Megan Fox and That Umbrella Guy (TUG) did a dishonest assessment of my recent article on the Hales case.
This post will set the record straight. Below is the segment of their show I focus on, along with the whole episode below that.
On May 6, 2026, I wrote an article entitled Shochet, Thomas, and Groeb team up to attack Bruce Matzkin’s career.
In September 2025, Bruce Matzkin sent four emails to the clerk for Levy County, Florida Judge Robert Groeb for a case between Michelle Preston and YouTuber Jeremy Hales.
While Michelle had been his client, she was not on this case. Once the clerk put the emails on the docket, Hales’ attorney, Randall Shochet, filed a motion to deem Matzkin to unlawfully practice law.
This was dubious because sending four emails does not mean you are representing anyone, and only the Florida Supreme Court, per statute, can make an unlawful practice of law determination.
Megan and TUG only analyzed half my article, so their audience didn’t see much of the evidence of malfeasance. Ironically, they still claimed I was misleading.
Their criticism boiled down to the three things.
1) I misspelled a word
2) I wrote, “Hales decided that Preston, along with her daughter, could be pawns for a protracted storyline in which he turned their lives upside down for YouTube content.
“At the center of this scheme were several frivolous lawsuits at the state and federal level.”
I didn’t point out that the lawsuit Matzkin was responding to was initiated by Michelle.
3) I should have released all four emails, and I was hiding something by not releasing them.
A second of the four emails sent by Matzkin.
While both insisted that I violated an unnamed journalistic ethic by not including all four emails, TUG struggled to explain why releasing all four was important.
“Cause it’s not, this clip here was not indicative of what he was doing. What was indicative of what he was doing was he was going after the people involved in the lawsuit. He wasn’t just talking about this or that. He was 100% talking about how Brucey Bruce. He was again practicing law without a license.” TUG said.
That statement earned him the Billy Madison reference.
TUG could have released the other emails on the broadcast, as they are available online, but chose not to while criticizing me for not releasing all of them.
Megan zeroed in on the substance of the email I released in which Bruce argued that a default was entered improperly.
I took no position in the article on the legal analysis because one doesn’t need to practice law well to practice it unlawfully, however, Megan was certain that Bruce was wrong.
Megan spent over four minutes insulting Bruce, insisting he was wrong, however, in the end, she acknowledged that she wasn’t sure which case he was citing and needed to look things up after the broadcast to prove her theory.
At another point, they criticized me referencing that Shochet had previously committed fraud. TUG struggled with coherence again.
“Remember, the whole thing wasn’t supposed to be about a dental license. The whole bringing up the dental license thing was for them to say, ‘he’s committed fraud on the court…by itself it means nothing (emphasis mine).”
The same people who cheer on frivolous lawsuits think that fraud “by itself it means nothing.”
Randall Shochet committed Medicare fraud; he lost his dental license. He then tried to become an attorney in Arkansas but was rejected due to the fraud and not being forthcoming about the fraud.
Shochet then was approved for a law license in Florida, raising eyebrows given his history, however, despite TUG’s assertion, fraud matters and shows a pattern of deceit which he also showed in the motions he filed in this case.
Shochet falsely claimed to have served Bruce; he falsely cited the law, and he falsely suggested that Bruce wrote some of the motions even though Shochet deposed the lawyer of record, Scott Stark, who said he, Stark, wrote the motions.
Megan and TUG’s audience would have known all this if the two had covered more of my article.
Instead, Megan spent ten minutes rewriting history of our friendship, falsely claiming that I betrayed her. In fact, she stopped being friends with me because I went onto Miltown’s Best to talk about a story she wasn’t covering.
That text message was sent on December 1, 2024. After that, she removed most of the YouTube videos we did together.
In January 2025, after all this happened, I started covering the Hales case.
Post-script
Check out the fundraiser to help me create more articles on the Hales case. Find articles one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five.
