Brandon Bryant, Malicious Prosecution, And A Timely Lesson For The Last Ditch Left – by Travis Mateer

Missoula is supposedly a liberal college town with progressive values, but is it really?

Because, if Missoula IS a liberal college town with progressive values, how can the city’s prosecution team justify engaging in malicious prosecution against an anti-war whistleblower for the crime of KNOWINGLY making LOUD and UNUSUAL noises?

In a soon-to-be-held jury trial here in Missoula, drone whistleblower, Brandon Bryant, will be facing prosecution for “disturbing the peace”, a criminal charge defined in the preliminary jury conference hearing as “knowingly making loud, unusual noises“.

To better understand why I think this criminal case is an example of malicious prosecution, lets look at a definition of malicious prosecution from a law firm’s website:

When someone is unjustly the target of criminal or civil procedures without probable cause, and when the real motivation behind the case is not justice but rather personal animosity, harassment, or retaliation, this is known as malicious prosecution.

For instance, you might have been the victim of malicious prosecution if you were detained or brought before the court without sufficient evidence and it later transpired that the allegations were unfounded and brought out of animosity or bias.

In addition to wasting time and money, this type of legal abuse can harm a person’s independence, profession, reputation, and mental health. Indeed, you have the right to pursue justice if this has happened to you.

Six years ago, amidst tensions surrounding the use of Tax Increment Financing, which led to the documentary, Engen’s Missoula, Brandon Bryant faced felony charges after someone else edited his videos and emailed City Council members the content.

For those who don’t recall this effort to prosecute Brandon Bryant, which included Judge Vannatta REFUSING to lower his bond, here’s KPAX’s initial reporting:

The man that was banned from Missoula City Council meetings for making threats has been formally charged.

Brandon Bryant of Missoula appeared in court on Thursday, after making a threatening YouTube video about city council members.

Bryant is accused of threatening mass murder-those threats apparently directed at Missoula City Council members. He is charged with one felony count of threats/improper influence in official and political matters.

…

Bryant is banned from contacting any city council member, or entering city property. As of Thursday afternoon he is still in jail on $100,000 bond.

Judge Shane Vannatta refused to lower the bond amount because he said the court is disturbed by the nature of the allegations.

Brandon Bryant was ultimately acquitted of the felony criminal charge that Missoula authorities spent thousands and thousands of dollars to prosecute, but this town wasn’t done with him yet. Here are several posts I’ve written over the past year which document the latest campaign to extinguish this unwanted subversive from our local landscape:

“A Preemptive Local Threat Assessment” (August 25th, 2025)

“How Does This Protect And Serve The Missoula Community, PD?” (August 29th, 2025)

“A Challenge To Local Media: Cover The Brandon Bryant Case!” (October 28th, 2025)

“Weaponized Protection Orders, Non-Compliant Sex Offenders, And The Case Of Brandon Wayne Bryant” (February 14th, 2026)

That last post about a weaponized restraining order is the context local prosecutors do NOT want introduced into Bryant’s trial for “disturbing the peace” because the violation of the order of protection charge got dropped after the protection order itself was, from my understanding, similarly dropped.

That means the entire setup for Bryant’s police interaction that day, outside, where the anti-war protestors do their thing on Fridays near Higgins bridge (sorry progressives, I’m not playing the rename game) has been excised like a tumor so that ONLY Brandon Bryant’s reaction at being legally harassed remains under the legal microscope.

Is this what Missoula taxpayers want done with their peace and justice dollars?

We’ll return to destroying subversives in a moment, but, before we do, the clown is my pivot to bring in the “Covid conscious” lesbian bar called “The Last Ditch” into this discussion, since it highlights why all the mutated forms of “leftist” ideology have essentially become an insane circular firing squad of vicious attacks capable of utterly destroying a local business after a modest attempt by this financially struggling business at going “mask optional” one day of the week.

And the clown connection?

Apparently, one of the three lesbians saw the writing on the woke wall, so to speak, and literally entered a clown school to flee this hellscape of leftist annihilation before it went nuclear during a Zoom meeting that has now, quickly, become an almost archetypal example of how truly insane this behavior appears to the casual observer.

Going straight (pun intended) to the poor woman left holding the debt, even her emotional appeal during the Zoom meeting didn’t satiate these hive-minded monsters of destruction, as reported by the New York Post:

When it came time to hear from Last Ditch’s last remaining owner — the other two quit months ago — she broke down in tears saying she’d just been trying to help her friends with their business before ending up in charge.

“It was not my passion project,” Jackie Matellian cried through her mask, explaining she’d been left responsible for the $50,000 business loan taken out with her friends and that she’d been living in a car for six months to stay ahead of bar payments.

Matellian also claimed she’d been working four jobs to keep up with the payments.

“I never really wanted this,” she said. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.”

Her critics weren’t impressed.

“You chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings,” one person responded. “This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”

It’s at this point we should realize that Jackie Matellian wasn’t facing a “reasonable” audience of critics, she was facing a bloodthirsty mob of dangerous zealots who had already condoned threats of fire-bombing her business, and these threats were issued without fear of consequence because this entire class of victims has been told their victim status totally absolves them of accountability for anything they do.

I put the word “reasonable” in scare quotes, though, because CIVIL legal claims, like protection orders in Montana, hinge on what a “reasonable” person would perceive. Here’s the actual language of the statute from Montana Code Annotated:

The intent of protection orders, as the name suggests, is to PROTECT the petitioner, not PUNISH the defendant, but enough people are using protection order to punish people that a Virginia law firm outlined why this is NOT the intent of the process:

In some cases, individuals falsely claim to be victims to gain an advantage in a dispute, using the protective order process as a means of punishment. The legal system, however, is not designed to resolve minor relationship or familial disputes rooted in personal grudges.

Weaponizing a protective order not only limits a person’s freedom of movement and ability to live freely but also has lasting effects on their reputation and relationships. The misuse of these orders can have long-term impacts, and it’s essential to address them with the seriousness they deserve.

When protective orders are weaponized in this way, they distort the purpose of the legal system and consume valuable legal resources.

For additional inquiries on this process, and how it might be abused, here’s a post on Reddit asking what would happen if someone did essentially what Brandon Bryant’s former roommate has done to him, with assistance from local authorities:

And here are some replies. Notice how the person being harassed by the weaponized protection order is expected to change their routines and take on the expense of hiring a lawyer to combat someone inclined to show up where they know the defendant is going to be:

One final online source on this topic continues asking the important questions about this process, and identifies those who are most likely to abuse the process–WOMEN!

Orders of protection are crucial legal instruments designed to protect individuals from harassment, abuse, and threats. However, there have been numerous cases where these orders are weaponized, particularly in contentious personal relationships. Some individuals, particularly women in this context, obtain these orders under false pretenses to gain leverage in disputes, causing undue harm to the accused.

One troubling aspect of this misuse is when the alleged victims, who sought protection, initiate contact with the person from whom they are supposedly seeking protection. This behavior not only undermines the integrity of the legal system but also causes significant emotional and legal distress to the accused party.

I propose the enactment of a new law that holds alleged victims accountable if they initiate contact with the person against whom they have an active order of protection. The key provisions of this law would include:

Clear Definition and Evidence: Establishing clear guidelines on what constitutes initiation of contact, including electronic communications, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Evidence of such contact must be thoroughly documented.

Lying about me and making my life as unlivable as possible is one thing, but when I see the name of my petitioner appear in print, in the Missoulian, to preach compassion about “urban camping”, where drug abuse and sexual abuse is happening with ALARMING frequency, I know how important it is that I continue to fight back against the kind of people who say shit like this in public while lying to the courts to destroy a REAL truth teller:

As the former Homeless Outreach Coordinator of the Poverello Center, I once relied on supposedly “empathic” people to do what I thought was an important community service, but now I see this “empathy” for what it is: a toxic method of attaining cultural power and, like all power, it corrupts the people who wield it.

If this town chooses to keep ignoring what’s happening with weaponized protection orders, and all the time and money being wasted to punish and destroy undesirables, then REAL threats to community safety, like cop-protected drug dealers killing people with dangerous substances, will continue to proliferate.

If that’s what this community wants, then just sit back, do nothing, and let the people who mistakingly stood up for what they believed in get destroyed so that you liberal cowards can pretend this type of legal destruction will never come for you.

Thanks for reading.