OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — March 30, 2026 (The Oklahoma Post)
On February 5, 2026, a “civil rights” attorney was jailed in Ada, Oklahoma for contempt of court after supposedly quoting a Pontotoc County bailiff who had that morning told him to get his rear end to the courthouse. His client, a domestic violence victim sheltering in another state under a protective order, did not appear. The attorney spent part of that morning arranging childcare from the Pontotoc County Jail. He was released later the same day. Maybe there was more to the story?
The Oklahoma Post covered that story. It became the most-read piece this publication has produced, generating thousands of clicks from search queries related to Rob Hopkins in a single 28-day period.
Rob B. Hopkins operated Hopkins Law and Associates, P.C. at 2807 N. Walker Avenue, Suite 1, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73103. He is a graduate of Oklahoma City University School of Law. His legal career focused on immigration law, civil rights and family law for marginalized communities. He holds degrees in Feminist Studies and Chicano and Latino Studies, is bilingual and has been a member of the Young Lawyers Division of the Oklahoma Bar Association, the OBA Diversity Committee and the OBA Women in Law Committee. He volunteers with Catholic Charities on immigration matters and holds membership in the LGBTQ+ Bar Association’s Family Law Institute.
He is alleged to have done bad things. He also abandoned his clients and schemed with opposing counsel.
Waiting for the Other Side to Strike
An Oklahoma County mother retained Hopkins to represent her in a family law case involving her child’s medical coverage and custody. She signed a retainer agreement setting a total fee of $3,000.00, with $1,500.00 due upfront and the remainder in monthly installments. She paid $1,800.00 in total before stopping payments when, she says, it became clear that no meaningful legal work was being performed on her case. She has asked to remain anonymous because her custody matter is still active and she does not want her participation in this investigation used against her in ongoing proceedings. The Oklahoma Post has verified her account through text message records, court docket entries and written correspondence retained by this publication.
Her central complaint involves a motion for contempt. Her former spouse had, she says, stopped maintaining medical insurance for their child and stopped paying medical bills as required under the court order. Hopkins told her the motion had been drafted and that his staff was handling its delivery to the court.
Text messages dated December 10, 2025, reviewed by The Oklahoma Post, show her texting Hopkins to report that the contempt motion was not showing on the OSCN docket. She wrote that the situation was getting urgent and asked him to check with the court. She told him she hated calling because she knew he took on a lot of cases. She got a thank you in reply. Nothing else.
Two weeks passed. On December 24, 2025, at 5:39 in the morning, she discovered through her own monitoring of the court docket that her former spouse and his attorney Kevin Taylor had filed a new motion to modify custody. She texted Hopkins immediately. His written response, reviewed in full by this publication, arrived in four separate messages sent within minutes of each other.
“Yes I’ve been waiting for them to file.” Then: “And let Kevin know to serve me.” Then: “It’s the better move.” Then: “Now he’s blaming the medical neglect on you.”
Hopkins had been deliberately sitting and waiting for Kevin Taylor to file a new motion against his own client. He had been in communication with Taylor about the motion before it was filed. He had told her none of this. She found out at 5:39 on Christmas Eve morning by checking the docket herself because her attorney had not called.
She did not tell him to stop pursuing the contempt motion. The text chain does not show any such instruction. What it shows is her attorney announcing after the fact, that he had decided waiting was the better strategic move, framing a unilateral choice as though it were a plan she had been a part of.
She kept trying. By February 2026 she was texting Hopkins asking whether she was losing him as a lawyer and telling him she had found all of her previous attorneys inadequate. She described feeling desperate to hold on to the one person left between her child and a bad outcome. Text messages reviewed by The Oklahoma Post show no substantive response from Hopkins in the weeks that followed.
She learned he was closing his firm through a Facebook post. She contacted him to confirm. He confirmed it. He had not told her directly.
Hopkins subsequently sent her a withdrawal notice directed to her personally rather than filed with the court. When she accessed her client portal to review the itemized billing he had claimed was available there, the portal was empty. She took a timestamped screenshot and has retained it.
She sent Hopkins a formal demand for a full refund of the $1,800.00 she had paid, citing Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.15 and Rule 1.16 by section number, attaching the text message record, documenting the absence of any filed motions and giving him seven business days to respond before she files a formal Oklahoma Bar Association grievance and pursues a small claims action.
Hopkins responded the same evening. His full substantive reply, from the document reviewed by The Oklahoma Post: “Have a good evening.”
In his initial response before that closing line, Hopkins wrote that she had personally told him not to file the contempt motion after it had been drafted, that all her calls had been returned, and that he had personally discussed the firm closure with her. The December 24 text chain does not support that account. It shows an attorney telling his client he had been waiting for opposing counsel to file, that he had already spoken to opposing counsel, and that this was the better move. It does not show a client telling him to stand down. It shows a client who woke up on Christmas Eve morning and found out from the court docket.
She also provided The Oklahoma Post with a screenshot of a Google review posted on Taylor’s public business listing. The review, approximately seven months ago and carrying a five-star rating, reads in part: “Kevin was awesome, he helped me with my custody with my son and made it actual 50/50 joint custody as it wasn’t before. I was dealing with a narcissist/borderline personality disorder EX, that made my life hell. however we do plan on being back for sole custody!” The ambush had been planned.
The source told The Oklahoma Post the reviewer is her former spouse. The review was posted on Taylor’s public Google business page while her case was active. Its closing line, that they plan to return for sole custody, is consistent with the new sole custody motion she says was filed without her being served. The review is retained by this publication. Taylor was asked specifically about the review as part of the pre-publication contact. He did not respond.
She told this publication she discovered a new opposing motion on the court docket on her own, then learned from Hopkins, after she called him, that he had already spoken to opposing counsel Kevin Taylor about it and decided not to respond. She says Hopkins told her: “Well, I can’t have you like this or you’re never gonna be able to go on the stand.” She has since retained new counsel.
She says Hopkins never filed an entry of appearance in her case, despite executing a retainer agreement and accepting payment. She says he sent her a personal withdrawal notice rather than filing with the court and is now claiming an outstanding balance. When she accessed her client portal it was empty. She has preserved a timestamped screenshot.
[I will get those emails redacted and posted tomorrow. Along with our corresponding article on the misdeeds of Kevin Taylor, then Corley. Seems to be a small circle of people in the know.]
Kristine Rice The Writ She Wrote
Kristine Rice is an auditor at a Fortune 500 company. She is also a pro se litigant in an active Oklahoma County guardianship case before Judge Martha Oaks. She retained Hopkins, signed a retainer agreement and paid a retainer. She told The Oklahoma Post in an interview that Hopkins never filed an entry of appearance in her case.
Failure to file an entry of appearance in a pending matter while accepting retainer funds and holding oneself out as counsel implicates Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.2, governing scope of representation, Rule 1.3, governing diligence, and Rule 1.15, governing safekeeping of client property.
Rice’s case did not begin with Hopkins. It began in 2014, when she and her then-husband Dennis Lee Rice II were awarded co-guardianship of an infant girl identified in court proceedings as K.R. Dennis Rice II is not K.R.’s biological father, but the grandfather. The biological mother was going to adopt the child outside of blood family, but Kristine stepped in. She raised K.R. as her own child, with motherly love, for more than a decade, serving as her primary caregiver from three months of age a fact, Rice says, reflected in the court record itself. This is all appropriate and necessary by law under the Family First Act. That history, and what happened to it inside Oklahoma County courtrooms, was documented in a March 19, 2026 investigation by Oklahoma Watch reporter J.C. Hallman titled “Sealed Records, 11-Minute Hearings, Hidden Conflicts: Inside Oklahoma’s Broken Guardianship System.”
The Oklahoma Post is not republishing that investigation. We are adding to it.
The Rice marriage deteriorated. Many do. Most all in fact. In this case, on November 18, 2018, officers of the Tuttle Police Department responded to a domestic disturbance in Tuttle, Oklahoma. PD Report No. 2018-00621, an unclassified closed case reviewed by The Oklahoma Post, documents what officers found when they arrived. Officer Buckles documented that Kristine Rice reported Dennis Lee Rice II had allegedly pushed her against a wall, choked her, followed her into the living room and struck her on the left side of the face with an open hand, then threw a chair and threw her purse. Officer Buckles documented multiple finger-nail marks on Kristine Rice’s neck, observed her left cheek to be red and appearing to have the shape of a hand, photographed her injuries and stored them in the department’s evidence folder. Officer Cox’s supplemental narrative confirmed the observations, noting marks on Kristine Rice’s neck in the shape of a finger and a hand imprint on the left side of her face. Dennis Lee Rice II was placed under arrest for domestic assault and battery and booked at the Grady County Jail.
That arrest record existed when every subsequent proceeding over K.R. was conducted. It was available to every judge who presided. It was available to Rob Hopkins.
Rice also told The Oklahoma Post that in her divorce case there was a protective order and a private protective order filed on behalf of the minor child, of which all presiding judges were made aware. That private protective order dates to March 2021, when Rice says she and K.R. fled the home after Dennis Rice allegedly berated K.R. so severely that the child, then seven years old, urinated herself.
Oklahoma Watch reported that the first guardianship judge assigned to K.R.’s case, Special Judge Allen J. Welch, affirmed supervision orders limiting Dennis Rice’s visitation. Dennis Rice then disappeared from the proceedings between June 2023 and January 2025. When he returned, Welch had retired. The case transferred to Oklahoma County Special Judge Michelle Harrington, who had marketed herself before taking the bench as a divorce attorney who does not like divorce. Harrington immediately restored Dennis Rice’s visitation rights despite the documented history.
Oklahoma Watch obtained therapist treatment reports available to Harrington that contained K.R.’s own words. In January 2025, K.R. allegedly described Kristine Rice’s home as her only refuge, saying she could no longer escape what was happening in her life. In March 2025, K.R. allegedly said she did not want overnight visits with Dennis Rice because his anger was still there. By April 2025, K.R. was allegedly expressing fear that Dennis Rice would gain full control and prevent Kristine from ever seeing her again.
During this entire period, Kristine says, Hopkins was allegedly discussing her case with other clients in ways she describes as dishonest. Rice told The Oklahoma Post that people she had never met contacted her to say Hopkins had told them the only reason Dennis Rice came back after a 21-month absence from the proceedings was because Rice had filed a contempt motion against him. Kristine says that is false. She and K.R. had fled under a victim protective order. Dennis Rice was absent for 21 months. Rice says Hopkins was allegedly lying about her case to explain away his own inaction, telling people he could not do much for her in order to manage expectations he was failing to meet. Kristine was wanting to allow sharing.
None of that stopped what happened next.
On October 8, 2025, Kristine Rice filed a motion to remove Harrington from the case. The following day a hearing was held before Oklahoma County Special Judge Karen Aguilar. Hopkins participated by phone from out of state, citing medical reasons. Rice was also on the phone and says she could not hear the proceedings or participate. The hearing lasted eleven minutes. When it ended, Aguilar had awarded sole custody of K.R. to Dennis Rice and issued a no-contact order barring Kristine from any communication with the child she had raised since infancy.
What Rice says she did not know until afterward was that Hopkins had allegedly failed to notify opposing counsel that K.R. was already being returned to Dennis Rice as ordered on October 13. Instead, Kristine says, opposing counsel told the court Rice was withholding the child and refusing to take her to school. Rice says she was in her car driving to pick K.R. up from school when the call took place. She says her phone records confirm it.
Hopkins was quoted in the Oklahoma Watch investigation describing Harrington’s posture before the recusal motion was filed. He did not address Kristine allegations about his own representation to this publication.
Kristine told The Oklahoma Post in a follow-up that she stated on the record in her proceedings: “Hopkins held my case and my daughter hostage by not filing motions, about ten of them, into the matter, and instead was told no, just wait, trust me.”
Kristine did not arrive at pro se litigation by choice. When a filing deadline approached and Hopkins had not acted, Rice went to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to file the writ of mandamus herself a document she says she was directed to write. After she filed it, Hopkins texted her. His message, she says, read: “Why did you file that? I was going to do it today.”
She was sanctioned for the filing, ordered to pay opposing counsel’s attorney fees and the cost of their response. She does not dispute the sanction. What she says she could not have anticipated was what the filing ultimately produced: it was that proceeding that brought to light the undisclosed attorney-client relationship between Judge Karen Aguilar and GAL Courtney Schamel. Kristine had not filed to expose the conflict. She filed because her attorney had not.
The story did not end with the eleven-minute hearing. Oklahoma Watch reported that Rice later overheard, from outside Aguilar’s chambers, the judge telling Hopkins that she was recusing from the case. The reason, Kristine says, was that Courtney Schamel, K.R.’s court-appointed guardian ad litem, was simultaneously serving as Aguilar’s personal attorney in Aguilar’s own divorce proceeding. Court documents confirm that arrangement. There was no disclosure of this alleged conflict at the time of the hearing that determined where K.R. would live.
Kristine has argued in subsequent filings that the no-contact order is void, entered by a judge who had an undisclosed conflict of interest and based on an affidavit she contends contained material misrepresentations. That motion remains pending before Judge Martha Oaks.
In December 2025, Oklahoma County District Court Judge Amy Palumbo removed Harrington from the case entirely, citing the high probability of bias. The case has since been reassigned. Rice has a hearing before Judge Martha Oaks on April 7, 2026. Judge Oaks, Rice says, has not been easy. But at a recent proceeding, when Rice finally stated on the record that she had been unable to present a single piece of evidence since February of the prior year due to what she characterizes as ineffective counsel, Oaks listened and set the motion for hearing. It will be, Kristine says, the first time she has been able to put evidence before the court since K.R. was taken from her on October 9, 2025.
As of a public Facebook post on March 9, 2026, Kristine wrote that she was at day 152 and could not imagine what her child was going through. She shared a Women’s Coalition piece the same day and separately shared a KOCO 5 News report noting the Oklahoma Senate had passed a bill to elevate the penalty for committing domestic violence in front of a child from a misdemeanor to a felony.
The 2018 arrest of Dennis Lee Rice II occurred years before the custody battle that would determine K.R.’s life. What existed then was a police report with documented injuries, two officer accounts, photographs in a department evidence folder and a booking at the Grady County Jail. That record was before every judge who presided over K.R.’s case. Including, Rice says, the attorney who allegedly told the court she had fired him while she stood in the room holding text messages that said otherwise. Including the attorney who, Rice says, told her he could not do much for her while allegedly telling other clients inaccurate things about why her case was not moving. Including the attorney who participated in the eleven-minute hearing that cost Rice her child by phone, allegedly unable to hear the proceedings, from out of state.
Kristine further told The Oklahoma Post that when she finally compared notes with Julie Kramer, she asked Kramer what Hopkins had charged for the writ he filed with the Oklahoma Supreme Court on Kramer’s behalf. Kramer estimated approximately $2,000. Rice’s response, in her own words: “Interesting, because I wrote it.”
Kristine says she was unable to file a bar complaint against Hopkins for months because he had allegedly threatened to share information about her case with her new judge, a jurist he claimed to know personally. She told The Oklahoma Post she felt handcuffed, unable to act against him while her child remained in a proceeding she had not yet been able to properly litigate. She has not seen or spoken to K.R. since October 9, 2025. She is now proceeding with a bar complaint.
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Justice For Julie
This publication wrote the February 5 story about Hopkins being jailed in Ada. That story was accurate based on what was verified at the time and reflected a genuine accountability concern about how Pontotoc County handled an attorney appearing for a domestic violence client. The Oklahoma Post stands by that reporting.
When this publication called Rob Hopkins before that story ran, he did not want to discuss his client. He wanted to discuss himself. He told this publication we needed to note in the article that we had not spoken to him before publishing. We had the recording. We had spoken to him. He did not seem to register the difference.
That call was the clearest preview of what his former clients would later describe in recorded interviews: an attorney who deflected, went quiet when pressed, made unilateral decisions without telling the people paying him, and eventually sent withdrawal notices to clients rather than to the courts where their cases were pending.
The jailing in Ada made him briefly famous. A bilingual civil rights attorney thrown in contempt for quoting a court bailiff who had told him to get his rear end to the courthouse, the story wrote itself, and this publication wrote it. Not much of his side of the story is true though…that is why the focus of those articles, and this remain on the context and the documents. More than 2,600 people searched his name on our page in the 28 days that followed. The click-through rate suggested they were specifically looking for him, not just stumbling across the story.
The internet did not decide he was a hero. Pages including I Stand With Meg and Guerrilla Publishing, which had previously focused on family court and domestic violence advocacy, chose instead to focus on the fact that Hopkins is transgender and on his reaction to being jailed or his mental breakdown. The mockery spread from there. This publication did not participate in that. We reported the contempt citation, the procedural absurdity of a rural court jailing a civil rights attorney for quoting a bailiff, and the broader pattern of judicial irregularities in domestic violence cases that Kramer’s situation represented. We reported it straight. What a person’s gender identity has to do with whether they properly filed a motion or entered an appearance in a case is a question those pages never got around to asking.
His former clients were not mocking him either. They were angry. They were scared. They were facing Kevin Taylor on the other side of their courtrooms and had retained Hopkins to stand between their children and that outcome. What they described to this publication, in recorded interviews and documented correspondence, had nothing to do with his gender identity or his reaction to being jailed. It had to do with a contempt motion that was never filed, a Supreme Court writ that a client wrote herself, a VPO hearing that was dismissed because the client was not told what it was, an entry of appearance that was never made despite a signed retainer, and a firm that announced its closure on Facebook before the clients whose cases were still pending heard a word about it directly.
But the story of Rob Hopkins and Julie Ann Kramer does not begin or end with a Pontotoc County contempt citation.
Julie Kramer is a former University of Oklahoma gymnast whose Oklahoma County case involves a man she alleges raped her while she was unconscious, a victim protective order that went unheard for more than a year, and a judge whose handling of multiple domestic violence custody cases has been the subject of sustained coverage by this publication. Her case is also one of the most-read stories The Oklahoma Post has produced. When Hopkins was jailed in February, it was while attempting to represent her in Pontotoc County, where she was required to appear in a separate custody matter while simultaneously sheltering in another state under an active protective order.
Retired OU Gymnast’s Perfect 10 Fight for Justice After Judges’ Shocking Errors – The Oklahoma Post
What sources told this publication is that they were present as a group in the Oklahoma County courthouse on December 19, 2025, the day of a critical hearing in Kramer’s case before Judge James M. Siderias. The source says Hopkins agreed that day to schedule a full victim protective order hearing for January 6, 2026. The docket reflected only a placeholder at a different time. Hopkins did not file a remote appearance for Kramer for January 6. He did not prepare exhibits. He did not brief Kramer on the nature of the proceeding. He did not tell her the date had been set as a full VPO day. Kramer did not appear. The hearing was dismissed.
Then Rice, further told this publication that she wrote the application for writ of mandamus that Hopkins filed with the Oklahoma Supreme Court on behalf of Kramer. Hopkins billed Kramer for that work. Rice says she did not learn what Kramer had been charged for the document until the two women compared notes after Rice identified herself as a Hopkins client….at the courthouse. Good stuff.
When Hopkins was jailed in Pontotoc County on February 5, his client was in hiding in another state with an active protective order because an Oklahoma County judge had not yet heard her victim protective order case. That VPO case had not been heard, in part, because the January 6 hearing Hopkins had agreed to schedule was dismissed when Kramer did not appear for a proceeding she had not been properly prepared for or informed of.
After the jailing, Hopkins told this publication before our February story ran that he had not been contacted before we published. He stated we needed to note that we had not spoken to him. We confirmed on our recording that we had spoken to him. He did not address the representation failures Rice described. We already knew there were issues.
This story is not a retraction of the February piece. A man, or woman, or both can be mistreated by a rural court and still mistreat his clients.
Both things can be true. No need to highlight the transgender issue or any other actions; the only need is to keep the focus on due process, family bonds, civil rights, and accountability in our courts. Based on four separate cases with consistent documented failures, three sources with consistent accounts, documented text messages, a formal demand letter, an email response that consists of four words, an entry of appearance question that goes directly to the bar rules, and a dismissed VPO hearing for a domestic violence victim whose case this publication had already covered, The Oklahoma Post believes the public has an interest in knowing what multiple former clients of Rob Hopkins have raised before his firm closes tomorrow. Will the OK BAR act?
Hopkins was contacted for comment. His response to his client’s formal demand letter is documented in this report. He did not respond to questions submitted on behalf of The Oklahoma Post. Any response he provides will be published in full. Maybe.
Complaints against Oklahoma attorneys Kevin Taylor, Rob Hopkins, Ky Corley, Phillip Corley, Jimmy Oliver, Melissa Delacerda, may be submitted to the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Office of the General Counsel at 1901 N. Lincoln Boulevard, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73105, phone (405) 416-7000, or at okbar.org.
Writing By: Kim Waxler | Editing by Robbie Robertson
Editor’s Note:
Sources
KOCO 5 News, Oklahoma Senate domestic violence in front of children bill, March 9, 2026 — koco.com
Oklahoma Title 43, Section 109.3 — oklahoma.gov
Hopkins Law and Associates, P.C. hopkinslawandassociates.com 2807 N. Walker Avenue, Suite 1, Oklahoma City, OK 73103
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.2 (Scope of Representation) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.3 (Diligence) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.5 (Fees) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.15 (Safekeeping Property) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.16 (Declining or Terminating Representation) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 5.5 (Unauthorized Practice of Law) — okbar.org
Oklahoma Bar Association, Office of the General Counsel — okbar.org — 1901 N. Lincoln Boulevard, Oklahoma City, OK 73105 — (405) 416-7000
Council on Judicial Complaints — oscn.net
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