Amy Drake’s newsletter hit my inbox at 8:14 Sunday morning.
My wife threw on some coffee. I sat down at the kitchen table. I read it.
It was about me. All four pages about me. Two days before the Republican primary, the sitting councilwoman from Clay Township sent her last message to her voters and the message was that I am a paid weapon of the St. Joseph County Republican Party.
The coffee was on the table. I read it again. Then I went to review the things she said.
She said I scrubbed articles off my own website to hide work I did for the GOP. She listed them out. Article, removed. Article, removed.
I opened my laptop. I typed in the address of my own website. The homepage came up.
There is a notice across the top of the page. “Please note: Redress South Bend recently migrated its website platform. As a result, some previously published news and opinion articles may be temporarily unavailable. Efforts are underway to recover and republish this content.”
The notice has been there for weeks. Drake had to load our website to compile her column. She wrote four pages accusing me of destroying evidence and never mentioned the notice on the front of my website.
Drake’s column then claimed my mailer was a hit piece. I stopped reading. I went and got it.
The Redress newspaper was on our counter. Volume 1, Number 1. April 2026. Tabloid size, folded twice, weight just over an ounce.
I held it up at the kitchen table. It has a masthead and page numbers. There is an “About Redress South Bend” box on the back, ad inquiry boxes with my email address, and QR codes to register subscriptions.
The lead story is about thirteen thousand dollars in extra compensation paid to County Council attorney Jamie O’Brien. O’Brien is the candidate Drake is fundraising for in the same column where she is calling my newspaper a party hit piece.
A party operation does not lead its mailer with an investigation of one of its own candidates. A party mailer carries a paid-for-by line. The newspaper does not have one because it is a newspaper.
Drake looked at it and saw a conspiracy.
The phone buzzed. I received a text. “How are you feeling about Amy Drake’s latest conspiracy?”
By 9:30 I had read the column three times. The coffee was cold.
I went back to the laptop.
Drake had put the words “monthly memberships and one-time donations” in quotation marks. She made it sound like a line I had cooked up to fool people, then asked her readers to wonder who was really cutting the checks. She suggested it was party leadership.
I clicked the menu bar on my own website. I clicked “Support Redress South Bend.” The page came up.
Three tiers. Ten dollars a month. Twenty. Thirty. Plus one-time donations of any amount. The labels on the page are the words Drake put in quotation marks.
She had quoted my own donation page back at me and called it a slush fund.
Then I read the part where Drake said I had mysteriously moved into her district to run for state delegate. I read it twice. I went back two paragraphs.
In the same column, two paragraphs earlier, Drake had written that she was kicked off the ballot for state delegate by a corrupt ex-judge.
She accused me of moving into her district to run against her in a delegate race. Then she told her readers, in her own words, that she was not in the delegate race.
A delegate is not a council seat. You can run from anywhere you live. I am on the ballot because I chose to be. Point blank. I believed running for delegate would further our journalism. I want to document the process from the inside, the precinct caucus, the convention, the rules, the rooms most reporters never see.
Drake’s list of enemies, by the end of the column, includes a former judge she calls corrupt, a political consultant, two news websites, a blogger she compares to a hit man, and me. All of us, she says, out to get her.
This is the message Amy Drake sent to Clay Township two days before the primary. Not her record. Not her votes. Not her constituents.
Me.
Logan Foster
Logan Foster founded Redress South Bend and reports on local government and public records in South Bend and St. Joseph County. He is 31 years old and is majoring in finance. He is a Cleveland sports fan and a longtime season ticket holder of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
