There should be no such thing as a non-disparagement clause.

It's a gag, pure and simple. You should always be able to tell your own story -- what you lived through, what you lost, who failed you. But these clauses are everywhere now, slipped into contracts and settlements, letting corporations bury their mistakes and keep the next person in line from knowing what's coming.

I learned this the hard way.

I grew up believing USAA was the gold standard of insurance. My grandfather used to say, "I won't always be around, but USAA will always have your back." So when my house flooded, I trusted them. They assigned me a contractor and promised -- in writing, on their website (it's still there: https://www.usaa.com/perks/home-solutions/contractor/) -- that I'd get a five-year workmanship warranty on the repairs.

What I got was a disaster.

Their contractor turned my house into a construction horror show. They cracked my foundation slab by drilling into it to move a drain -- cutting tension cables in the process. They killed two huge front-yard trees by dumping chemicals on them. They didn't scrape off the old glue before laying new flooring, so the planks bent and shifted underfoot. They painted latex over oil, so the paint peeled off in sheets. They tiled the bathroom directly onto the subfloor with no moisture barrier, ignored termite damage behind the walls, dropped and damaged new appliances -- cook top and oven were both damaged. Since they used multiple sub-contractors, their crews even the new cabinets they installed were cracked and chipped in over a dozen places. They stole everything from my garage -- even stole the ice cube maker from my fridge!

It got worse.

They cracked the gas line and left it leaking (I had to call the fire department). They installed two sinks with the hot and cold lines reversed. Messed up all of my GCFI outlets, and they left the entire upstairs without electricity and without working outlets at all. They even covered electrical outlets with drywall instead of cutting openings where the plugs had been. Every corner I turned revealed something new, often dangerous -- and I documented it all with photos, videos, emails, and texts. I thought having a paper trail meant I was safe.

When I complained, we went into mediation. The contractor -- a steam-cleaning company that had only recently started doing restoration work -- admitted they'd screwed up. One of their managers even wrote, "Look, the situation at your house is unfortunate. We hired subcontractors we thought we could trust, but clearly we didn't supervise them correctly. This isn't how we normally operate, but we'll make this right."

We built a punch list of fixes. They agreed to pay my living expenses while I was displaced.

Then they vanished.

No crews. No repairs. No communication. No reimbursement. I kept sending receipts -- just like we agreed -- and got nothing. USAA went quiet too. Three months later, someone at USAA finally said, "Look, I can't help you, but why haven't you hired a lawyer yet?"

I said, "Because I trusted you."

After a year of silence, USAA's mediation team -- who had never set foot in my house and were based in another state -- emailed me: "Your house had issues no contractor could have foreseen," they said. The work, while clearly bad, was apparently "about what you could expect from the average contractor in Austin right now." They knocked $2,000 off the bill. I had to spend $80,000 fixing the foundation slab alone. (All told, I've spent over $300k repairing my house to date, and there's still more to do... just for context, I only paid $275k for my house in 2010...)

And here's what I didn't know: the "mediation" wasn't neutral. It was run through Contractor Connection -- a company that exists to serve insurance carriers. I was never really their customer. USAA was. Any pressure to do the right thing had to come from USAA -- and USAA simply didn't care.

So I finally hired a lawyer. Expensive. Slow. A year later, we finally had our "day in court." Except it wasn't court -- there's no public record, no evidence allowed (meaning my entire photo slide deck showing all the issues wasn't even looked at!), no jury of sane peers who could see this from a human angle. Just arbitration with a "neutral" retired judge who had spent the past two years doing nothing but USAA cases. (Think she'd have had that job for two years if she ever ruled against the insurance company?) At one point she said, "We have to give the benefit of the doubt to these hard-working contractors who came to aid you in your hour of need. If we don't protect them, they won't be there when others need them."

You can imagine how her ruling went.

(Another thing everyone should know about Texas before moving here: there are no "Licensed Contractors." So even though I had a professional inspection outlining all the issues, when it came time to present it, I said, "It's clear a professional didn't do this work." And the contractor's lawyer was able to shamelessly say, "Nowhere in the contract does it say a professional would do the work." So shady.)

The contractor wanted me to pay their legal fees. Pay for the full amount of the repairs -- wouldn't even tell me what the insurance company had agreed to pay, but claimed the value of their work was three times higher than any number I had seen until that point. It still bothers me that they were allowed to just make up a number -- and all the written emails and texts saying they'd make things right, pay my living expenses, were just ignored.

But what killed my will to fight... mid-way through, my lawyer told me that if I wanted to proceed to trial, I'd need a $250,000 retainer up front -- and it would drag on for two or three more years. And I wouldn't be allowed to fix or move back into my house until it was done because they would need the house as evidence. By then I was exhausted, broke, and just wanted it over. Ten hours into a marathon arbitration session -- literally as the building's janitorial staff was locking doors -- I agreed to a deal to just make all this stop. We'd all just walk away. I'd keep the house in the state it was, we'd never have to go through mediation again or do another blue-tape walk-through, but they weren't paying for anything -- not even the expenses they'd already agreed to pay, certainly not the damages to my house.

At the end my lawyer pointed me to a DocuSign field and said, "Sign here." After I said, "Well, at least I can warn other people with a brutal Yelp review," my lawyer said: "No, you can't. You signed a non-disparagement clause." At no point was this talked about before I signed it. When I asked, "Why didn't you tell me?" my lawyer just said, "Oh, these are really standard..."

And apparently, she didn't think it was worth bringing up because another one had already been in the original contract I signed while standing in two inches of water in my living room. Looking back, it feels like they knew from the start they weren't going to deliver quality work -- and they wanted to make sure anyone who went through mediation could never speak publicly about it again. (Technically it doesn't cover USAA, but calling them "independent" is like calling a husband and wife independent -- legally separate maybe, but joined at the hip in every way that matters.)

That's the real power of these clauses: they don't just close your case, they erase it. They wipe away the evidence, silence the people who lived it, and make sure the next homeowner walks into the same trap with no warning. And there's a power dynamic. They've done this a hundred times. They show up with the contract they want. You're acting in the moment, often stressed or panicked. You think you're just signing to pay them -- but really, you're signing to let them off the hook for any damages, and do things in the shadiest way they can do them. And no matter what they say or do after that, the only thing that matters is the original contract.

So I can't name the contractor in Austin. But I can tell you it was USAA's contractor. And everything I went through was part of a process that USAA designed. =P

Insurance companies aren't there to help you. They're there to protect their balance sheet. If you get crushed in the process, that's acceptable collateral damage. They don't care about making you whole -- only about checking boxes in a process designed to minimize payouts and keep the stock price climbing.

And non-disparagement clauses? They're how corporations make sure no one ever finds out -- so they can keep getting away with it.

That's an epic and terrible story. I'm sorry and horrified you had to experience that :$

Stories like these are why I'm content to rent forever