This recording documents another hearing at the Taichung District Court on August 14, 2023 — a session so irrational it borders on surreal.

The proceedings revolve around one question: “Why did you post the rental contract, Mr. Cline?” That has been their mantra for years. Again and again, the same question, as though repetition itself could substitute for reason.

I explained, as I always have, that point five of the contract was clearly broken — and that when my landlord refused to fix the rolling metal gate or attend mediation, I posted the contract to document the violation. Any normal person, facing an unsafe home and a stone-walling landlord, would have done the same.

But logic had no place in that courtroom. The judiciary had long since turned this case into a performance — a kind of Salem-witch-hunt for a foreigner who dared expose wrongdoing. Every fact, every piece of evidence, every threat I had received was brushed aside. The judge fixated instead on whether I had “a dispute about fixing the gate,” as if a broken door were the heart of the issue.

Meanwhile, the police report about the threatening phone call from the landlord’s husband — telling me to go back home and worse — was treated as a minor misunderstanding. The judge’s question wasn’t why I was threatened, but whether I disagreed about a gate.

It would be laughable if it weren’t my life. Listening to this recording, one can hear the emptiness of the process — the casual cruelty of officials who treat human rights as paperwork. It’s not just indifference; it’s institutional blindness. The system could see every contradiction and still pretend not to.

To me, this hearing captures the core of the injustice: a courtroom more offended by a foreigner’s honesty than by the landlord’s fraud. It’s corruption by habit — the reflex to protect one’s own at the expense of truth.

This audio may sound monotonous, but it is living proof of a system that has lost its moral compass — a record of how a simple housing dispute was twisted into an act of heresy.

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This recording captures a long and painful conversation between me and a Taiwanese lawyer on September 28, 2023 — a conversation that lasts over an hour, though a few minutes are all it takes to understand the larger picture.

It’s the sound of someone begging for help and being politely, bureaucratically turned away. I had contacted this lawyer hoping to hire him privately — to finally have someone independent of Legal Aid who might look at my case honestly. I wasn’t asking for charity. I was ready to pay.

But what I heard instead was a kind of quiet defeat that says everything about how the system really works. He explained that he “doesn’t work with” Legal Aid clients, that there’s an unspoken rule preventing lawyers like him from taking on cases once Legal Aid has been involved. It’s as if I had been marked — tainted by the free system — and no private lawyer wanted to touch me.

At one point, he even admitted that he couldn’t guarantee success, no matter what. “You should just ask for a new Legal Aid lawyer,” he told me, as though this were all a simple mix-up instead of a man’s life unraveling under a judicial mistake.

The irony is breathtaking: a foreigner trying to pay for legal help — and not being allowed to. A lawyer who acknowledges the injustice but won’t cross an invisible line to correct it. A justice system so entangled in its own internal politics that doing the right thing becomes professionally risky.

Listening back, I can hear my own voice — exhausted, cornered, but still pushing. I tell him plainly that I need someone serious, someone willing to look at the documents, the contradictions, the judgments that were made without me even being present. I need someone who believes in rectifying something that is plainly wrong. But all I get in return are careful pauses, vague reassurances, and a tone that says more than words ever could: you’re on your own.

That’s what this recording represents — not just one failed phone call, but the quiet machinery of avoidance that defines systemic corruption. When even the people who could help are too afraid to try, it’s not a legal problem anymore. It’s a moral one.

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This recording captures the day I was called to court because I was — apparently — suing my former landlord, Bella, for fraud. Looking back, I was still quite green. I walked into that courtroom without a lawyer, without guidance, and without any idea how much the odds were already stacked against me.

From the very start, it was clear that no one in that room cared about my privacy, my security, or the death threats I had received from Bella’s husband. None of it mattered. They were box-checkers — people who treated the law like an exam sheet, racing to fill the blanks without ever stopping to ask what was true or fair.

By then, I had come to recognize the pattern. Bella, her husband, and their associate Paul worked like a small crime syndicate, each one insulated by the others, so that no individual could ever be held fully responsible. They knew the system and how to manipulate it — when to shout, when to whisper, when to intimidate — and the courts rewarded that performance. They knew exactly how to use bureaucracy as a shield.

In this recording, you can hear my frustration. The judges had all the facts in front of them — the timeline, the threats, the contracts, everything. I had given them the evidence myself. It wasn’t lawyered up or packaged in legal jargon; it was raw truth, hand-delivered by the person who lived it. And still, they refused to act.

Instead, I was told to fill out more forms, meet more requirements, jump through more hoops. I remember standing there thinking: what does it take for someone to simply do the right thing?

I wasn’t asking for mercy — just logic. I had reached the point where I was trying to end the nightmare by going directly to court myself. But the system had no interest in ending it. It seemed more interested in exhausting me into silence.

By late 2023, it had stopped being about a rental contract shared for two days years earlier. It was about pushing me off the island — breaking me down until I left Taiwan entirely. Whether it was bureaucratic cruelty or personal prejudice, the message was clear: you don’t belong here anymore.

This recording is the sound of a man trying to use the system one last time — calmly, honestly, and within the rules — only to discover that the rules were never meant to protect him.

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This was a call from Taiwan’s immigration office that caught me completely off guard. When you’re a foreigner in a foreign country and immigration calls you, it hits differently — there’s an immediate sense of worry. You want to do everything right, and I always did. For fifteen years I played by the rules, registered everything properly, and even built my business as a legitimate foreign investor — something almost unheard of in Taiwan without a local partner or spouse.

That’s why this call was so upsetting. The officer on the other end wasn’t rude, exactly, but there was a tone — a coldness that made it clear I was no longer seen as a person, just a file to be closed. It was one of those moments when you realize how easily bureaucracy can turn human effort into paperwork.

Listening back, you can hear the frustration in my voice. I had done everything right, and it still wasn’t enough.

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This short recording (about 17 minutes) captures a routine hearing in which the court again pressed me to settle the matter out of court. There were competent, patient translators present, and you can hear the procedural politeness — which only made the whole thing more maddening.

I kept explaining that settlement wasn’t possible: Bella refused to negotiate in good faith and effectively demanded an amount I could never produce. Her position wasn’t a compromise; it was a take-it-or-leave-it demand that left no room for resolution. Listening back, you hear the disconnect between polite courtroom language and the reality of what I faced — a system politely urging compromise while one party refused to compromise at all.

It’s a short clip, but it’s useful: a clear example of how the process kept circling the same problem without ever addressing the underlying impasse.

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This recording captures a short but telling call from the court clerk — the same one who had phoned me before. She said she was calling on behalf of the judge, urging me once again to “negotiate” with Bella so I wouldn’t “screw myself.” The idea was that if I just sat down and reached a deal, everything would go away.

But what they never seemed to grasp is that you can’t negotiate with someone like Bella. She wasn’t interested in fairness or closure — she wanted money and control. I told the clerk plainly that negotiation was impossible. Bella had already demanded over NT$100,000 and even bragged that I’d end up paying more in taxes just for trying to settle.

Everyone around me kept saying, “Be the better man, just work it out.” I tried. Vanessa even helped me make a website and send apologies. But then I’d go to court and hear Bella tell the judge I never once tried to apologize — and the judge just nodded along, as if her word alone made it true.

What makes this call so frustrating is how routine it sounds. The clerk is polite, even casual, about things that were destroying my life. She asks about my court dates — April 15 and 17, both at 9:30 a.m. — but can’t even tell me what the hearings are for. Two cases, same week, same courtroom, same people. It’s a glimpse into the chaos that became my normal — too many cases, too many contradictions, and no one in the system willing to see how absurd it all was.

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This short recording — just over two minutes — is a voicemail I received from the Taichung High Court on April 17, 2024, the very same day I was already expected to appear in court. A coincidence, perhaps — but one that says a lot about how carelessly my case was handled.

The message was polite, even overly so. The caller apologized for her “bad English,” explained that she was phoning from the High Court in Taichung, and asked whether I was “willing to mediate with the defendant, Li Hui-ru.” I had heard this question many times before. What none of them seemed able to grasp was that mediation implies balance — two parties negotiating in good faith. There was no such balance here.

How do you “mediate” with someone who has left you living behind an unlocked door, under threat, and in fear for your safety? How do you sit down and “negotiate” with a person who once demanded NT$500,000 in so-called emotional damages as a condition for even speaking — a demand made through the first Legal Aid lawyer who tried to intervene? There is no mediation in that; there is only coercion dressed up in civility.

I sometimes think the caller herself — whoever left that message — could have used a brush-up lesson or two from iLearn.tw, but the irony goes deeper than that. The same High Court that could not deliver justice seemed far more comfortable sending voicemails in hesitant English than reading the clear, documented evidence I had submitted.

It’s almost comical, in a tragic way. After years of hearings, filings, and court appearances, I was still being asked the same question: “Would you like to mediate?” As if compromise were possible with someone who had already violated every principle of fairness.

So this brief voicemail, banal as it sounds, is a snapshot of the absurdity that defined the entire process — a polite reminder that behind the courtesy and the ritual language, there was nothing resembling justice at all.

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This recording, running about 1 hour and 55 minutes, captures another long and largely monotonous day in court. It begins with me being asked to swear in — though in Taiwan there’s no oath to God, just a promise to “tell the truth.” It’s a small ritual that feels symbolic of the system itself: formality without substance.

Much of this hearing revolves around the same theme as so many before it — the court’s fixation on the fact that I once posted my rental contract online. They repeat it endlessly, as though that single act explains everything that has happened since. What’s ignored, of course, is why I did it. I wasn’t publishing for attention or revenge. I was documenting what had happened — because in Taiwan, I had learned that the only way to be heard was to record everything.

Videos automatically generate English subtitles, which can then be translated into Chinese. It became the only way to communicate clearly and transparently in a system that seemed determined not to listen. The “Landlord Scam” webpage was never about humiliation or exposure. It was evidence — a record of facts, built by someone who had run out of conventional avenues for justice.

In this session, I tried to explain that every time the landlord’s associate “Paul” came to fix something, it ended up worse than before. Broken glass, cracked fixtures, dripping pipes — a home turning into chaos piece by piece. I described these details because they show a pattern of neglect and manipulation that no one in authority seemed interested in addressing.

The judge didn’t want to hear that. The system preferred to circle back, again and again, to the one act they could label “wrong” — ignoring the context, the evidence, and the absurdity of prosecuting a man three times for sharing a rental contract once.

Yes, this hearing may sound slow and uneventful, but it documents an essential truth: that beneath the polite procedures and formalities, the process itself had become hollow. It’s a portrait of a courtroom that had long since stopped listening — and a man who refused to stop speaking, even when no one wanted to hear him.

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This recording corresponds to my court appearance on May 16, 2024—one of several separate cases the Taichung judiciary pursued against me for the same single act: posting a rental contract online for two days, nearly four years ago, before apologizing and taking it down.

In any normal legal system, multiple suits over one act would be consolidated into a single case. In Taiwan, however, the process fractured into three or more overlapping prosecutions—an unmistakable sign of how easily procedure can be manipulated when bureaucracy overrides reason. The irony is painful: a foreign resident who tried to follow the law became trapped because he followed it too carefully.

If you take the total rent I paid and divide it by the time I actually lived there, the landlord earned exactly NT$28,000 per month from me. That’s the real figure. Yet she demanded another NT$100,000, a staggering amount for someone already in debt to friends and with no steady income. Her threat was clear: pay, or I’ll take you to criminal court—and win. She knew perfectly well what that meant: I would have to leave the country, abandon my life, and lose everything I had built. She didn’t care.

Worse still, her husband was the one who made the threatening phone call. I didn’t know that at the time—the police never told me. They wrote their report entirely in Chinese, and I couldn’t understand what was being said. Only much later did I learn that, during their investigation, they had called the landlord herself to ask about the threat. She told them it was her husband who had called me, and they simply accepted it. The police listened to the very person responsible for the harassment to explain the harassment—and then wrote her version of events into my report.

That is not oversight. That is corruption. Plain and simple. When the judiciary and the police both abandon common sense and accountability, the system stops being a system of justice. It becomes a network of self-protection—protecting the corrupt, shielding incompetence, and punishing anyone who dares to point it out.

And yet, amid that farce, there was one small light: the court interpreter. A woman of rare kindness and grace, she stood out as a reminder that compassion and integrity still exist within the system, even if the system itself is broken. Her quiet patience and humanity gave me hope that Taiwan could one day reclaim its conscience.

I still believe in Taiwan. I wouldn’t be publishing this material if I didn’t. But after a year of unanswered petitions and bureaucratic deflection, it is time for the public to hear and see what happened. This audio stands as a record—of endurance, absurdity, and the stubborn conviction that justice, somewhere, must still mean something.

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This recording comes from my court appearance on June 18, 2024 — a hearing that, on the surface, seems uneventful, but in truth captures one of the most revealing moments of this entire ordeal.

In the courtroom with me that day was a translator I had met once before — a woman of extraordinary patience and kindness. Her calm presence and professionalism stood in stark contrast to the atmosphere around us. If anything made the experience bearable, it was her. She reminded me that compassion can still exist even inside a system that has forgotten what justice is supposed to mean.

But the rest of that hearing was a study in frustration. Once again, the focus was not on truth or evidence, but on repetition — the endless mantra that I “broke the law” by posting a rental contract online. For nearly five years, that single phrase has been echoed like a script, as if repetition could replace reason. What no one seems willing to discuss is the other side of that truth: the landlord’s threats, the phone call from her husband, and the five witnesses who were ready to testify in my defense.

Five witnesses. Not one. Not two. Five. And yet, the court decided their testimony was “not important to the case.”

How can a judiciary maintain any credibility when it silences evidence in favor of convenience? How can anyone claim due process when a foreigner — unrepresented, isolated, and repeatedly sued for the same event — is denied the right to have even his witnesses heard?

At some point, this stops being procedural failure and becomes what it is: corruption. Someone, somewhere, decided that this case wasn’t about truth. It was about control, and about saving face.

So yes — this recording might sound quiet, slow, or even dull to an outsider. But beneath its stillness lies everything that’s wrong with the process: a man trying to speak, a kind interpreter doing her best to bridge the gap, and a courtroom determined not to listen. It’s worth documenting — not because of what’s said, but because of what’s ignored.

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Mr. Huang was the man I called after dialing the number written on a single sheet of paper I had received in the mail — a document that arrived entirely on its own, without an envelope or any accompanying correspondence. Ironically, it was from the Supreme Court of Taiwan. One would expect that an institution entrusted with justice would at least understand the basic formalities of secure communication.

In hindsight, that small oversight mirrors something much larger: the absence of integrity within a judiciary that allowed my case to unfold as it did. Having lived through what I can only describe as institutional cruelty, I now understand why so many Taiwanese citizens fear political and legal regression.

At this point, it would take far more than an envelope for me — or anyone who has endured what I have — to believe redemption has arrived. If you ever see me in Taiwan again, it will mean that genuine rectification has been achieved: compensation, recognition, and an acknowledgment of the harm done. Until then, I wait for the day when the country I love — the country I once called home — can again embody the values of fairness, decency, and human dignity that it claims to uphold.

Whatever the eventual outcome, this case will remain a costly mistake for Taiwan — not only in financial terms but in moral credibility. I would rather face hardship elsewhere than accept a world where those responsible for such injustice act without consequence. This isn’t vengeance; it’s the natural insistence of a human being on truth, accountability, and respect for the law.

Taiwan must decide whether it wishes to be known as a democracy that truly lives by justice, or as a bureaucracy slowly becoming indistinguishable from the very authoritarian systems it once opposed. The world is watching — and history will remember which path it chooses.

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This recording was made on the evening of February 19, 2025, while I was at my grandmother’s house in New Brunswick. She had already gone to bed, and I was in the quiet of her living room when my phone rang — an unexpected call from Taiwan’s immigration office.

The officer said he wanted to arrange a meeting with me at home. I immediately sensed what was happening: the same judiciary that had wrongfully sentenced me was now trying to use immigration to draw me back into its trap. It was a bizarre and desperate move — the kind of clumsy maneuver that only makes sense inside a system already collapsing under its own corruption.

The officer seemed puzzled. He couldn’t understand why I hadn’t chosen to do “community service” instead of jail time — as though those were reasonable options for someone who had done nothing wrong. I tried to explain the obvious: no rational person would agree to work four days a week for a year, unpaid, under a criminal record and a multi-million-dollar debt, just to appease a system that knows full well it made a mistake.

This conversation took place after the same judiciary had already sentenced me, before Christmas 2024 — and just weeks before they sent a letter, in March 2025, confirming that I had no malicious intent. Think about that: the same court that condemned me later admitted I had done nothing wrong, and still expected me to serve a sentence for a “crime” that never existed.

That letter is the contradiction that exposes the entire system. It is written proof that Taiwan’s judiciary acknowledges innocence while enforcing punishment. There is no moral or legal logic to that. It’s not a technical error. It’s not oversight. It is corruption, clear and simple.

I remember telling the immigration officer that evening, calmly but firmly, that until Taiwan takes responsibility for what it has done — until there is compensation, rectification, and accountability — I cannot return. Any person with dignity would say the same.

This recording captures my voice not just in anger, but in exhaustion — the voice of a man who tried every legal avenue, who believed in justice, and who finally realized that truth alone does not move a system determined to protect itself.

Taiwan has a choice to make: it can either confront the corruption that has crept into its judiciary, or continue down the path of self-deception and deflection. Because if justice does not protect the innocent, then no one — citizen or foreigner — is safe within its borders.

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