The blogger known as “JoJo from Jerz” has an incredible, frightening story to tell. She has a large following on social media, and she uses it to say what she thinks about Donald and Melania Trump. She doesn’t like them.

Not long ago, she got a letter from a government attorney threatening to sue her for defamation. This is, of course, an outrage because the First Amendment protects her right to criticize the President, his policies, and his very public wife.

But the threat was clear. A lawsuit would bankrupt her, cause her to lose her home, and ruin her life. The federal government has unlimited resources; it can destroy your life simply by engaging in litigation. At some point, the ordinary citizen runs out of money.

I learned about the situation while reading Dean Obeidallah’s post, where he gave the background and explained that JoJo is Joanne Carducci, a single mother of two children.

Dean wrote:

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Donald and Melania have been threatening lawsuits against Joanne Carducci—better known as JoJoFromJerz—in an effort to silence her criticism. Carducci has millions of followers between X, Facebook, Threads, Substack and more. But what the Trump crime family didn’t count on is the type of fighter JoJo is and how people would rally to support her!

I spoke to JoJo about her ordeal that she only went public with in her Substack post on September 26, 2026, titled, “Be Best. Be Quiet. Or Be Bankrupted.” It was jaw-dropping to read how the Trumps—apparently led by Melania—had their lawyers send letters to JoJo threatening to sue her for criticizing Donald and the so-called “First Lady.” (In Trump’s case, Melania is far from the first lady—she’s more like the 100th!)

Having read Dean’s introduction, I then opened JoJo’s September 26, 2026, post, where she described the nightmare of being threatened by the Trumps, but most especially by Melania.

Jojo wrote:

For the first half of this year, Melania Trump was doing everything in her power to get me to shut up.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this. I didn’t know how to talk about it. And if I’m being fucking honest, I’m scared to talk about it right now.

But I’m sick and tired of carrying it around, and I need to put it down.

And watching my fucking feed turn into a propaganda pageant for that self-anointed patron saint of women has exhausted whatever restraint I had left.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know something was happening earlier this year. I was trying to keep doing my work while worrying about my children, our home, my livelihood, and whether telling you what was happening could cost us everything.

Here’s what I didn’t tell you.

The president and the first lady of the United States of America were threatening to sue me.

Me. A single mother of two in New Jersey.

At first, the letters were about things I’d said about both of them, although mostly her, but over the next several months it became entirely about Melania. She wanted me to retract what I’d said and apologize, and when I wouldn’t, another letter would come, another accusation of defamation, another demand for money I didn’t have, until this woman’s wounded feelings had become something I had to consider every time I thought about my family’s future.

A prominent attorney who wasn’t able to help me told me I should do everything they asked because otherwise they would ruin me.

They would take my home.

And I don’t know how to explain what those words do to you when you’ve already had to rebuild your life from scratch, when the home somebody is telling you to be afraid of losing is the place you made out of everything you managed to save of yourself. There wasn’t some other fortune underneath us. There was this house, my work, and two children who depended on me to make it enough.

I cried every day for months, but I kept going because I had to keep going, because I didn’t have a choice, because my kids need me and their lives don’t stop to indulge two petulant narcissists who can’t stomach being criticized. There’s still dinner and soccer and baseball and laundry and life—the life I’ve worked so hard to make ordinary for them. They get to have that. They get to need things and forget things and go on being children without having to make room for whatever the first lady thinks she’s entitled to take out of their mother.

And I never told them. They still don’t know.

I didn’t want to scare them, didn’t want to give them a reason to look around their own home and wonder whether they would get to keep it, so I kept it from them, even as this constant background noise ran underneath everything else: two of the most powerful people in the world, with all their money and lawyers and access to the levers of power, had targeted me. 

My livelihood. My family. The life I was right there in the middle of trying to live. And I couldn’t make the enormity of that fit with how ordinary we were, how little we had to spare, how much damage they could do without it costing them anything they would miss.

She was swinging a fucking wrecking ball at a mosquito, and my children lived in the building.

For months, I told only the people closest to me and some incredible, heroic human beings—elected officials, people you might recognize from television—who showed up when I needed help. I sat on the rest because I was scared, and I hate that for me, but I fucking hate it for my country, too. I was afraid to tell you what the president and first lady were doing because I didn’t know what telling you might make them do next.

She never had to set foot in our house to make her presence felt in every room.

That’s the brutal, grotesque, fucking disgraceful truth.

And let’s be clear about what I do: I have never intentionally lied about her. When I’m talking about what these people say and do, I’m working from my understanding of the truth, what I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. But a hell of a lot of my work is mockery and ridicule, because I’m a satirist and they’re public figures, and I have a right to point at the ridiculous fucking spectacle they’re making of this country and laugh.

They don’t have to like it. That couture-clad, cash-cushioned control freak was trying to turn free speech into a luxury item and price me out of my own fucking voice.

I don’t need to make shit up. With these two, the problem has never been a shortage of material.

Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s former attorney general, helped me for free, spending hours on the phone with me, giving his time and expertise at considerable personal cost, shepherding me through something I could never have begun to navigate alone. And he listened to me. He advised, explained, helped me understand what I was facing, but the decisions stayed mine. I still cry when I think about the sheer luck of somebody that good showing up in the middle of something that ugly, when I needed help I couldn’t afford and didn’t know how to find.

He’s an extraordinary fucking human being, and I owe him in ways I’ll never be able to adequately express, let alone repay.

Having him beside me felt like somebody putting a hand beneath a box I’d been holding so long my arms had started to shake. I still had to decide where to go with it, but I could finally take a breath without being afraid I’d drop everything. I kept returning to Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance.”

This is the beginning of her post. Please open and read it all.

It shows how thin-skinned the Trumps are, how ruthless they are, and what true courage looks like.