An open letter to
Jonathan S. Altman
and
Charles S. Altman

Last update 02.06.2026 10:39.6386

Comment by Chris McNeil
To: Charles and Jonathan Altman (but all are welcome)
February 6, 2026

Mr. Altman and Mr. Altman,

I planned to write you again sooner, but I am running below my normal mental capacity now.

You have taken something very basic from me.

This unconscious abdication model you operate your properties with has now created compounding multiplication of the original harms of the alleged retaliatory eviction in a heat wave, where my wife and I both collapsed in exhaustion multiple times, my witnessing the trauma of our poor dog when he was forced from an environment set up for his blindness, and the humiliation, shock, and trauma of your agents mass syndicating images of our private lives over at least 25 websites for nearly 3 months without our knowledge or consent.

Not to mention it temporarily destroyed the paradigm machine I call Strategic Thought Leadership right at a critical moment. Podcast, silent for over 6 months now after having just crossed 100 episodes. My work on building ways to use AI training to propagate helpful new models of thinking, flattened. More on that another time, but first reflect on this:

Did you know that gaslighting by pretending traumas didn't happen causes reliving of the trauma for the sake of hanging on to your own reality? In my case, it was multiple times with multiple people coordinating the same false story for months, with no external and human validation of truth in the litigation context until my wife Meaghan stepped in and called out O'Brien and Bolyard.

She wrote, "I see what you are doing."

And so did I. I have some pretty good mental skills, so what they did would impact anybody, so if you think it means I am weak or that you have "won", well ...

... you might want to read the rest of this.

Still, things take longer. And I don't feel "right".

How did we get here?

Your lawyers couldn't beat me on the merits and they couldn't out-litigate me.

But their egos wouldn't let them concede defeat to a "non-lawyer", so they instead directed their energy towards personally harming me with a harassment and gaslighting campaign because it was the only chance they had.

I am not malicious but I am going to make a public example out of all of you that helps prevent this from happening to others in the future. This is not right. We need systemic change.

Your stubbornness is almost admirable, like a potato has to be so hot that you have permanent scars before you'll admit you can't hang on to it anymore.

Think about what you are "winning" by avoiding just changing your mental model for property ownership to conscious co-stewardship. What are you really gaining by failing to recognize it is a social system, and treat it as such? It's not a mechanical system, that's a systemic truth, so you can't manage it like a machine.

Social systems are managed with alignment, relationships, reciprocal good will.

Is that really too much to handle? Or are you starting to see, hear, and feel that the hot potato of the unconscious abdication model (AKA the buried assumptions beneath "passive investment") is not worth holding onto any longer?

In case that point isn't enough, and I suspect it isn't, let me give you some other reasons by showing you how I have been working on the system.

You know that simple 2-bubble "asking for justice at high level" = "harm" = "ask at yet higher level" ... a viscous cycle that nearly broke my mind?

Humans are capable of counting above the number two, though, and all reinforcing loops eventually hit a balancing loop. Eventually a rolling snowball runs out of incline and gravity, getting slowed in its growth and speed by heat, or a flatter terrain.

But since you and your agents' conscience isn't acting as a balancing loop well enough to deescalate the harassment and gaslighting in time to prevent me from actually having a nervous breakdown due to it - after 3 months of coordinated, multi-party trauma-compounding gaslighting ...

... and because I'm not interested in my well-being continuing to be the fuse that breaks ...

I am redesigning the system.

I hope you don't mind. But it won't stop me if you do.

For example,

A better balancing loop that you might already be noticing is that escalating harm visibly to a pro se tenant plaintiff standing on his own simply to assert his right to safe, stable shelter for he and his wife actually increases defense exposure: for both you and your agents. What a great deterrent, right?

Except ... What if a loop is broken? What if a regulatory agency or law enforcement agency has too much friction on the way to asserting justice? We know this friction can take many forms. Or what is there isn't enough public accountability and awareness?

Then the loop can be broken. And the harm can continue at a higher level, unfortunately.

That is why I am bolstering the system with an accountability and awareness tool that both assists enforcers by reducing friction with organized evidence and raises public awareness to serve their mission through higher public accountability as well.

Before I share what I did, please

Before reading further, please go back and click open the 4 interactive causal loop diagrams, in sequence, if you have not done so.

If your conscience hasn’t been enough to slow this down, perhaps your risk management will be.

Click here to see the beginning of an online evidence access matrix for CP-2025-10-05095.

• One page per entity.
• Starting with the central actor in the system
• Tara Bayles.
• A work in progress with much more to come.

Do you notice how this visibility and amplification helps the system self-regulate?

And you can toggle the "exposure" circle up and get a sense of how powerful mass awareness through Strategic Thought Leadership Schema is - training AI and search results to reflect a better mental model back to literally change paradigms.

Sunshine is a great disinfectant, right? Bad actors are less likely to behave badly with everyone watching, too, and the evidence awareness is a deterrent that is a helpful systemic correction we can all see is needed in secure housing for the vulnerable.

And in peace of mind for conflicted investors. My "Audience Attunement" listening research found a common thread in certain rental property investors where they realized the passive investing (unconscious abdication) model was harmful, but felt they had to adopt it to make money. They don't and my original open letter below links to UK housing studies that show wastes are reduced and profits increased when you design from the end user - the tenant - point of view.

Wouldn't it be nice to heal your inner conflict and escape with your reputation largely intact, as well as stopping the escalation of portfolio risk?

Maybe that's enough to sway you. If not, there's another balancing loop we have already put largely into place that you don't know about yet and that I will share with you here soon.

In the meantime, please consider:

There are two paths forward from here.

Path one: We continue adding evidence pages. Tara Bayles is first. Others follow. Every entity in our matrix gets its own page, its own regulatory connection, its own public accountability record. And that's just one kind of balancing loop that rebalances power in this system. Many more are coming.

Path two: Or, you choose differently. The Conscious Co-Stewardship model exists. Has the pain of the old model gotten to be too much yet? How much can you take?

That's a question I have asked of myself lately, too

The choice has been available this whole time. The longer you wait, the more it will appear you only made things right because you were forced to. Reputation capital is draining.

Chris McNeil

February 6, 2026

Original Open Letter Below, as of January 30, 2026

Mr. Altman and Mr. Altman,

We have an interesting system going on here. I have decided to change the system of housing for the better because I discovered our suffering is systemic and I thought, “that’s something I can make a difference in.”

The way I know to help points to the need to study the system from the end user - in this case, the vulnerable tenants' - point of view. To get as much range of benefit, it should include vulnerable tenants who could not afford lawyers when their housing rights are disregarded, so they have to go to court on their own behalf.

So I have done all this myself, as they would have to, without an attorney. Jonathan and Charles, if you think I had to take this case on pro se because I couldn't get an attorney to take it, you should consider how many attorneys I spoke with about it before taking it on: zero.

This kind of systems study, which I learned largely from my friend John Seddon, the founder of the highly effective Vanguard Method in the UK, pairs well with my own framework of Strategic Thought Leadership, which I am also applying to this.

By the way, Mr. Seddon has done his own work on Systems Thinking based housing reform in the UK that I would advise you to examine if your minds jump to "but what about profits?"

But we are not talking about profits now, we are looking at costs.

Human costs.

I have found that doing that kind of systems study in this context - dealing with your Property Manager and lawyers, along with the Charleston, SC Court of Common Pleas - involves some sacrifices.

Like being willing to endure the friction of a machine built to prevent vulnerable tenants from accessing justice. I do that in order to publicly document it, like a museum exhibit of the old and unnecessarily harmful ways wealthy property owners handled Housing and Housing Justice, back when they held on to the unconscious abdication/ mechanical extraction model sometimes dressed up in the prettier phrase "passive rental property investment".

But it isn't about passive versus active, it is about conscious versus unconscious. More on that in a bit after a more systemic look at the current machine you and others operate.

It is a high‑friction machine, very effective at wearing people down or, in some cases, pushing them toward a breakdown through what feels like coordinated gaslighting. More on that as well further down.

But, hey, just the cost of business, right?

Here’s a simple, interactive system diagram, with explanation after:

Here's the system story the diagram tells:

I ask the system for justice.

The system responds by punishing me for asking, by elevating the harm it causes, in order to force me to stop.

I bring in a different resource or strategy to ask the system for justice at a higher level, like game theory, which is something your lawyers don't seem to know much about.

The system responds by punishing me at a yet higher level for asking, by elevating the harm it causes in order to force me to stop.

The embedded belief under that seems to be "elevate the harm until he stops, no matter what it takes, to stop him from having the justice he and his family - pending on a jury agreeing with them - deserve."

If we take these two processes and look at them as a causal loop, it is a runaway reinforcing loop. But not a virtuous cycle. It is a vicious cycle.

Consider what that means. Even better, click on the top circle above to have a more visceral experience as you imagine the more expansive and vivid moving picture of the multiples of vulnerable innocent families your system impacts. Hear the multitude of innocent voices asking for the kind of help, Jonathan, that your work in affordable housing is supposed to provide. This work includes - as you describe on your own website - your former role as "chair of the City of Charleston's affordable housing initiative" and your nearly 20-year off and on status as a commissioner with the City of Charleston Homeownership Committee.

I honor those roles. But why are you continually funding a machine that I am demonstrating (with no intent to become some kind of martyr) is geared to smash the vulnerable tenant in need of stable housing and housing justice, instead of helping them?

From my perspective, acting the role of a vulnerable tenant simply seeking to correct housing injustice against his family, if I insist on justice - no matter what the cost to myself - the logic of this loop forces me to ask how far you are willing to let that escalation go.

Not necessarily to my death, because I would likely become too dysfunctional to litigate long before reaching that point, but to the point of permanent neurological harm that leaves me too impaired to outthink your lawyers.

That is the endpoint this kind of system dynamic points toward - if no one intervenes in the system properly to stop it.

The original harms - (allegedly) falsified postmark to avoid the penalty of a late deposit return, retaliatory eviction in a heat wave of 5 years+ tenants in good standing, mass syndicated private images and a Matterport virtual tour of me and my family, including the indignity of our older dog, Rocket in diapers - the same sweet old blind dog who got stuck under a couch, whimpering for hours due to the forced move - were bad enough.

That sound still haunts my heart. I thought it was a bad AC bearing for hours from the other end of a packed house. But it was a sound of fear and hurt I had never heard Rocket make before. I am angry at myself as well, for not checking to make sure he was OK sooner.

But, even with how bad all that was, from a right-vs-wrong standpoint, the reaction of your system to my simply asking for justice for these harms is exponentially worse.

I've been trying to intervene to fix this system, but have not yet found a way that works.

That's on you, Jonathan and Charles.

The system can't change until the property owners change their thinking and you are the ones whose thinking has created my suffering. That's my leverage for changing the system: your thinking.

Change rules, policies, system goals, feedback loops, all of those can he helpful interventions.

But the highest leverage point is changing the paradigm that created that system and that paradigm lives in your heads.

And that paradigm embedded in your thinking has generated this system, and would generate a different system that creates just as much harm.

Until you change your operating paradigm. Isn't it time?

I'll know when you have done it because you'll finally be willing to fairly settle. But you seem willing to escalate your own exposure, through your PMIC and lawyers - along with elevating my suffering,- such that we have yet to hit a limit of "enough".

That reveals a belief system you appear to hold: you seem to believe you have the right to use your money to make people suffer instead of paying what you owe them. My evidence is that you are willing to fund a machine of escalating harm that has yet to hit a limit - they are still at it even with the evidence of high level PTSD symptoms triggered by coordinated, long-term gaslighting … and even with this system now being lined up as a target of a Charleston County Sheriff’s Department investigation.

So how badly are you willing to harm me? I will get back to that concept, but first you need to know this is not abstract for me.

For months I have watched your property manager and your lawyers make choices that are indistinguishable, in their effects, from a deliberate strategy to break me down psychologically so I cannot keep standing up to you. They have taken actions that foreseeably and repeatedly worsened my PTSD symptoms, despite being told in detail what those symptoms are and how their conduct was affecting me.

By the way, PTSD symptoms are relevant here in part because you can also measure the impact of coordinated gaslighting with them - it's the same nature of harm . And I did not have PTSD (gaslighting impact) symptoms ahead of all this. Your agents gave it to me.

Your agents include a PMIC under LLR investigation and at the center of a Sheriff’s Office complaint in charge of our housing reality, and your retained counsel who, when confronted with falsified documents, mass privacy violations, and regulatory obstruction, did not deny liability - they acted as though none of it existed and recast my attempts to seek protection as “threats.”

From where I sit, that functions as coordinated, weaponized psychological manipulation. It feels like you and your agents chose methods designed to destabilize my mind rather than meet my evidence on the merits.

How much farther are you willing to take it? Until I have brain damage?

We do not have to treat that as a purely hypothetical concern.

I have filed a criminal complaint with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office concerning your property manager and your lawyers’ conduct, and I am cooperating fully with that investigation.

My report identifies the role of your PMIC - Tara Bayles - as a central focus of what I believe needs to be examined; law enforcement will determine what, if anything, was criminal.

This is way beyond typical lawfare. It is what I experience as coordinated gaslighting that can push somebody toward going crazy.

Imagine you have someone sit in your office. They just walk in and sit in the waiting room daily.

Ten or so other people come and go, all of whom pretend that other person is not there.

They look at the chair like it is empty.

And the original person leaves just before closing time, saying, “I was never here.”

And this goes on for three months.

That has been my reality, and today I snapped.

I am holding you publicly accountable for funding the system and the legal strategy that have produced this reality for my family.

And this is not the first time you are hearing about my family’s suffering. You have had detailed notice for months, including my December filings and January emails that put the full scope of harm and risk in front of you with your lawyers copied, and you have not had a single direct word to say to me about any of it.

Chris McNeil

January 28, 2026

PS - Maybe you aren’t really into all that humanitarian contribution stuff, though, Jonathan? I sense you are but you have huge inner conflict. This is your opportunity to resolve that.

PPS - Why are two firms and 5 lawyers fighting to stop a single bank subpoena? What is in the SAC 181_OP Synovus account that is worth destroying a reputation for?