If anyone knows of a (legit) way to donate or make a payment towards her $256,000 in fines, please do share the details.
> What will funds go toward specifically?
> We will need legal funds for Chelsea’s legal fees, and legal costs such as court transcripts and travel, and commissary.
Ideally, her legal team or someone would put up a separate fundraiser for her fine, that goes specifically to paying that. I for one would definitely donate.
So the goal would be to pay lawyer fees to fight the $256k of fees.
You're aware she's been granted immunity, right?
Plus, you don't rat people out because you've been granted personal "immunity".
From what I remember, with some crowd-funding platforms, it is against Terms Of Service to rise money to pay sentence's fine. I do not remember if laws in France forbid it or if it's for other reasons.
Here are some links about it :
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46794480
https://www.scmp.com/sport/other-sport/article/2181379/forme...
Also, I don't think it's legal to jail someone over unpaid debt (though many states will certainly try). They can do all sorts of things like garnish your wages, but federal courts don't throw people in jail for being poor.
Son of Sam laws, and their derivatives, can also prevent her from monetizing her story easily, if at all.
You can absolutely be jailed for not paying court ordered fines; that's often how the legal system in the US works for the poor and marginalized. It's a nasty cycle. Punishment fines also can't be discharged in bankruptcy, afaik.
She's a celebrity speaker with a large upper-middle-class fan base, so as long as their interest doesn't go somewhere else she’ll probably do okay.
Of course, if her opponents don't do their part to keep her in the news, the attention will wane.
> Also, I don't think it's legal to jail someone over unpaid debt
It's not. Though it's quite possible she could now be charged with criminal contempt and imprisoned for that.
She could also be jailed for refusing to pay her existing debt (but not for inability to pay.) But note that isn't always an easy line to draw, and a lot of time the latter is dressed up as the former, though with sufficient litigation (which someone has to fund) to challenge it, higher courts may reverse it.
She's also very not-ok (3 suicide attempts, including 1 last week) after what she's been through. Being trans is traumatizing enough in itself, and I can't imagine what it was like for her in a military prison. If I were her, I would want an extended period of time away from the limelight.
It frequently is, IF the debt is to the legal system.
The legal system has and will treat a single mother who works full time but just can't make the agreed upon payments differently than a felon that can't get a job that pays enough to cover costs of living and their fines; especially if the felon is in the same jurisdiction and has seen the same judge before. I've seen it several times in person, have been told about it by people that it's happened to, in several states.
But that's not a “the law allows imprisoning you for inability to pay a fine” problem but a “the legal rights of the poor are ineffectively protected in our system” problem, which is a different and much broader problem.
> I'm in Missouri, so if you want more details about this you can see anything about Ferguson.
As I recall, practices of this kind were prominent in the catalog of violations of federal Constitutional and statutory rights compiled in the DoJ investigations around Ferguson that descended after the Michael Brown incident and associated protests, sure.
Yes, they don't have to jail you, but they absolutely can and do.
I wish some country like Iceland would just offer her a refugee status (assuming she would want it).
This whole thing is really depressing.
The cycle I'm referencing is usually fail to pay your fines, at some point dependent upon jurisdiction and familiarity to the court, arrest warrant is issued, if caught you are arrested and taken to jail to be held until you see a judge, accrue more fines, possibly repeat.
I'm not making statements that this will happen, only that it absolutely can and does happen to people.
The sibling link to her legal defense fund is presumably structured this way - the money goes directly to her attorney who holds it in trust specifically for her legal defense. She never has any control over it, and so she cannot be compelled to use it to pay the fine.