We Made a Mistake. Here’s What Happened.
On May 29, 2026, the Pocono Review published an investigative article on a PPP affiliate who harassed journalists, threatened a politician, and hid her connection to all of it. In that article, we attributed quotes to Shannon Oakley and Samuel Box that were not theirs. The quotes in question were replies to their social media comments, written by other people, that we incorrectly assigned to Oakley and Box.
Both pointed out the error publicly on our Facebook page. They were right. We were wrong.
We corrected the article by removing their names and the misattributed quotes entirely. The people who were misquoted are no longer referenced in the piece. The harm, being publicly associated with words they did not write, was eliminated by removing the association itself. There is no misquote left in the article to correct because the misquoted material no longer exists in the article.
We did not follow step two of our posted corrections policy, which calls for noting the correction within the article. We did follow step three: the original URL stayed live and unchanged. The article was not deleted or moved. Here’s why we didn’t add the correction note: that step exists to alert readers that something they may have already read was wrong. When the correction is removal, when the names and quotes are gone entirely, there is nothing left for a reader to misunderstand. The original error was live for less than an hour before the article was corrected. The fix was permanent. We made the editorial judgment that removing the content served the interests of the people affected better than a footnote preserving their names next to quotes they never said.
We also never removed the Facebook posts where Oakley and Box called out our mistake. Those posts are still there. Anyone can read them. The public record of our error, and our response to it, has been visible the entire time.
That matters for what comes next.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Let It Go
After we published our three-part investigation into the Ellis Law Group on June 3, 2026, a commenter named Chris Novoa appeared on our Facebook page. He posted lengthy critiques across multiple posts and in the Honesdale community Facebook group. His central argument: the Pocono Review cannot be trusted because of the misattributed quotes in the May 29 article.
He did not dispute a single fact in the Ellis investigation.
Except for one claim about Jessica that remains unsubstantiated. Novoa claimed the Wayne County Commissioners’ statement was directed at Jessica’s opponent Wayne Thomas, not at Jessica. He said Thomas posted claiming he was trusted by those organizations, then deleted it. Novoa admitted he has no screenshot or proof.
Novoa wrote hundreds of words about our correction. He described the misattribution as “obvious gross negligence.” He said we failed to follow our own corrections policy. He said our “mistakes can be damaging” and that we have “a duty to help clear the name of people we made look bad.” He said he won’t “trust a source of news that won’t take accountability.”
He spent what must have been hours reading through our published work. He went backward from the June 3 Ellis investigation to the May 29 PPP article. He found the Facebook exchange where the mistake was identified and corrected. He then used that exchange (which was only visible because we left it up) to argue that we lack transparency.
And across all of that effort — every article read, every comment posted, every paragraph drafted — the only substantive error he found was one we had already fixed, involving people who are not him.
Who Is Chris Novoa?
After his public posts, Novoa reached out to us through private messenger. We replied with a direct question: are you affiliated with Brendan Ellis?
“My relationship with him doesn’t seem relevant to the accuracy of the reporting on the PPP article, which is why we are chatting.”
We asked again. Working relationship? Personal?
“I’d love to know more about the correction policy going forward at Pocono Review.”
We asked a third time. He would not answer.
Here is what he did say publicly, on our Facebook page:
“Between the two of them, I have spent hundreds of hours over the last decade volunteering my time and energy into the local community alongside the Ellises.”
Hundreds of hours. Over a decade. Alongside both Brendan and Jessica Ellis. But when asked privately whether he’s affiliated with Brendan, he called the question irrelevant.
A person who has spent a decade working alongside the subjects of an investigation, then publicly campaigns to discredit the outlet conducting that investigation, has an obligation to disclose that relationship. Novoa chose not to. That choice tells you more about his purpose than anything he wrote about our corrections policy.
What He Cared About — and What He Didn’t
Novoa read our Ellis investigation. All three parts. He said so himself. That investigation documents:
Brendan Ellis has served as ADA since July 2019 while simultaneously running a private law firm, Ellis Law Group, at 1018 Church Street, Honesdale. His wife Jessica Ellis served as ADA beginning in April 2022 while also maintaining a private practice at the same firm and, according to her own campaign materials, serving as solicitor for Wayne County Human Services.
Ellis Law Group was originally incorporated as Meagher Law, Inc., co-founded by Matthew Meagher, who became a Wayne County Court of Common Pleas judge in 2021. No public record of a buyout, divestiture, or formal separation between Meagher and the firm has been identified. The firm’s website still carries his name in the footer and its copyright line.
Wayne County’s Court of Common Pleas has exactly two judges: President Judge Janine Edwards, who built the DA’s office both Ellises work in and co-created the Drug Treatment Court with Brendan Ellis, and Judge Meagher, who co-founded the firm Brendan now operates. Every case the Ellises touch, as prosecutors or as private attorneys, lands before a judge with documented ties to their firm.
No screening memoranda, ethics walls, recusal orders, or conflict disclosure forms across nearly seven years of this arrangement have been identified in any public record.
In Commonwealth v. Kaitlin White, ADA Brendan Ellis prosecuted a case before Judge Meagher, his former law partner, without the relationship being disclosed on the record until four months and eleven judicial actions into the case. The defendant entered a no-contest plea via Zoom from a Sheetz gas station after her defense theory was excluded six days before trial, her attorney’s motion to withdraw was denied, and her motion to continue was denied.
The official criminal docket for Commonwealth v. White lists no judge and no prosecutor by name. The transcripts, which cost money to obtain, identify both.
Novoa read all of this. His response was to spend his time attacking us over two misattributed quotes that had already been corrected in an article about a different subject entirely.
That tells you everything about what Chris Novoa was trying to protect and what he was trying to bury.
The Fact-Opinion Framework He Ignored
The Pocono Review’s investigative reporting separates fact from opinion, explicitly and by design. Articles by Vinnie Vetaducci use a color-coded system that visually marks every factual claim and every editorial interpretation so readers can distinguish them at a glance. Nicole Hallman’s pieces open with a clear editorial disclosure and label analytical claims as opinion throughout the text. In both cases, factual claims are sourced to court transcripts, dockets, corporate filings, published records, and correspondence. Readers are told what they’re reading and invited to evaluate the sourcing for themselves.
Novoa’s critique ignores this entirely. He wrote that statements like “no ethics wall covers a marriage” are “rhetorical” and “not a legal conclusion.” But that statement isn’t rhetorical. It’s true. Ethics walls are formal mechanisms designed to prevent information sharing between professionals within a firm. No such mechanism exists for a married couple living in the same home. Nicole Hallman stated a fact about the limitations of the tool, and Novoa called it rhetoric because engaging with the substance would mean acknowledging the problem.
When your strongest critique of an investigation is that the clearly labeled opinions are opinions, you don’t have a critique of the investigation. You have a problem with the investigation existing.
The Timeline
Here’s what the dates show:
May 29, 2026 — The PPP harassment article is published. The misattribution of quotes to Shannon Oakley and Samuel Box is identified on our Facebook page. Within an hour, we correct the article by removing their names and the misattributed quotes. We leave the Facebook posts calling out the error fully visible.
June 3, 2026 — The Ellis Law Group investigation is published: three parts documenting nearly seven years of overlapping roles, undisclosed conflicts, and structural problems in Wayne County’s justice system.
After June 3 — Novoa appears. He arrives via the Ellis investigation. He works backward through our content. He finds the May 29 correction discussion, still public, still visible, never hidden, and builds a campaign around it.
He didn’t come to our page because Shannon Oakley or Samuel Box were wronged. He came because we published an investigation into the Ellises. Everything that followed was in service of one goal: give people a reason not to read what we wrote about Brendan and Jessica Ellis.
What I Believe
Let me state this one more time: what follows is pure opinion and speculation.
I believe Brendan Ellis is Chris Novoa’s lawyer — or his family’s lawyer.
I believe Novoa is not upset because we misattributed two quotes in an article that had nothing to do with him. I believe he is upset because our reporting threatens something he personally benefits from. When your attorney is also the ADA — when his wife sits on the bench — when the firm’s co-founder is the other judge — you don’t just have a lawyer. You have the system. Every case Novoa or his family might bring, every dispute they might have, every legal question they might need answered walks into a courthouse where the Ellises are on both sides of the counter.
That’s not representation. That’s institutional advantage. And it only works as long as nobody looks too closely at how the institution is built.
And even if I’m wrong about all of that, Novoa’s own words and actions tell you everything you need to know. He spent all this time focused on one corrected misquote while ignoring an entire investigation into how people get ground up by the Ellis law machine. That tells you who he cares about, and who he doesn’t. The defendant churned through four lawyers and pressured into a plea from a gas station, the parents who lost their rights, the litigants who never knew the judge co-founded their opponent’s firm — those people don’t exist in Novoa’s version of Wayne County.
If you have information relevant to this case or to similar cases in the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas, contact tips@poconoreview.com.
Corrections: corrections@poconoreview.com