The Winstons Together

A Brief Timeline

The Long Years

Arroyo Vista, 1999–2009.

The Winstons moved in 1999 from a mold-stricken first home to a five-acre gated farm at 2000 Arroyo Vista Way, El Dorado Hills. They built a custom barn there, eventually valued at roughly three hundred thousand dollars, and they began the rescue work that would define the next two decades of their life together. Horses came first. Then dogs. Then the kind of population that a couple committed to taking in what others would not take in tends to accumulate. The Keeper, Alma's mother, lived with them. People stopped their cars on the road outside to admire the pasture.

From the beginning, there was a neighbor problem. The harassment came in waves and was, at no point, ambiguous. There were the threats spoken aloud in the presence of police officers. There was the seventy-pound dog that mauled Charel's leg while a neighbor stood by and shouted, in front of the responding officer, that maybe now the Winstons would pack their bags and leave town. There were forty-plus police reports filed by the Winstons over a three-year period documenting vandalism, theft, and direct threats. Not one of those reports was investigated. The pattern of complaint without remedy would become the structural feature of every interaction the Winstons had with public authority for the next twenty years.

Forty-plus police reports filed by the Winstons over three years. Vandalism, theft, death threats. Not one investigated.

The barn arson, December 27, 2004.

On December 27, 2004, the Arroyo Vista barn was destroyed by arson. The flames were visible from Sacramento. Alma looked out the window of the small RV the Winstons were living in at the time and saw red light coming through the barn window where one of their dogs slept. She ran. At the doors of the barn the heat was, in the words she has used since, catastrophic. Something stopped her at the threshold. She turned back. As she turned, the fire erupted in every direction at once.

She and Charel stood together in the field afterward and watched the barn burn to the ground. Then Alma ran, repeatedly, into the smoke and heat, and brought the horses out. Her stallion Plebeyo Acierte, second champion of the world, was led to safety. Their horse Milagro was rescued with wet blankets across his back, steam rising from the cloth as they walked him through the heat and out into the cold field beyond.

The dog who had been in the barn was not found in the ashes. What was recovered, days later, was not him. A veterinary examination determined the bone structure was incompatible with the breed and weight of the missing animal — approximately twenty-five pounds of remains where the missing dog weighed eighty-five to ninety. The jaw had been removed before the fire. The forelimbs had been removed before the fire. The veterinarian described the manner of removal as ritualistic. A neighbor's keys were found on the ground outside the burning barn. Men's boot prints were photographed at the apparent point of origin. A 911 recording from earlier captured a teenager's voice saying "I'm going to kill you, bitch!" The insurance investigator concluded, on the documentary record, that the fire was arson and that it was an outside job.

The next morning, federal agents arrived. They demanded a liability waiver as a precondition to their assistance. The waiver was signed by two women still in shock from the previous night. Some time afterward, the case was officially closed by the local authorities as "unknown cause of origin." Nobody was charged. Some time after that again, a sheriff's deputy delivered to the Winstons a box of internal documents implicating the office he worked for. Before he was forced to retrieve the box, the Winstons removed and secured the documents that mattered. Those documents are with them still.

The prosecution, 2004–2009.

In 2004, despite a documented finding by the prior District Attorney's administration in 2002 that there was no evidence to charge, the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office filed felony charges against the Winstons. A grand jury proceeding followed in 2005. Witnesses were coerced. A juror's aside, captured on the record, asked: "Are these some gay mafia?" Another noted, also on the record, that the women had been described to the jury as not liked, even hated, but that the panel had heard no evidence of any actual crime committed. The grand jury was tainted; the prosecution proceeded anyway.

The trial bench, in turn, was hostile. A statement from a judge during the bifurcated trial — "I have bent over backwards for you people" — entered the record. Alma was denied counsel at the bifurcated stage. The speedy-trial clock was exceeded by thirty-three months. In a separate Sacramento County matter, after the Winstons filed a valid peremptory challenge against the assigned judge, that judge imposed on them a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar vexatious-litigant bond before being recused for bias. The damage was already done.

In 2008 and 2009, the Arroyo Vista property was foreclosed by a presiding judge — later removed from the bench by the California Judicial Committee for unrelated egregious misconduct — in the middle of active mortgage negotiations. The Winstons were given twenty-four hours to vacate. Five acres. The barn ground. The pasture. Twenty-four hours.

Across the same period, the County also conducted what can only be described as an off-the-record reputational campaign against the Winstons in their own community. Local businesses, including national hardware and warehouse retailers, were contacted and given an unflattering account of the family. Medical records were seized in 2006–2007 and posted online. Court-sealed documents were disseminated outside the seal. A telecommunications company's dispatch managers, on multiple occasions, called the Sheriff's Office with false reports that the Winstons had guns and were threatening people. None of this was prosecuted as the harassment of identifiable persons that it was. All of it was perpetrated, in the Winstons' lived experience and in their documentary record, by County employees and contractors.

The Lonesome Dove sanctuary, 2010–2018.

What rose at 4767 Lonesome Dove Drive in Shingle Springs after the loss of Arroyo Vista was, by any honest accounting, one of the most extraordinary private animal sanctuaries in Northern California. More than three hundred animals lived there over the years that followed: roughly one hundred and fifty dogs, nearly twenty horses, alpacas, goats, exotic birds, cats, pigeons, fish, guinea pigs. The dogs were fed daily-cut raw beef and organic vegetables. Many of them lived to twenty or twenty-five years, twice the lifespan typical for their size. The Winstons spent approximately twenty-five thousand dollars per month on the animals' nutrition. They conducted, in collaboration with a veterinary research program at UC Davis, stem cell work on dogs infected with Circovirus. The premises were, in the words of those who saw them, clean enough that one could eat off the ground.

One of the horses born on the property — a pony called Tin Cup — broke a leg as a foal. He was fitted, by the family veterinarian Dr. Dean R. Bader DVM, with a custom prosthetic. By the age of eight he walked, ran, and lived as a normal horse, on the prosthetic, on the property where he was born. Plebeyo Acierte, by then approximately thirty-five years old, was a former second champion of the world and Alma's deepest personal companion among the animals. The household ran on an ethic of care that was, in retrospect, the best argument anyone could have made for the people who ran it.

In January 2018, the Lonesome Dove property was recorded as tribal land by its Metes and Bounds and original Land Patent. In a kennel-license proceeding before an El Dorado County Superior Court judge that same month, the judge formally acknowledged Charel's sovereign status as Chief Dovetail of the Diné Tribes of the Athabaskan Nation. That recognition is on the El Dorado County court record. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars and it cannot be unsaid.

In July 2013, the then-Sheriff of El Dorado County personally visited 4767 Lonesome Dove Drive as a welcome guest, accompanied by his lieutenant. He met both Charel and Alma. He promised, in the language of his office, that there would be no hate crimes against the family on his watch. The visit was confirmed in writing afterward by the Sheriff's Office Executive Secretary. He was, on that day, a guest in the home he would order raided six years later.

May 2, 2019. The raid.

In April 2019, in the weeks leading up to what would happen, the harassment around the property escalated sharply. A dead deer with its genitals removed appeared in the area. A bludgeoned, visually impaired cat was found at the road entrance. Stalking was reported. Chainsaw threats were reported. The Winstons documented all of it in writing to the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office. A sergeant from the Sheriff's Office visited the relevant neighbors on April 18 to warn them. Fourteen days later the County, which had been put on written notice that the Winstons were the targets of an escalating local harassment campaign, raided the Winstons.

Representatives of retail rescue organizations had been observed casing the property for fifteen days before the raid. On the morning of May 2, before any animal had been removed, those representatives were on site, audibly arguing among themselves over which animals each of them would take. The argument was over goats. "I'm getting those goats. No, I'm getting those goats." Four to five news reporters had been brought to the property in advance and told this would be the largest hoarding-and-abuse case the County had ever produced. The narrative had been constructed, the press had been pre-positioned, and the buyers were already on the lawn.

No warrant was served on or before the raid. The signed warrant was found by the family on the kitchen floor seventeen days later.

The first medic on the scene examined The Keeper, found her in excellent condition, told Alma so kindly, and walked back out. The County's officers then convened a huddle. A second, hostile medic was summoned, who entered the room, threw the sheet off The Keeper's body, and asked Alma whether she was starving her mother. The first medic's findings were not retained as part of the County's narrative. The second medic's were, and they were used to construct the elder-abuse protective order on which Alma was prevented from seeing her own mother.

Tin Cup — eight years old, born on the property, walking on his prosthetic, with no sores, no injuries, no infirmity — was executed on the spot, in full view of neighbors. His body was dragged across the pasture. The surviving horses became hysterical. Plebeyo Acierte, second champion of the world, approximately thirty-five years old, had his hooves cut to the quick before he was killed — to cripple him so that he could not move, and then to destroy the bloodline that had defined him. Alma did not get to say goodbye to him.

Animals were left in hot, closed vehicles for hours without water. Dogs that had not been in contact with one another in the sanctuary's careful arrangement were placed together in mass confinement and contracted new diseases from the exposure. Both houses on the property were ransacked. Food and water were withheld from the seized animals, and the resulting conditions were photographed by the County as the basis of its evidentiary case against the Winstons. The next morning, Alma sat on a park bench in town and gave an interview to a local ABC affiliate that — for that single news cycle — reversed the County's narrative and is preserved on the public record. The interview is available online. The County, that morning, was in retreat. By evening it had recovered the narrative.

On May 9, 2019, on official El Dorado County letterhead, a captain of the Animal Services division sent the Winstons a written demand: that the return of an ADA-recognized service animal be conditioned on Alma signing a paper agreeing not to be in possession of five or more dogs over four months of age. The conditioning of the return of an ADA service animal on the surrender of a federally protected right is, on its face, a federal civil rights violation. It exists, in writing, on County letterhead. On July 26, 2019, the Director of the Animal Services division sent a final response to the Winstons' formal demand for return of property, copying the County Counsel's office, stating: "El Dorado County will not be returning any animals to either of you. Your request is denied." The animals were then sold. The proceeds, on the documentary record, were applied to the Animal Control budget.

November 2019. The First Lady. The arrest.

In November of 2019, while The Keeper remained in state custody and was being denied adequate care, the Winstons attended a Women's Civil Rights event in Sacramento. The Governor of California's wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was present. She introduced her two young children to the Winstons. The children were shown photographs of the sanctuary animals and were delighted by them. Mrs. Siebel Newsom said: "How beautiful they are!"

The Winstons then handed Mrs. Siebel Newsom a documentary file. The file contained photographs of The Keeper in her condition under state custody — bruised, bedsore-covered, gasping — and a written account of what had happened to the family over the preceding twenty-four years. The Winstons had previously been denied a direct meeting with the Governor. His office had been informed of this family. He had chosen not to meet.

Two days later, both Charel and Alma were arrested. No warrant was served for the simultaneous seizure of the family's twenty-plus remaining animals. Alma was arrested with a pre-existing broken right wrist. Miranda rights were not properly administered. ADA accommodations were denied. Both were held on excessive bail. The discovery from the second property — which the County's officers had also entered and inventoried — showed every animal in perfect condition, the household in impeccable order. The charges were animal cruelty and elder abuse. The basis for them was, in any honest examination of the evidence, absent.

A documentary file was handed to the wife of the Governor of California. Two days later, both Winstons were arrested. The arrest two days after protected petitioning activity is the textbook fact pattern of First Amendment retaliation.Hartman v. Moore, 547 U.S. 250 (2006)

Incarceration, 2019–2020.

Alma's scheduled orthopedic surgery for her pre-existing broken wrist was denied while she was held. On December 28, 2019, in a non-ADA-compliant jail shower, she fell and fractured the same wrist a second time. She was placed afterward in a cold cement holding cell without a blanket and without pain medication. She was placed subsequently in solitary confinement for six consecutive weeks, in a cell without windows. The emergency call button, she was told, was for use only if she was actually dying. On January 7, 2020, the Winstons were released, in exchange for a guilty plea entered without effective representation and the surrender of long-held ADA service animals — some of whom had been with the family more than twenty years. The wrist surgery later cost twenty thousand dollars. A second surgery on the other wrist is estimated at sixty-five thousand. A knee surgery is pending. Neurological and ocular injuries are documented.

2020 onward. The work continues.

The Keeper died in state custody in 2019–2020 — Clostridioides difficile acquired in custody, pressure wounds acquired in custody, a destroyed knee acquired in custody, a final overdose. The State's own Public Guardian conceded in subsequent court pleadings that the facility had withheld medical care from her. No coroner's investigation was opened. No public office has rendered an account.

Charel filed Winston v. Nguyen in 2021. She filed Winston v. Tharaldson in 2022. In 2026, she filed the Rule 60 motion in the District of Maryland matter. In April 2026, both Winstons filed a sworn formal Civil Rights Complaint with the United States Department of Justice — Civil Rights Division, Office of Tribal Justice, Elder Justice Initiative, and the FBI Civil Rights Unit. The complaint is in propria persona, sworn under penalty of perjury, supported by sixty-one catalogued exhibits, and is the formal federal vehicle for the matters described in this section.

This is, in the briefest version, what was done over twenty-seven years to two women, their family, and an elderly woman from Guayaquil who had volunteered with a Sheriff's senior program and was unable, after 2014, to speak for herself. Every adverse fact stated above is drawn from the public record — police reports filed by the Winstons, court files in matters in which they are parties, official letters on County letterhead, written communications from County officials in their official capacities, court findings of recusals for bias and removals of judges for misconduct, public concessions by State guardians in court pleadings, and the federal complaint sworn in 2026. The reader who wishes to verify any specific assertion is invited to do so.

What Was Done to the Partnership

The Lonesome Dove residence.

Since 2011, Charel Winston has resided continuously at 4767 Lonesome Dove Drive, Shingle Springs, California, under a lease-with-purchase-option arrangement entered into with the property's then-owner. The arrangement is the subject of the litigation captioned Winston v. Nguyen, Case No. 21CV385110, in the Superior Court of California for the County of Santa Clara. The Operative pleading is the First Amended Complaint, supported by an exhibit compendium that includes the executed Residential Purchase Agreement (DocuSigned September 2015), proof of buyer funds drawn on Wells Fargo, the Fidelity National Title Company preliminary title report, and a prior interpleader complaint filed by Fidelity National Title Company that itself recites the buyer-seller relationship as admitted fact. The matter is set for hearing on May 22, 2026, in Department 20 before the Honorable William J. Monahan.

The federal enforcement matter.

In SEC v. North Star Finance, et al., Case No. 8:15-cv-01339-PX, in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, Charel Winston is named as a relief defendant. The procedural posture is, again, important: a relief defendant is a third party alleged to be holding funds traceable to a wrong committed by a different person. The Commission's pleadings in that matter do not allege personal wrongdoing by Charel Winston, and no court has ever found such wrongdoing. The matter has been litigated, in significant part, by Charel pro se, over a period of approximately ten years.

On March 31, 2026, Charel filed, pro se, a motion for relief from the underlying judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(3), 60(b)(4), and 60(d)(3). The motion is supported by a one-hundred-twenty-seven-page exhibit package and articulates a three-wave institutional enforcement pattern bearing on the constitutional adequacy of the underlying proceedings. The motion identifies, among other things, a withheld Commission file (referenced as HO-12571-A) the production of which the motion contends would have changed the posture of the original case. The motion is on the public docket. Anyone may read it.

The Sacramento matter.

In Winston v. Tharaldson, Case No. 34-2022-00317332, in the Superior Court of California for the County of Sacramento, Charel is the plaintiff. The defense is represented by Liberty Mutual. Procedural motion practice is ongoing.

The recycled narrative.

None of the foregoing — neither the Lonesome Dove tenancy nor the federal enforcement matter nor the Sacramento civil action — has ever produced a finding of personal wrongdoing by Charel Winston. None of it has ever been the subject of legitimate journalism. The recycled narrative that has nevertheless circulated about the Winstons is, in its essential particulars, unsourced; in its essential phrasing, repetitive across instances that share no editorial origin; and in its essential character, defamatory of identifiable persons. It is the only kind of "story" that is allowed to circulate in the absence of the documentary, journalistic, and judicial processes that ordinarily separate true accounts from false ones.

The persons described in the recycled narrative have, throughout, continued to do the work that the recycled narrative pretends does not exist: building the companies, signing the sovereign instruments, prosecuting the patents, litigating the cases. The work is the answer.

Contact

All formal correspondence concerning Charel Winston and Alma Marie Winston routes through the office of Alma Marie Winston at mimi@mimitothemoon.com. Inquiries from working journalists with verifiable institutional affiliation are welcomed. Pleadings, demand letters, and other instruments of formal service should be directed to the appearance address of record on the relevant docket.