, there was nothing in my background to keep me from getting hired, so they set me up to take a fall, otherwise, why would they have been in such a hurry to get me out?
After that, O’Neil sabotaged an internship I had lined up with an attorney that could have lead into a full time paid position. I was livid! How could she do something so rotten?
I filed a complaint with Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2011 and Bondi, literally, endorsed O’Neil in 2012. Of course, Bondi did nothing about my complaint except to bureaucratically, send me to other places so she did not have to hold O’Neil accountable since they were Republican buddies.
I filed a complaint with Governor Rick Scott, who made it an employee issue, rather than a public official issue and he did nothing to hold O’Neil accountable either. As a matter of fact, Scott appointed O’Neil’s husband, Judge Declan Mansfield, as judge in the same court where O’Neil is clerk of court. Big conflict of interest! And Mansfield presided over a case where O’Neil was one of the defendants just two months after they were married. With Scott’s connections to O’Neil, there was no way he was going to hold his Republican buddy accountable.
That left me with no choice but to run against her, myself, (as she had no other opponent so I could help another candidate keep her out of office) to try and hold her accountable for her wrongful actions and to keep her from using the clerk’s office as an umbrella to harm anyone else.
Unfortunately, I never anticipated that O’Neil would stoop so low as to exploit my daughter’s sexual abuse case in public records after I signed up to run against her on Oct. 24, 2011. It was a memo dated Nov. 18, 2011 to be used by the media to help O’Neil win re-election. And who do you suppose foot the bill? The Tampa Bay Times ran with the information in the memo and used their own set of lies to help O’Neil win. The memo made it appear that I represented myself as an attorney when trying to pull up a confidential file. So, O’Neil and the Tampa Bay Times dragged up my daughter’s sexual abuse case from 1998 to make people believe lies. The file was not confidential to me as I initiated prosecution, I was a witness in the case and she was my daughter. To top it off, the Times never even interviewed me about the confidential file, they just stuck it their paper to hurt my campaign and it is still being used against me now.
I filed lawsuits against O’Neil and her select employees and the Tampa Bay Times after the 2012 election was over only to find out that the judges would be completely and utterly bias and refuse to allow me to take the cases to trial with so much evidence that there was no denying that I had a very good case for each one that warranted going to trial. I could not even get O’Neil and her select employees on the stand to testify as Judge Babb quashed every single one of my subpoenas. Babb protected them! Their lies would have, most definitely, come out under oath. I was like David fighting Goliath in a Kangaroo County and Kangaroo Court System, in order to gain some sort of dignity, justice and to clear my name of all the lies, but I was denied due process and the right to a jury trial stated in our United States Constitution.
The fight and mission I was on continued to the 2016 election year when I signed up to run against O’Neil again, only for more corruption to manifest, itself. For one, the Pasco Supervisor of Elections, Brian Corley and the Superintendent of Schools (used to be the election supervisor in Pasco County), Kurt Browning, as well as my opponent, O’Neil, literally campaigned for O’Neil and not only that, but they did it at a nonprofit charity event for children that was tax exempt through the I.R.S, which was a big NO! NO! to use a tax exempt organization for a political rendezvous. Go to http://pascocountyfloridacorruption.strikingly.com/ to see all the pictures and the charade of O’Neil’s shirts throughout the event. Most of them, if not all of them, were O’Neil’s employees wearing her campaign shirts. Also, can you imagine a supervisor of elections campaigning for any candidate? He was supposed to be completely neutral on all sides. That was outrageous!
Also, be aware that O’Neil hired reporter Tom Jackson after he wrote praising articles about her. She first hired him as a contractor, paying him $5, 000 dollars a month and in his contract, he only had to work 20 hrs. a week and did not even have to show up for work. A few months later, she hired Jackson as a full time clerk employee and paid him about $75,000 a year, which equated to over $6500 a month to do anything that the other clerk’s employees could do, pull up public records. This was using her office to benefit herself and to praise and thank Jackson for all the bias articles he wrote about her. Knowing this, could you trust any reporter to tell you the truth? Not if they were bucking for a $5,000 a month to start.
That brings us here today. I signed up to run against O’Neil a year earlier than I did in my other two campaigns. I signed up in 2018 for the 2020 election year.
Remember this: Don’t let yourselves be brainwashed into believing that it is running a negative campaign to expose public officials. They want to make you believe it is running a negative campaign to take the focus off of them. In fact, it is running a positive campaign when we expose public officials so that they cannot continue to use their office as an umbrella for wrongful actions and in the end, it would be improving our government to get them out.
Please support my campaign by donating money and volunteering your services. Email me if you would like to donate or help in my campaign.
Sincerely,
Roberta Cutting (Cutting Corruption, Cutting Wrongful Actions, Cutting Violations of Public Records, Cutting Nepotism and Cronyism, Cutting bureaucracy by having an Open Door Policy, and basically, cutting anything that hurts the people.
