This is the prelude to a Web2-to-Web3 bridge in action.
In the morning, this article will go live on Medium for a Web2 audience, but I’m publishing it here first as part of the process—on-chain, transparent, and evolving in real time.
This isn’t just a post; it’s a live experiment in onboarding, funding, and narrative-building at the intersection of economic justice and decentralized tools.
The words may shift, and edits will be visible on-chain, but the core remains the same: economic violence is real violence, and we refuse to wait for traditional systems to recognize our worth.
Dawn Robinson Is Living in Her Car. I Might Be Next. So I Engineered a Financial System to Fight Economic Violence
This isn’t just about Dawn. It’s about a system that traps women like us in survival mode through economic violence — unless we fight back with something more powerful than hope: strategy. This is the story behind the pattern — and the solution I built to stop it.
By Felice LaZae
Published on Medium on Mar 24, 2025
I remember being a little girl, watching En Vogue’s music videos with wide eyes. Dawn Robinson stood there — powerful, unapologetic, strong. I’d watch her, thinking, “I want to be that woman someday.” I felt her power. For a bullied little Black and Brown girl growing up in the suburbs — constantly harassed, physically assaulted, and discriminated against — Dawn and her bandmates represented everything I aspired to be: confident, successful, unstoppable.
Last week, that same Dawn Robinson — the woman who helped me believe in my own strength — revealed that she’s been living in her car for nearly three years.
“You guys, for the past three, almost three years, I have been living in my car. I said it! Oh my god, it’s out. I’ve been living in my car.”
I Too Am a Victim of Economic Violence
For 15 years, I have experienced relentless economic violence — a coordinated, systemic assault on my financial autonomy that many don’t recognize as abuse until it’s too late. Even as I’ve worked with major media companies like Disney and Warner Bros, consulted and collaborated with Fortune 500 clients, and built creative projects that reached millions, I’ve been trapped in an invisible cage of economic warfare.
→ Support the Fund Now — because justice shouldn’t take years.
Just a month ago, I produced a 40-person choir performance for a 10,000-person event at San Diego Convention Center — all while wearing my one remaining pair of shoes in my possession because I am currently a victim of an active crime and all of my belongings have been illegally stolen — a grand theft felony crime under California Penal Code 487.
Meanwhile, I am left to push through, performing at the highest level professionally while scrambling to avoid the very fate Dawn is experiencing now.
It started with coerced six-figure debt under my social security number back in 2011. Economic coercion transformed my financial foundation into quicksand, making me vulnerable to multiple criminal incidents of sexual violence, exploitation, and fraud — all directly linked to the power imbalance created by economic abuse. This past year when I finally was in a position to try to rebuild and buy a home, investor-sellers in a predominantly white area defrauded me and my partner in escrow, leaving us trapped in an uninhabitable rental home that made us physically and mentally sick, forcing us into housing instability.
These aren’t random events. This is a coordinated pattern of foreseeable harm — direct, predictable consequences of systemic failures designed to keep certain people vulnerable and exploitable.
How many Dawn Robinsons have to speak up before we admit this is systemic? How many brilliant, talented people need to end up in their cars before we acknowledge the pattern? This isn’t just my story or Dawn’s story — it’s a designed outcome of a system that isolates its victims, making them believe it’s their personal failure when it’s actually economic violence by design.
The Hidden Architecture of Economic Violence
The public misunderstands economic violence. When we see someone experiencing homelessness, we default to “bad choices” as the explanation. But the truth is almost always far more insidious.
Economic violence creates predictable disaster patterns. The system is designed to:
Destroy your financial foundation through coerced debt, predatory contracts, or wage theft
Eliminate your support systems by isolating you economically
Block access to resources through gatekeeping, discrimination, and bureaucratic mazes
Blame you for your deteriorating circumstances through public shaming and victim-blaming
I saw it in the comments about Dawn’s situation:
➔ “She should have managed her money better.”
This comment assumes financial disaster comes from individual failure, not systemic assault. It ignores how economic violence systematically strips away options until there are none left. Dawn didn’t “choose” homelessness any more than victims “choose” physical abuse — she was systematically cornered until her car became her only remaining shelter.
➔ “Why doesn’t she just get a job?”
This comment assumes jobs provide immediate financial stability, ignoring how economic violence destroys the foundations needed to maintain employment: address verification, reliable transportation, professional appearance, mental bandwidth, and physical health. The entertainment industry specifically exploits talent through unfair contracts, withheld royalties, and financial mismanagement — issues Dawn herself has spoken about.
➔ “She must have mental health issues.”
This comment reverses cause and effect. Economic violence doesn’t just happen to people with pre-existing conditions — it creates trauma, depression, and anxiety through constant survival stress. When financial stability is systematically denied, the resulting psychological distress is a symptom of the violence, not its cause.
These responses reveal how deeply we’ve internalized a false narrative about economic disaster.
We’re not dealing with personal failures — we are victims of economic disasters. Just like natural disaster victims don’t “cause” hurricanes, economic disaster victims don’t cause the systemic exploitation and often criminal negligence that destroys their financial stability.
When Dawn described her manager — promising housing but delivering hotel rooms at inflated costs, blocking every apartment she tried to secure, creating dependency while claiming to help — I recognized the pattern. This wasn’t a personal failure. This was economic exploitation.
The Invisible Wounds of Economic Violence
Economic violence leaves wounds that aren’t immediately visible but are no less devastating:
Destroyed credit scores that lock you out of housing, employment, and financial services
Mounting debt that becomes mathematically impossible to overcome
Housing instability that threatens your physical safety and psychological well-being
Systematic disenfranchisement from institutions designed to protect wealth, not people
The most devastating impact is how economic violence makes you doubt yourself. The world says, “You should have known better,” while systemic failures in our financial system, criminal justice system, and victims services systems deliberately conceal that they are part of the problem. The bureaucratic red tape these systems are surrounded by create impossible barriers to the help economic disaster victims deserve not only as fellow human beings, but under the law.
I’m no stranger to navigating complex bureaucratic systems. During the pandemic, I successfully freed my father from Federal Prison under the CARES Act when less than 4% of eligible elderly incarcerated men were released to protect their health. I guided friends and family through obtaining SBA PPP forgivable loans and EIDL assistance, decoding paperwork mazes that were designed to exclude. I didn’t just help myself — I helped my community thrive despite the pandemic’s financially devastating effects.
Yet today, despite filing complaints with the California Civil Rights Department, HUD, POST, Attorney General Bonta, and the DOJ — with all my experience forcing systemic corrections — I still can’t get justice. This reveals a devastating truth: the system isn’t broken; it’s designed to exploit us. I’ve experienced institutional gaslighting firsthand, watching agencies that established protective laws refuse to enforce them when I needed protection. I’m not saying this to shift responsibility from myself or Dawn. I’m saying this because the horror of being gaslit by the very institutions designed to protect us needs to be named and confronted.
➔ Join the fight for justice. Read, share, and help us fund the fix.
Institutional gaslighting looks like this:
➔ Calling the police for help with a clear criminal case… only to be dismissed, told it’s a “civil matter,” or worse — treated as the problem instead of the victim.
➔ Being denied financial assistance you legally qualify for… because a bureaucratic technicality “invalidates” your claim, while corporations and the wealthy exploit loopholes daily.
➔ Presenting undeniable evidence of fraud, theft, or misconduct… only to be told there’s “no wrongdoing” while the perpetrators walk free and your financial ruin is ignored.
➔ Applying for victim services that claim to provide urgent relief… only to be told you don’t fit the criteria — criteria that mysteriously shifts whenever you meet it.
➔ Trying to fight back using the legal system… but being buried in procedural delays, administrative roadblocks, or lawyers who say they “believe you” but “can’t take the case.”
➔ Watching organizations publicly claim they help people in crisis… while your real-life experience with them proves they do the exact opposite .
Those are just a few examples. That’s what the cause looks like. And here’s what the foreseeable harm — the effects — look like:
When victims don’t receive proper restitution from economic violence:
Mental health crises escalate without treatment resources
Financial stability collapses, creating housing insecurity and homelessness
Generational wealth-building becomes impossible
Desperation can force people into criminalized survival activities
Communities fragment as individual members struggle alone
This isn’t just a personal tragedy — it’s a massive societal cost. Every dollar of denied restitution creates tens of thousands in downstream expenses through increased reliance on emergency services, public assistance, lost productivity, health crises, and intergenerational trauma.
Meanwhile, institutional “protections” fail precisely when you need them most:
Law enforcement often refuses to investigate complex financial crimes, or worse, retaliates against victims who report them. When I reported my illegal lockout due to retaliation for reporting habitability violations under California law, police refused to even view my lease or document my residency, dismissing a clear criminal violation as a “civil dispute.” These aren’t just unethical acts — they’re criminal violations under California law, including Penal Code 418 (illegal lockout), 487 (grand theft of tenant property), and 518 (extortion), among others. And that’s not me just making a judgement call — Attorney General Bonta released a bulletin № 2022-DLE-05 in 2022 with the subject “Protecting Tenants Against Unlawful Lockouts and Other “Self-Help Evictions.” This bulletin explicitly states identifies each of these Penal Codes to be applied to “self-help” evictions whether the tenant is behind on rent or not, let alone our situation where we were made sick by uninhabitable housing conditions.
The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) sits on billions in unspent funds each year while creating arbitrary barriers to accessing support for economic crime victims — claiming they only support victims of physical violence, despite nowhere stating this limitation on their website or documentation.
Legal systems make justice prohibitively expensive, ensuring only the wealthy can afford to fight back. The District Attorney’s office has explicitly stated that such cases “could take months to years” despite clear statutory violations.
These aren’t bugs in the system. They’re features designed to protect wealth and power at the expense of those who need protection most.
Why I’m Speaking Now
I was going to build the solution in silence out of fear of my professional reputation being damaged. I thought I could fix my situation privately while developing a system to help others.
But Dawn’s revelation and strength to finally go public showed me that visibility is power. Our silence protects the perpetrators of economic violence, not the victims.
For too long, survivors of economic violence have been forced to use broken tools — GoFundMe’s that require us to prove our pain, donation links that expose our legal strategy, and fundraising methods that move too slowly for disaster-level urgency.
That’s why I built the Decentralized Litigation Fund (DLF).
Not as a charity, but as a systemic fix.
A financial engine that replaces shame with power, and begging with strategy.
DLF is a community-powered legal funding system that gives victims of economic disaster the resources to fight back. It is the first active initiative under the Economic Liberation Fund — a decentralized financial engine designed to operationalize justice at scale, not just survive injustice. The DLF is the first litigation funding model built by and for survivors of economic violence, turning legal battles into a pathway for collective power and systemic correction.
Most people are only familiar with predatory legal funding, where desperate plaintiffs take on high-interest advances against future settlements, often losing huge portions of their compensation to exploitative repayment structures. But at the highest levels, litigation funding is a $23.57 billion industry controlled by hedge funds and elite investors who strategically bankroll legal battles in exchange for astronomical returns — like Burford Capital’s 37,000% gain from their Argentina case.
These resources exist, but they aren’t accessible to the people who need them most.
The DLF’s model democratizes access to this powerful financial tool, allowing communities to fund their own justice and collectively benefit from the network effects of successful litigation. By bypassing traditional gatekeepers, we’re creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that transforms trauma into equity and economic power.
This isn’t charity — it’s reciprocity.
It’s not just about helping one another; it’s about building an economic structure where those impacted by systemic harm are no longer left in survival mode, but instead given the means to reclaim, restore, and reinvest in the communities that have supported them.
This isn’t charity — it’s revolutionary economic warfare, but no blood is shed in this fight.
This war is fought through paperwork and litigation forcing systemic corrections in real-time. Our legal system’s infrastructure is already built to protect us, but we’ve been excluded from our civil right to justice under the law.
The DLF gives economic disaster victims the financial leverage to use the system’s own mechanisms to reclaim wealth taken through economic violence.
Our five active cases span toxic tort litigation, civil rights violations, ADA discrimination, and wrongful termination — each representing systemic failures that would typically go unaddressed without proper funding.
We’re not just fighting individual cases; we’re creating a replicable model for collective justice and wealth reclamation.
And I’m starting with myself. Me and my partner’s case will be among the first funded through this system. I’ve tried everything I could to fight this through the proper channels and I’ve been failed by the police, the DA, and even AG Bonta’s office. If the office that wrote the guidelines on illegal lockouts won’t enforce their own laws, then who will?
I refuse to let economic violence destroy another life without fighting back. By making my battle visible, I create the blueprint for others to follow. If I win, we ALL win.
→ Join the Fight — Back the Fund
The Movement Starts Now
Economic violence is real violence. It ruins lives, traps survivors, and enables systemic abuse. It’s not random — it’s a designed outcome of systems that profit from exploitation.
If Dawn Robinson — a founding member of one of the most successful female groups in music history — can end up living in her car for three years while me, someone completely unrelated to her — is fighting to avoid the same outcome, the pattern is clear, the system is broken by design, not by accident.
This isn’t just about awareness — this is about action. This is your moment to fight back against a system that has been weaponized against all of us.
The Decentralized Litigation Fund is how we transform individual victimization into collective power.
If this resonates with you, don’t just sympathize — join the movement:
Support the DLF: Back the fund that will give economic disaster victims the legal leverage they need HERE.
Share your story: Break the silence that protects abusers with the hashtag #EconomicViolenceIsRealViolence.
Demand accountability: Challenge institutions that enable economic violence.
I don’t want to end up in my car. I don’t want Dawn Robinson to remain in her car. I don’t want anyone to suffer economic violence without recourse.
And luckily, the way my brain works, I know I can’t solve this for myself without solving it for everyone.
The only solution to a systemic problem is a systemic solution. That’s why the DLF isn’t just a fund — it’s a declaration of war against economic violence.
The time for silence is over. The time for action is now.
Dawn, thank you for your courage to share your story. Your voice has freed mine.
Together, we fight back.
This isn’t just a fund — it’s the launch of a decentralized economy engineered by the very people the system tried to erase.
Felice LaZae is the founder of the Decentralized Litigation Fund (DLF) and CEO of Sweet Spot Studios, a creative strategy and immersive tech agency. She has consulted for Disney, Marvel Studios, Microsoft, and Airbnb, and is building next-gen systems for justice, storytelling, and decentralized economics. Learn more at litigationfund.xyz and sweetspotstudios.xyz.
We are not just raising money.
We are onboarding capital into a decentralized justice engine.
Author’s Note:
This piece was written by me, Felice LaZae, in collaboration with an AI thought partner trained to support my voice and assist in shaping complex narratives. It is not AI-generated — it is synthesized from multiple iterations of my original writing, insights, and lived experience.
The algorithm didn’t write this.
The system tried to erase me.
I trained the algorithm to remember.
