Mavel Ruiz lawsuit follows the money behind ‘communist judge’ campaign

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The most interesting and heated judicial race in Miami-Dade just went nuclear.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mavel Ruiz, who is fighting to keep her seat against challenger Destiny Alvarez (aka Destiny Goede) in the election that ends Tuesday, has filed a lawsuit accusing Alvarez, her husband and a network of political committees and consultants of orchestrating a coordinated smear campaign designed to punish Ruiz for a ruling involving — who else? — Donald Trump.

And this isn’t your typical my opponent is lying about me campaign complaint. Ruiz is suing them.

The complaint, filed last week in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, names Alvarez; her husband, Nicholas Alvarez; four political committees — New Vision for Our Courts, Fighting for a Better Miami-Dade, Miami-Dade Residents United and We Can Do Better Miami — as well as political operative Damian Tapia, consultant Alejandro “Alex” Miranda, his companies, Miranda Advocacy LLC, Order 66 LLC, and four John Does and one Jane Does who are described as “significantly imvolved in Florida politics as either a lobbyist, donor, consultant or official.”

Ruiz alleges they participated in a civil conspiracy to defame her and improperly influence the election for Circuit Court Group 67.

Read related: Somebody really wants Miami-Dade Judge Mavel Ruiz off the bench

The centerpiece of the alleged operation is an attack website using perhaps the most valuable piece of internet real estate you can have when you’re trying to destroy a candidate: her own name.

The website, mavelruiz.com, declares: “Judge Mavel Ruiz: Unethical. Unfit. Untrustworthy.”

And, just in case voters don’t get the message the first time: “Countless findings. Dozens of reversals. One disastrous record.”

The site ultimately accuses Ruiz of having “a pattern of abusing one’s power.” Ruiz’s lawsuit says the website takes a handful of unrelated cases over nearly a decade — including a disciplinary matter and appellate reversals — and packages them together to manufacture the appearance of a corrupt pattern.

The attack website itself is not exactly subtle. It remains online and describes Ruiz’s record as one involving judicial misconduct, reversals, abuse of discretion and property rights being “eviscerated.”

It is not your typical judicial race website.

But the lawsuit says the campaign didn’t stop there.

Miami-Dade voters also received a Spanish-language text message that went much further. It called Ruiz a “communist judge” who “hates our country.”

Ay, por favor. This must mean the Alvarezes are desperate.

It also claimed Ruiz stopped President Trump from building his presidential library in Miami and accused her of using the judiciary “as a weapon to attack conservative patriots in our courts.”

There’s just one rather important problem with the presidential library claim. That’s not what Ruiz did.

Read related: Trump library and the ‘name game’ will feature in Miami-Dade judicial race

This appears to be the political origin story for the whole mess.

Ruiz presided over a lawsuit challenging a Miami Dade College Board of Trustees’ September 2025 meeting at which they voted to convey downtown property next to the Freedom Tower to be used for Trump’s presidential library/hotel/office tower. The lawsuit wasn’t about whether Donald Trump could have a presidential library. It was about Florida’s Sunshine Law.

Last November, Ruiz temporarily blocked the conveyance after finding that the public notice for the college board’s meeting was legally inadequate. And her order specifically said the problem could be fixed: The board could properly notice another meeting and vote again.

Which is precisely what happened.

The board re-noticed the meeting, met again in December and again approved the conveyance. Ruiz subsequently dismissed the case and the transaction moved forward.

So, no, Ruiz did not rule that Trump couldn’t build his library. She ruled that a public board had to properly notice its public meeting.

Apparently enforcing the Sunshine Law is communism now.

The Third District Court of Appeal later disqualified Ruiz from further proceedings in the case. Importantly, Ruiz’s lawsuit does not claim that reporting her disqualification is defamatory. The complaint specifically distinguishes that fact from what Ruiz says are the false claims about what she actually ruled.

And here’s where the story gets much more interesting. Because Ruiz isn’t just suing over some nasty political texts.

She’s following the money.

Read related: Donald Trump Library back on track after judge lifts MDC injunction

According to the complaint, after Ruiz issued the temporary injunction in the Trump library case, a politically connected network recruited Alvarez to challenge her and then financed the campaign against the incumbent judge. That is Ruiz’s allegation, of course. It has not been proven.

But it looks bad. And the financial relationships cited in the lawsuit are worth a very close look.

The complaint says New Vision for Our Courts, Fighting for a Better Miami-Dade and Miami-Dade Residents United, along with another committee called Miami United, all use the same principal address in Coral Gables and the same telephone number. We Can Do Better Miami uses the same office suite.

The same person serves as treasurer for four of the committees, according to the lawsuit, and Tapia is chairman and registered agent of three of them, including New Vision, which reported receiving $34,000, all from committees within that network, according to campaign finance reports cited in the lawsuit. Committees paying committees who then pay other committees is a great way to hide the actual funding sources.

But the lawsuit focuses on the spending. Especially the payments to Order 66.

Star Wars fans might remember that’s the secret command Emperor Palpatine used to order the clone army to kill all Jedis as traitors to the Galactic Empire.

Probably just a coincidence.

New Vision reported spending $27,681.02 in total. Of that, according to the complaint, $25,696.94 — about 93% of everything the committee spent — went to Order 66: $9,000 for advertising, website development and hosting, $5,000 for consulting, $550 for translation, and $11,146.94 for peer-to-peer text messages.

Those spending categories happen to correspond rather neatly with the exact pieces of the attack campaign Ruiz is suing over: a website, a Spanish-language message and mass texts sent to voters.

The complaint alleges that Alejandro Miranda controls Order 66 and Miranda Advocacy and that he and the companies directed, created, translated, published or disseminated the website and text campaign. It also alleges Miranda Advocacy performed political consulting and voter-contact work for the network.

Ruiz also alleges Nicholas Alvarez served as an intermediary between his wife’s campaign and the committees and vendors so that Destiny Alvarez would not be publicly connected to the attacks. Again, that’s an allegation — but probably one of the most consequential allegations in the entire complaint.

Because judicial races in Florida are supposed to be nonpartisan. Yet voters are getting messages about a “communist” and “liberal” judge who supposedly hates America and attacks “conservative patriots” because she temporarily stopped a government board from transferring public property after finding that its public meeting wasn’t properly noticed.

Nothing partisan about that.

Read related: How a sleepy Miami-Dade judicial race woke up as one of its most political

The Ruiz complaint also ays there was no disclaimer. The mass text directing voters to unfit.mavelruiz.com did not contain a political advertisement disclaimer identifying who sent it.

That could become important beyond the defamation case.

Ruiz’s lawsuit is essentially asking the court to look behind the curtain of what she says was not spontaneous political criticism but a financed and coordinated political operation. And that’s what makes this lawsuit more interesting than the usual election-season mudslinging.

Judge Ruiz — who has been endorsed by the Miami Herald, the League of Prosecutors, the AFL-CIO and SAVE — certainly has a record voters are entitled to examine. She was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court in 2020 over judicial misconduct, and her opponent’s supporters have made her appellate record a central issue in the campaign. Those are legitimate subjects for scrutiny.

But saying a judge was reprimanded is one thing. Saying she is a communist who hates America because she enforced Florida’s open-government law is something else entirely.

And Ruiz apparently decided she wasn’t going to just put out a press release denying it.

She subpoenaed the political food chain — figuratively speaking — by putting the whole thing into a lawsuit.

Now, if the case gets far enough, there could be discovery. Bank records. Emails. Text messages. Contracts. Communications between the candidate, her husband, the PACs and the consultants.

In other words, all the things political operatives generally prefer voters never see.

The election is Tuesday. But this lawsuit could last considerably longer.

And Ladra has a feeling Group 67 isn’t going to stop being interesting when the votes are counted.

Nobody else is covering the judicial races like Political Cortadito. This kind of independent, government watchdog reporting is crucial to transparency and democracy. And more so every day. If you want to read more about the judicial and other campaigns in 2026, please help with a contribution to Political Cortadito. Click here. Independent reporting is more important than ever. Ladra thanks everyone for their support.

Mavel Ruiz complaint August 2026 by Political Cortadito