Honesdale, PA — On May 29, 2026 — the same day Pocono Review published its investigation into her weeks-long harassment campaign against this outlet — Candy Maylone, also known as Candy Viola, sent us a cease and desist letter demanding we remove the article, publish a retraction, and cease all further reporting.
Read Part 1: The PPP Affiliate Who Harassed Journalists, Threatened a Politician, and Hid Her Connection to All of It
Read Part 2: The RICO Question: Does the Williams-Glover Network Meet the Federal Definition of a Racketeering Enterprise?
Also Read: The Silence of Honesdale: What 10,000 Views and Two Loud Voices Tell Us About Fear in a Small Town
She previously told us her lawyer would be handling it. No attorney signed the letter.
The letter lists ten excerpts from the article. It calls them “false, misleading, unsupported, and/or defamatory.” It claims Pocono Review implied she committed federal crimes. It demands compliance by June 5th.
It does not identify a single factual claim in the article that is wrong — not the photo, not the comments, not the fake editor’s note, not “we know who you are.” The letter contests the characterization of her conduct. It does not contest the conduct itself.
The letter calls what she did “ordinary online disagreements and social media comments” and describes our reporting as having “improperly transform[ed] protected speech and internet commentary into fabricated allegations of criminal misconduct.”
Maylone’s own words tell a different story. Part 1 did not include all of her comments and messages — the article was already long enough. What follows are additional private messages Maylone sent this outlet throughout her campaign, none of which we initiated. She came to us — every time. Her own words are more damning than anything we could write.
Silencing Of Honesdale
Pocono Review’s May 19th investigation “The Silence of Honesdale” laid it out in numbers: nine Honesdale stories drew 10,000 views but almost no public participation. One Pocono Township story with half the readership produced 82 comments and 20 shares. The difference wasn’t interest — it was fear. Candy Maylone AKA Candy Viola and Julie Rose Romano, who has publicly stated she is friends with Lisa Glover, Derek Williams, Keenan Gruver, and his partner Heather, turned the comment sections into a space hostile enough that residents went silent. When we published an article documenting that chilling effect, Candy Viola’s response was a meme — “Are you gonna cry?” — followed by “Little cry baby is back again with another post for his 66 followers.” She read an article about herself suppressing public conversation and answered it by suppressing the conversation. Notice she didn’t send a cease and desist then.
“Make Yourself Obvious”
In a private Facebook message to this outlet — one she initiated — Maylone wrote: “Better watch that anger of yours otherwise you’re going to slip up and make yourself obvious, stalker.”
That is not an online disagreement. That sounds like a person going out of her way to privately message journalists, telling them she is deliberately trying to provoke them into revealing their identities — while calling them a stalker, while secretly affiliated with the project they’re investigating, on reporting about a sitting mayor and public money. “Make yourself obvious” is not something a concerned citizen says during a casual Facebook argument. It is something a person says when the point of the antagonism is to flush someone out — to harass and to dissuade future reporting.
She confirmed as much herself:
She wrote: “You let your anger over being called out cause you to make some mistakes here, which is what I thought would happen.”, followed by: “…why I knew exactly what I COULDN’T and would not say.” Then she ends it with “Maybe if you can’t handle rebuttals blogging isn’t for you.” Not opinions. Not disagreements. Rebuttals — a word that only makes sense if she understood herself to be engaged in a sustained, adversarial response to this outlet’s reporting, in defense of the project she’s affiliated with. Which is exactly what the article she’s threatening to sue over says she did.
Read that again. She is telling us — in her own words — that every comment she posted, every private message she sent, every insult, every accusation, every meme was premeditated. None of it was spontaneous. None of it was reactive. She thought about what to say before she said it. She weighed each word against what she believes the law allows. Not what the law actually allows — what she thinks it allows. She built herself a legal theory, decided she was safe, and then executed a weeks-long harassment campaign based on that theory.
Premeditation is the opposite of “ordinary online disagreements.” A person who gets heated in a comment section doesn’t announce afterward that she knew exactly where the legal lines were the entire time. A person who planned it does.
She was sent a phone number in response to the messages she initiated to call so she could hear for herself we’re not James Hamill. She refused to call. Instead told us she gave the number to her FRIEND who is a cop. That is a very specific choice of words.
The Letter Contradicts Itself
Maylone’s cease and desist rests on two claims: that she is a private citizen, and that her conduct was ordinary.
Her own messages destroy both.
A private citizen doesn’t tell reporters she’s trying to bait them into exposing themselves. A private citizen doesn’t announce that every interaction across a weeks-long campaign was premeditated and tested against what she believes the law permits. The public attacks, the private messages, the identity accusations, “we know who you are” — by her own admission, all of it was calculated. None of it was ordinary.
A private citizen doesn’t show up on every single post about a publicly funded project for a month, go absolutely berserk in the comment sections, call journalists stalkers and psychos and failures, fabricate an editor’s note, tell readers not to engage, produce zero factual rebuttals across all of it — and then send a legal threat the hour the outlet begins asking important legal questions.
And our readers should remember who Candy Maylone believed she was attacking. She didn’t think she was yelling at anonymous bloggers. She said so herself — repeatedly, publicly, by name — and in the private messages she sent us. She wrote “Jim and James” directly to this outlet. She believed she was going after Jim Hamill, a sitting Honesdale Borough Councilmember who holds direct voting authority over Central Park and the borough assets PPP is planning to touch. One of two council votes against committing $400,000 to the project. The only person on that council who publicly question anything. That’s who she thought she was targeting.
So when she tells us “I knew exactly what I COULDN’T and would not say,” she isn’t just admitting she premeditated her attacks on a news outlet. She is admitting she launched what she believed was a legally calculated intimidation campaign against a sitting elected official with oversight over the very project she denied any connection to — the man who ran against the mayor whose girlfriend she is photographed sitting next to at a PPP planning table. She’s not denying the conduct described in our article. She’s confirming it — and calling it strategy.
She also told us why. In another message, Maylone wrote:
“Because you’re relentlessly attacking a good person who does more good for our community then you’ll ever be able to. You act like you’re a news source but you only report slander on Derek and Lisa and it’s fucking creepy and pathetic. You’re obsessed with them and have countless photos of them saved on your phone, you’re a stalker who needs to be called out. There’s so many other things happening in the area like the fight against data centers and building a good park for the kids in town but all you care about is making shit up about the mayor and his partner. You are no one’s hero. You’re a safety concern because people like you are the ones in society that go crazy and commit acts of violence, you have anger and jealousy issues that are so obvious.”
Derek and Lisa. First names. She calls them “the mayor and his partner.” The phrase “only report[s] slander on Derek and Lisa” is an admission that her campaign was a direct response to coverage of Williams and Glover specifically. “A stalker who needs to be called out” isn’t someone stumbling into an argument — that’s someone on a mission. She accuses journalists of being potential perpetrators of violence. And “building a good park for the kids in town” — that’s the People’s Playground Project, the same project she sat at a planning table for and then refused to acknowledge three times — cited as an example of what we should be covering instead. She also refers to Mayor Derek Williams as Mr. Rogers:
Her cease and desist says she is a private citizen with no obligation to disclose her associations. Her own words say she is personally defending the mayor and his girlfriend by name, retaliating against coverage of their project, and doing it on purpose. Both statements are in writing. Both are hers.
The Mayor’s Own Words
Candy Maylone AKA Candy Viola told us she did this because of Honesdale Mayor Derek Williams. Williams, meanwhile, was doing the same thing from his end.
In emails to this outlet’s reporter and on two separate posts on his official Facebook page he uses in his official capacity, Mayor Derek Williams called Pocono Review a “pretend reporter,” a “news impersonation page,” and a “generative doubt machine.” He called our reporting “AI-generated stories” containing “factual inaccuracies and clear misrepresentations.” He dismissed anonymous journalism as a problem, describing this outlet’s journalists as “made up characters who are not real people” and warning constituents against “unnamed people who haven’t earned our trust.” He referenced “one of my elected peers on Borough Council” who “was a former journalist” — Jim Hamill, the same councilmember Candy Maylone AKA Candy Viola and Julie Rose Romano was targeting by name.
He tried to unmask this outlet’s journalists through repeated invitations to meet in person. “Let’s see you and Vinnie’s eyes,” he wrote, offering to bring recording equipment and inviting a third outlet to attend. The goal was identification.
Then this: “This reply is in no way connected to or representative of any other work or volunteer associations I hold here in Honesdale. I had to say that part, btw.” He felt the need to preemptively distance himself from the exact network our reporting documents — the same affiliations Maylone refused to disclose.
His brother Ryan Williams has also been messaging this outlet privately since April 29th. Over a month, he asked how long Pocono Review has been around, how many journalists we have, whether we use “journalists plural” or just one, and when our earliest article was published. When we didn’t answer, he accused us of being an AI chatbot. When we did, he called it “the standard chatbot reply” and wrote “cool bye bye robot.” Then he came back the next day and asked the same questions again.
The mayor writes emails demanding to see our eyes. His affiliate sends private messages trying to provoke us into revealing ourselves. His brother spends a month in our inbox counting our staff. The questions change. The goal doesn’t.
Williams was publicly calling this outlet fake and trying to identify the people behind it. Maylone was privately doing the same — calling us stalkers, trying to provoke us into revealing ourselves, telling us “we know who you are.” Same vocabulary. Same target. Same goal. Maylone told us she did it for him.
Did Mayor Derek Williams and Lisa Glover send her? We’ll let our readers examine that.
The cease and desist itself tells you how seriously to take it. Filed under the name Candy Viola, the damages section lists “(reputational injury, harassment, employment consequences, business losses, emotional distress)” in parentheses, unfilled, copied from a template. No lost job, no lost client, no dollar figure.
She gave herself a week. June 5th. Either a lawsuit materializes or it doesn’t.
What We’re Doing About It
The end goal is public accountability — a sitting mayor, his girlfriend’s project, public money, a public park, and a foundation that pays his salary. The public gets to know. That’s it.
We are not removing the article. We are not retracting the article. We are not disabling access to the article.
We are publishing her cease and desist letter in full below, because the public has a right to see how the subjects of local investigative reporting respond when the reporting is accurate and the facts are undisputed. Her own messages confirm the conduct the article describes — and reveal that it was deliberate.
Perhaps she should have consulted with her lawyer before, not after.
The full text of Maylone’s cease and desist demand is reproduced below.
Full Text: Candy Maylone’s Cease and Desist
Cease and Desist Demand – Defamatory Publication Concerning Candy Viola
I, Candy Viola, represent myself regarding defamatory statements published by The Pocono Review on May 29, 2026 in an article/post titled “The PPP Affiliate Who Harassed Journalists, Threatened a Politician, and Hid Her Connection to All of It” located at (https://poconoreview.com/peoples-playground-project-intimidation/).
This letter serves as a formal demand that you immediately cease and desist from further publication and republication of the defamatory statements identified below, and that you take prompt corrective action.
1. Publication at Issue
- Outlet/Publisher: Pocono Review
- Author/Reporter: Nicole Hallman
- Headline/Title: “The PPP Affiliate Who Harassed Journalists, Threatened a Politician, and Hid Her Connection to All of It”
- Date Published: May 29, 2026
- URL(s)/Platform(s): https://poconoreview.com/peoples-playground-project-intimidation/
- Copies preserved: Screenshots; link
2. Defamatory Statements (Verbatim)
The publication states, in substance and/or verbatim:
“The question is whether Candy Maylone was acting on her own — and whether what she did, and what the people around her have done, constitutes a federal crime.”
“Under 18 U.S.C. § 241, it is a federal felony — punishable by up to ten years in prison — for two or more persons to conspire to intimidate any citizen in the free exercise of a right secured by the Constitution.”
“The coordinated harassment campaign documented in this article…”
“That is not social media banter.”
“That conduct doesn’t just offend decency. It potentially implicates three federal statutes.”
“Interstate threats. ‘We know who you are’ … raises the question under 18 U.S.C. § 875 of whether the communication was designed to coerce silence.”
“If any federal investigation, audit, or proceeding is opened … Maylone’s campaign to intimidate the journalists and the politician she believed was behind the reporting becomes potentially relevant evidence of obstruction under 18 U.S.C. § 1512.”
“She intended to publicly name and intimidate a sitting elected official…”
“If that’s not intimidation of a public official in service of a political and financial enterprise, the word has no meaning.”
“Part 2 of this investigation documents the enterprise Candy Maylone was protecting…”
These statements are presented as factual assertions and/or convey false and defamatory implications that I, Ms. Viola/Maylone, engaged in criminal conduct, conspiracy, intimidation, obstruction, unlawful threats, and participation in a corrupt political or financial enterprise.
3. Falsity and Defamation by Implication
Each of the above statements is false, misleading, unsupported, and/or defamatory by implication.
The publication repeatedly insinuates that I, Ms. Viola/Maylone, committed federal crimes under 18 U.S.C. §§ 241, 875, and 1512 despite the absence of any criminal investigation, charge, finding, or factual basis supporting such allegations.
Statements characterizing ordinary online disagreements and social media comments as “intimidation,” “interstate threats,” “obstruction,” and a “coordinated harassment campaign” improperly transform protected speech and internet commentary into fabricated allegations of criminal misconduct.
The article misleadingly claims I, Ms. Viola/Maylone “hid” or “concealed” an affiliation with the People’s Playground Project based solely on my attendance at a public meeting and my refusal to answer accusatory social media questions posed by the publication. I, Ms. Viola/Maylone, had no legal, professional, or ethical obligation to disclose personal associations to anonymous individuals on social media.
The publication falsely frames speculation and opinion as factual investigative conclusions by invoking federal criminal statutes, references to prison exposure, and language implying ongoing criminal conduct or conspiracy.
The article’s repeated references to “enterprise,” “coordinated conduct,” “conspiracy,” “intimidation,” and “obstruction” convey to the ordinary reader that I, Ms. Viola/Maylone, engaged in unlawful activity, despite no evidence supporting such implications.
Under Pennsylvania law, defamation includes not only directly false statements but also publications that create false and defamatory implications through insinuation, selective omission, misleading context, or implication. When read as a whole, the publication clearly communicates to readers that I, Ms. Viola/Maylone, allegedly engaged in criminal or quasi-criminal conduct, which is false.
4. Fault and Harm
Pocono Review either knew these statements/implications were false, acted with reckless disregard for their truth, and/or failed to exercise reasonable care before publishing. Since publication, I, Candy Viola/Maylone, have suffered substantial harm, including (reputational injury, harassment, employment consequences, business losses, emotional distress), and the harm that will be ongoing due to continued online availability and republication.
5. Demands
Accordingly, I demand that you:
- Immediately remove and/or disable access to the publication and any substantially similar reposts.
- Cease and desist from further publication, republication, or dissemination of the statements and implications identified above.
- Publish a correction and retraction, in a form and placement reasonably calculated to reach the same audience as the original publication.
6. Notice of Potential Legal Action
If you do not comply by June 5, 2026, I will consider all available legal remedies, including initiating litigation in Pennsylvania seeking damages and injunctive and/or other appropriate relief. Nothing in this letter is intended as a complete recitation of the facts or law, and all rights and remedies are expressly reserved.
Please direct all communications regarding this matter to my attention.
Pocono Review covers Wayne, Monroe, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties. Tips, documents, and on-the-record accounts: tips@poconoreview.com. We never name our sources.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Bureau of Charitable Organizations accepts complaints about unregistered charitable solicitation at attorneygeneral.gov. The FBI accepts tips at tips.fbi.gov. The IRS Criminal Investigation Division accepts referrals at irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation.
Pocono Review is committed to accuracy. If you believe any fact in this report is incorrect, email corrections@poconoreview.com with the specific claim and your supporting documentation. Verified corrections will be published promptly.