Open Letter to Governor Youngkin

Office of Governor Youngkin
1111 East Broad Street,
Richmond, VA 23219

Paul Shao
9233 Lee Masey Drive
Lorton, VA 22079

January 9, 2026

Dear Governor Youngkin,

I would like to bring to your attention my experiences with the District Court of Alexandria.

In the last sentence of my Informal Opening Brief, filed with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, I wrote, “Appellant with humility in his heart respectfully moves this Court to retore the American values in the integrity of the court system, which is among the best in the world.” (USCA4 Appeal: 25-2248, Doc: 13, Filed: 11/20/2025, Pg: 35 of 36.)

“The American values in the integrity of the court system” quoted above are referred to the disapproval of the fabrication of quotations in the case laws by the other party, that of the falsely denial of factual statement in the RFA of Discovery, and that of the discriminatory court-sealing of the very contract under dispute.

I have represented myself as a pro se litigant against the Allstate Insurance Company about five years ago in the State Court. Removed to the Federal Court. Remanded back to the State Court. Took Virginia Law of Nonsuit and refiled and reset the case about three years ago in the State Court and eventually ended up in the District Court again. The initial defense attorney was Mr. J. Scott Humphrey of the law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP, who was replaced by Mr. Bret C. Marfut of the same law firm. After Nonsuit, Allstate hired Mr. Humphrey again and Ms. Katie M. Burnett of the law firm Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff LLP as defense attorneys.

The buyout

I had paid a sum of $339,787.91 to purchase a partial book of insurance policies with a $1,445,906 premium from Allstate agent Mr. Brent L. Elliott on 08/01/2015. When I was initially terminated by Allstate on 05/01/2020 after five years as an Allstate agent and then extended to 08/01/2020 due to a potential buyer. On 08/01/2020, I had a book of $1,353,508.91 premium. My understanding of “buyout” from Allstate would be: $182,723.70 (= $1,353,508.91 × 9% × 1.5). However, I was told I would only receive a sum of $129,973.21, which is slightly different from the sum 129,704.27 (=$960,772.39 × 9% × 1.5), in 24 installments without interest. There was a shortage of $52,750.49 (= $182,723.70 − $129,973.21). This was because Allstate only took into consideration the $960,772.39 premium as eligible for the buyout and the balance sum of $392,736.52 (= $1,353,508.91 − $960,772.39), the 9% commission cut of which would have been $53,019.43 (=$392,736.52 × 9% × 1.5), as ineligible because these policies had been written by Allstate employee agent before year 2000. Also, Allstate left out 18 months interest on the sum of $135,487.30, which is $12,646.17 (= $129,704.27 × 6.5% interest × 18 months). Thus, a claim of $70,313.33 on my part.

An offer, then a retreat

Plaintiff Shao’s initial complaint (State Case No.: Case No. 2021_03802; Fed. Case 1:21-cv-00482, Dkt. 1-2) against Allstate was filed on 03/15/2021 at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia for two causes of action. Mr. Humphrey contacted via phone on 04/29/2021 Shao who was at Virginia Beach, with an offer of more than the amount of $70k, which Shao had claimed for in the Complaint. (Undocumented.) He and Shao set up a telephone meeting the next day at 9 a.m. after Shao returned home that very same day.

The 04/30/2021 telephone exchange between the two had been pen-recorded by Shao and confirmed by Mr. Humphrey in their email exchanges. (Documented.) Mr. Humphrey had reduced the offer to $30 – $40K, and Shao had declined to settle.

Fabricated citations

In the litigation, Mr. Humphrey and Ms. Burnett had fabricated quotations in the case laws. Specifically, produced a fabricated quotation, which is, “punitive and actual damages can be aggregated to meet amount in controversy requirement” (1:23-cv-00809, Dkt. 1 at 7) in two case laws, Bell v. Preferred Life Assurance Society, 320 U.S. 328, 64 S. Ct. 5, 88 L. Ed. 15 and Church Hill Place Investments, LLC v. MDA Lending Solutions, Inc., No. 3:10CV288, 2011 WL 976458, at *2 (E.D. Va. Feb. 25, 2011), (Id.), and the Honorable Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick declined Shao’s request for authenticating the quotation and for sanctioning the implied fabrications of quotation if unauthenticated. (Id., Dkts. 11, 14, 16, 18, 23, 26, 30.)

Lies in discovery

Mr. Humphrey and Ms. Burnett had denied (thus, lied) in their answer in the RFA of Discovery to that “Mr. Glenn Shapiro, President of Allstate Personal Insurance, Esurance, Encompass, and Answer Financial, was in his vacation home at Fort Lauderdale from 03-12-20 to late April 2020 and then stayed in his Longmeadow Residence of Massachusetts from late April to late August 2020 without going to his Northbrook office at Illinois to work.” (Id., Dkt. 37, Request No. 1.) Shao found the smoking gun in another trial, which irrevocably proves that Mr. Shapiro was taking Shelter-in-Place in Florida and Massachusetts for six months during that period. Mr. Humphrey and Ms. Burnett had lied through their teeth!

The smoking gun Shao found is in Wasgatt v. Allstate et al. (Case No. 4:20cv40118-TSH, Doc. 17-2 (E.D. Mass. 10/23/20)) THE SUPPLEMENTAL DECLARATION OF GLENN T. SHAPIRO (Dkt. 94-3, Exhibit C), which, in Mr. Shapiro’s own words, said that he was indeed in Florida and Massachusetts during that period without going into the Illinois Allstate Office.

Sealed twice

Mr. Humphrey and Ms. Burnett had sealed twice the Allstate R3001S Exclusive Agency Agreement (“EA Agreement-Main”), which is the contract between Allstate and its agent. And the EA Agreement-Main was made as the first exhibit in an unsealed manner in every lawsuit between Allstate agents and Allstate, and yet they wanted to enforce the sealing of the Agreement as exhibit, which was granted approvals by Judge Fitzpatrick to their Motions to Seal. (Id., Dkt. 109, 110, 135, 146, 163, 167, 181, 192, 196, 209.) This, I believe, was a discriminatory act against Shao by the Court and the learned counsels.

In short, Mr. Humphrey and Ms. Burnett undermined the fundamental American values of intellectual honesty, fair play, basic social trust, and the First Amendment Right. And, perhaps, the violation of the foundational idea of fairness in the Anglo-Saxon common laws.

Fairness, from the Saxon ploughman to Alexandria

In his popular documentary Story of England, Michael Wood introduces Simon de Montfort (c. 1208-1265), the Charter of the Forest, and the common law, saying, “[A] good old Anglo-Saxon word—the idea of fairness—the roots of the English system Co-operation.”¹ Fairness and equality are central themes run through John Rawls’s classic A Theory of Justice.² Unfortunately, the subsequent British colonialism had subverted and distorted this Anglo-Saxon original aspiration of fairness into colonial rule and justice, which were first experimented in Ireland and, then, internationally included the American Colonial Rule, which our nation fought against 250 years ago and the result of which gives us our 250th birthday this year. Our great founding fathers claimed victory over colonial rule and justice and, alas, the district court of Alexandria has retained the mentality of colonial justice 250 years after our great revolution against colonialism.

A digression: Washington, Richmond, and Ningbo

Digress a bit on George Washington, Richmond, and the ancestor home of my parents, the city of Ninbo, which was proposed as a sister city to Richmond in 2003(?)³. I was a guest delegate of then Governor Mark Warner participating in the ceremony of the sisterhood of two cities. I had learned that there was a stone tablet from Ninbo, made by the Mayor/Prefect of Ninbo and then conveyed to D.C. by the visiting Presbyterian ministers in 1848-53, to celebrate the centennial anniversary of George Washington. The stone tablet is displayed on the 10th floor of the Washington Monument and the existence of it was brought up by President Clinton on 06/29/1998 in his speech at the University of Beijing.

What is marvelously extraordinary is the content of the tablet, which came from an Imperial minister, in whose writings there was a passage on George Washington, which profusely praised him for his stepping down from the presidency after two terms, liking him to the idealized sage-kings in Chinese antiquity, who did not hold life-long power. If an Imperial minister and a local prefect could recognize with awe the sage-king-like character of Washington in 1848, one may speculate that the character of Washington in the historical act of stepping down had some influences of inspiration on China’s becoming a republic in 1911.

Back to the lawsuit

Back to my lawsuit with Allstate. I was an infant in my rather innocent knowledge of laws and courts, when I filed the initial suit. I would take Allstate to court with only a simple brief that I lived in a country where private property was protected by law. From 2002 to 2013, I lived in Beijing, China – nine months there and three months in Virginia. As far as property rights were concerned, China looked up to and emulated U.S. In 1982, ten years after the normalization with the U.S., they realized that the concept of property rights was the bedrock of a free market, and they started dozing out a fixed sum of compensation to former owners of properties. In 1992, they came to realize that to be measured up to the U.S. standard, they would have to pay market values of the properties they had seized or were going to appropriate.⁴ In this land of laws, Allstate could not appropriate my ownership of the percentage “cut or leasehold” of the premium sum of $392,736.52, as mentioned above, of the insurance policies without paying me a cent by creating arbitrary rules in the rules and regulations section of the contract to forfeit the policies. And I had paid a sum of $92,293.08 (=$392,736.52 × 10% × 2.35) for the ownership of the cut of the insurance premium, and had received a cut of 9-10%, in relation to the production of life insurance, for five years from these premiums. I shall attach to this letter my Informal Opening Brief filed on 11/20/2025 at the Court of Appeals (USCA4 Appeal: 25-2248) for those who might be interested in this case.

I sincerely believe that George Washington would not have approved the conducts of the District Court of Alexandria in the following: a) Allowing the legal professionals to fabricate quotations in case laws; b) Permitting the legal professionals to lie in the RFA discovery; c) Approving twice sealing of contract, which had been unsealed in all other cases between Allstate and its agents; d) Siding with a Fortune 500 company to appropriate without any compensation on the portion of an insurance book which I had paid a sum of $92,293.08.

I sincerely hope that our elected politicians, the legal communities, the civil rights organizations, the insurance industry, and the Asian communities, and the media would review and investigate my case and put forth findings in the public spheres.

Below are a sonnet and a poem I wrote to record my experiences at the District Court of Alexandria, who had treated me not as a citizen but as a subject of the great nation of ours:

Sincerely,
Paul Shao

Full distribution list (Cc)

To Witness

• Office of the Governor Glenn Youngkin: Via Mail
• Senator Mark Warner: Via Email
• Senator Tim Kaine: Via Email
• Senator Elizabeth Warren: Via Mail and Email (To Review and To Witness)
• Congressman James Walkinshaw: Via Email
• And many other Asian American lawmakers
• The Virginia State Bar Association: thevba@vba.org
• Illinois State Bar Association: information@iardc.org
• State Farm Insurance, Office of CEO: Via Mail
• Travelers Insurance, Office of Chairman and CEO: Via Mail
• Progressive Insurance, Office of CEO: tricia_griffith@progressive.com

To Investigate

• MS NOW: msnowpress@ms.now
• NewsNation: programming@newsnationnow.com
• WETA: Via Mail
• MPT of PBS: comments@mpt.org
• Local NBC: Via “Tips for Investigations”
• fox5dc@fox.com
• newsdesk@wjla.com
• Adam.O’Neal@washpost.com
• newstips@washingtontimes.com
• The New York Times: Via Mail
• The Wall Street Journal: Via Mail
• Guardian: press.office@theguardian.com
• npr: Investigations@npr.org
• Los Angeles Times: Via Mail
• mwilliams@timesdispatch.com
• tinytang@visiontimes.com
• The Harvard Crimson: editorial@thecrimson.com
• The Georgetown Voice: editor@georgetownvoice.com
• And many other campus newspapers
• Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA): support@aaja.org (To Investigate and to Trumpet)

To Review

• Harvard Law School: deansoffice@law.harvard.edu
• And many other law schools
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice: Development@advancingjustice-aajc.org
• Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Virginia: apabaofva@gmail.com

To Trumpet

• Romero of ACLU: aclu@aclu.org
• ACLU of Virginia: enews@acluva.org
• And many other members of the ACLU
• OCA@ocanational.org: Via Email
• info@asianamericanforward.com: Via Email
• sbw@80-20.org: Via Email
• Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE): ideas@saseconnect.org
• National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAAAP): info@naaap.org
• munsupseoh@siscom.net: Via Email
• NAKASEC@nakasec.org: Via Email
• And many other community organizations
• Andrew Yang: Via info@yang2020.com, andrewyang@substack.com, andrew@andrewyang.com
• Nicole Ann Shanahan: c/o Andrew Yang

Enclosure: Shao’s Informal Opening Brief filed on 11/20/2025 at the Court of Appeals (USCA4 Appeal: 25-2248).