Modern Mortician Admin
Retaliation, Corruption, and a Fight for Justice
The Modern Mortician’s Legal Battle: Retaliation, Corruption, and a Fight for Justice
For over two decades, Melissa Meadow, known as The Modern Mortician, has dedicated her life to ethical, transparent, and sustainable deathcare. When she took a job at Penttila’s Funeral Home in Long Beach, Washington, efforts to improve practices quickly put her in the crosshairs. What began as consumer advocacy spiraled into wrongful accusations, retaliation, and a deeply flawed legal process that ended with a felony conviction for a crime she did not commit.
A Career of Advocacy Turns into a Target
Since 2015, Melissa has spoken openly about price gouging, misleading marketing, and corporate greed in deathcare. Despite criticism, she stayed in the field to push reform from within.
In April 2022, she was hired by Anderson, the owner of Penttila’s Funeral Home, after being transparent about her social media and advocacy. Soon she began documenting serious issues, including unlicensed cremations, improper body handling, and even cremations done on Amazon boxes instead of proper trays. Her attempts to fix problems were dismissed or mocked.
Her role included administrative work, updating price lists, and ordering supplies for three locations. Business credit cards were provided and saved in her Amazon account; she also used personal supplies for families; stationery, keepsakes, memorial items-without reimbursement.
By August 2022, tensions escalated. After she posted an educational Titan Casket unboxing (explaining families can buy directly), Anderson demanded she delete it. She refused. While on scheduled medical leave, she was fired by text on August 31.
Retaliation Begins
Retaliation followed. Anderson blocked her from packing her own things and had staff do it instead. When she arrived to retrieve belongings, she photographed a pile of Amazon boxes used as makeshift cremation trays, one of many practices she’d tried to correct.
Over the next months, Anderson told unemployment officials she’d been fired for harassing a colleague (a claim later overturned in her favor), filed a complaint with Washington’s funeral licensing authorities, and warned local funeral homes not to work with her. She was openly confronted in public.
By December 2022, while volunteering at the Long Beach post office during the holiday rush, Anderson allegedly demanded her removal, claiming she was under investigation. Days later, a local officer questioned her about Amazon purchases tied to Penttila’s. She explained that the business cards were saved to her account with Anderson’s knowledge and that many items had already been returned. She was not Mirandized, was pressured to provide a written statement, and left believing the matter was resolved.
A Wrongful Conviction
In March 2023, she received a court summons-not an arrest-charging theft in the second degree (alleged “theft by misdelivery”) for a casket that had been provided to her for social media marketing, not for the funeral home. She obtained a letter confirming this and prepared to present it. At her first hearing, she was assigned a court-appointed attorney, Justin Kover, who refused to meet outside brief courthouse encounters, ignored exonerating evidence, and repeatedly delayed proceedings.
As the case dragged on, prosecutors escalated from a single count to 14 counts of second-degree identity theft, each tied to individual Amazon transactions while employed and shortly thereafter. The actual total of genuinely personal, non-business purchases was under $300, yet she was never allowed to present the receipts and supporting documentation. What should have, at most, been a misdemeanor was strategically inflated into multiple felonies. She is willing to share documentation with legitimate legal aid or reporters.
On September 29, 2023, after months of delays, intimidation, and exhaustion, she signed a plea under duress, protesting even as she signed, “This isn’t what happened. This isn’t right.”
The Toll on Mental Health
The ordeal devastated her mental health. Already navigating disability and the compounding stress of job loss, financial instability, and industry burnout, the harassment and public defamation pushed her into survival mode. Having spent years advocating for better practices, she became a target of the very system she sought to improve.
Fighting Back
Melissa has filed a grievance against her attorney with the Washington State Bar, compiled extensive evidence of her innocence, and is eligible to seek expungement in 2028, which she intends to pursue. She continues to speak out about industry corruption, pushing for stronger oversight and protections for families and professionals.
Her podcast, Exposing Deathcare, has become a platform for others who have faced similar retaliation.
A System Rigged Against Whistleblowers
Melissa’s case shows how small-town power, legal inertia, and industry gatekeeping can be used to silence a whistleblower. She wasn’t punished for wrongdoing, she was punished for telling the truth.
Justice for The Modern Mortician
Melissa’s story isn’t over. After a year-long fight to defend her funeral director license and clear her name, she’s chosen not to maintain the license going forward, removing one more target for those trying to stall her work. She continues advocating for national regulatory reform and provides support and education in ethical deathcare. The industry may have tried to silence her; it underestimated her resilience.
Ongoing Silencing and Healing
Melissa’s fight for justice did not end with the courtroom. She continues to face efforts to silence her voice through anti-harassment orders issued by judges who, in many cases, are connected as clients of the very people who targeted her. These legal maneuvers serve not as protection, but as tools of intimidation, another way to keep her quiet and discredited.
Despite these obstacles, Melissa is actively working on her healing. She attends therapy to process the trauma and rebuild her sense of stability, while still pushing forward with her advocacy. Speaking out remains dangerous, but she refuses to give up. Her determination is rooted in a belief that transparency in deathcare is worth fighting for, and that others facing similar retaliation deserve to know they are not alone.
For more details, join our
Patreon
to read.
New Paragraph
