When Carefree gets personal
How one recorded call spiraled into a very public shaming campaign.
Most of the houses in Carefree don’t have mailboxes.
Instead, the town’s 4,000 residents line up at the post office for their bills, catalogs and to catch up on the small-town rumors.
Many residents know the rumors about Stephanie Barbour, a 63-year-old retiree who’s lived there for 11 years: That somewhere along the way, she crossed a line with the Carefree Town Council.
It’s public knowledge because the town council publicized its 15-page cease-and-desist letter against her, and held a 30-minute presentation at a public town council meeting, where a defamation attorney outlined Barbour’s alleged transgressions.
Her main offense: Sending a town official a recording of a phone call that made the town look bad.
Barbour is now suing the town in federal court, which she hopes will help clear things up. The way she tells it, Carefree turned a routine dispute over development into a public shaming meant to silence her.
The dust-up started because Barbour wanted to know why the previously planned development next to a major intersection was taking so long. A development company, Thompson Thrift, had already submitted a proposal to build in the area.
So in 2023, she decided to call the company herself.
A Thompson Thrift executive confirmed Barbour’s hunch: He said Carefree town officials were slow walking the development’s approval.
Barbour recorded that call and held on to the recording for more than a year, per the legal complaint. It only got out when the town’s vice mayor asked for a copy.
That transmittal, and the idea that Barbour sought damaging information about the town, amounted to defamation, Carefree said.
But residents wouldn’t know those details from Carefree’s version of events.
We reached out to town officials for comment, but town attorney Denis Fitzgibbons told us Carefree “does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
Barbour’s experience was traumatizing and humiliating, but it wasn’t exactly unique. The town has a pattern of bullying its critics, her lawyers say.
Across the valley, cities are clamping down on the public’s right to give input. Last year, Surprise arrested a woman for criticizing the council. Earlier this year, Fountain Hills cut off the public comment portion of its meetings — neighboring Scottsdale is also considering restrictions on the public’s right to address the council.
And at the highest levels of government, attacking those who disagree with you has become the norm.
A town that cares
Carefree is an affluent retirement community north of Scottsdale, and despite its name, its residents actually care a lot.
Barbour, for example, said elections in Carefree can turn on a few dozen votes, so she takes time to really understand issues before she votes on them.
Before December 2024, Barbour regularly attended public meetings and spoke during the public comment portion.
She went to her last town council meeting about a year ago, when Craig Morgan, the town’s contract attorney, gave an impassioned speech detailing how Barbour and the Thompson Thrift company wronged the town.
A Thompson Thrift executive gave Barbour misleading details about the development, Morgan said, and Barbour secretly recorded the call to “impugn the integrity” of town employees.
“Hearts were broken because of this. Tears were shed, and families were put in peril,” he said. “These people deserve better.”
After the meeting, Barbour said other residents approached her at the grocery store to ask about the scandal. Others wrote letters to the local paper accusing her of “using false information to disparage others” and “orchestrat(ing) a smear campaign.”
Even if she skips council meetings, Barbour said, there’s no escaping it in a town as small as Carefree.
“We are forced to see each other constantly, almost daily. And what the town did to me was so incredibly hurtful, so incredibly humiliating, I cannot go anywhere now without people knowing exactly what the town did to me,” she told us.
Now, she’s suing her town in an attempt to “regain (her) voice.”
Barbour filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in January, alleging the town retaliated against her for exercising her First Amendment rights.
A secretly recorded call
While Carefree’s residents have plenty of disposable income, the town government doesn’t: There’s no primary property tax, so its revenue is heavily reliant on sales taxes.
The council tried to implement a primary property tax in 2023, but 80% of residents voted against it.
That’s around when Barbour’s questions began.
She wanted to understand why Carefree wasn’t working to boost sales tax revenue after the election failed. Five years before the failed vote, the town rezoned an area next to a major intersection for commercial use, but nothing was being developed there.
In 2022, Thompson Thrift applied to build 126 residential units and nearly 50,000 square feet of commercial space on the site, but Barbour said the town’s staff wouldn’t give her clear answers on why their proposal wasn’t moving forward.
She called Andrew Call, Thompson Thrift’s vice president of development management. He told her about his company’s repeated attempts to work with Carefree, and the town’s consistent reluctance to engage.
Barbour recorded the call.
“We’ve met with a lot of the staff. We have a zoning attorney that’s involved, and met with the mayor and some council members … They are pretty blatant about saying ‘No, we are not — we’re not receptive to developing it,’” Call said on the recording.
Barbour kept the recording to herself. That changed in April 2024, more than a year later, when she had a meeting with Vice Mayor Cheryl Kroyer, who was also wondering what was going on with the development. Barbour mentioned the recording, and Kroyer asked for a copy.
The vice mayor said she’d get Barbour some answers after listening to the recording, per the legal complaint against Carefree.
But Barbour never got those answers.
Instead, more than a month later, Barbour received a scathing, cease and desist letter from Morgan, Carefree’s contract attorney, who demanded Barbour and Thompson Thrift “recant” their “defamatory statements.”
The website is the first thing that pops up if you Google her name plus Carefree.
Thompson Thrift had initially proposed a predominantly residential project, the letter said, which the area isn’t zoned for, and the developer walked away from the project. Carefree’s lawyer alleged Thompson Thrift misrepresented Carefree’s intentions by claiming town officials didn’t want the development in a phone call the executive didn’t know was recorded.
And Barbour was to blame, Morgan said, for spreading a false narrative.
He cited her emails to the vice mayor, which stated “Carefree ran off Thompson Thrift,” and included capitalized words for emphasis. He cited that as evidence that Barbour knowingly spread false information.
“Using all-capitalized letters in a written communication is understood by some to mean to convey the act of shouting at a recipient. See Writing in All Caps Is Like Shouting (lifewire.com),” Morgan noted in a footnote.
The attorney also took issue with Barbour’s use of a plural pronoun in another email.
“Ms. Barbour’s e-mail mentions ‘we’ and begs the question: who ‘we’ means whether anyone is conspiring with her to defame Town Staff? If necessary, pre-trial, or even pre-filing, discovery will reveal any such individuals. And they, too, will be held accountable.”
Barbour’s attorney sent the town a response letter arguing the defamation claims were unfounded and meant to silence her.
Carefree’s attorneys didn’t respond until December, when Morgan made Barbour the topic of the town meeting, saying Barbour’s recording was “obtained entirely by unethical means.” (Arizona is a one-party consent state, so you don’t need permission to record phone calls.)
After that meeting, the town posted the “unethically obtained” recording on its official government website, alongside Carefree’s demand letter and Thompson Thrift’s written apology for mischaracterizing the planning process.
And the town posted Barbour’s personal email address.
Morgan told Barbour’s lawyers she didn’t have privacy rights as an “active, very vocal, and very public participant concerning these issues,” according to the complaint, and “Ms. Barbour can appreciate the fact that victims of bullying and false accusations have every right to set the record straight.”
“It feels to me like the town was trying to intimidate me, and if they were trying to intimidate me, they certainly did it,” Barbour said.
A pattern of bullying
In her lawsuit against Carefree, Barbour isn’t just asking a judge to clear her name — she wants the town found in violation of her constitutional rights and ordered to pick up the tab for damages and attorneys’ fees.
Barbour’s lawyers say her claims aren’t part of some wild conspiracy theory and she had genuine concerns that the town slow-walked the Thompson Thrift project. She spent more than a year digging into it — including by legally recording a phone call that “helps to defeat (Carefree’s) false allegations.”
Thompson Thrift’s attorney issued an apology clarifying “Town Staff never refused to work with us or derail any proposal we made.”
“Thompson Thrift regrets the inaccurate statements made by its agent and the distribution by third parties of these statements, along with a site plan not meant for public disclosure,” an attorney wrote in a November 2024 letter.
Carefree’s lawyers seem to know that one phone call alone won’t carry a defamation case. Morgan instead shifts to attacking the motive behind the recording, framing it around an email Barbour sent to other residents in early 2024 that called for the removal of prominent town staff members.
In the cease and desist letter, Morgan used the email as evidence that Barbour “has weaponized that secret recording and aims to sew divisiveness and disruption in the community and shatter the livelihoods of Town Staff.”
But Barbour argues that Carefree has a pattern of retaliating against those who challenge its positions.
In 2022, the town’s attorney sent a homeowners association a cease and desist letter threatening a defamation lawsuit over members’ opposition to water policies in 2022, per Barbour’s lawsuit.
And in 2018, Carefree’s attorney dressed down a city council member with an 18-minute speech on a council member’s alleged defamatory comments, the complaint says.
As Barbour awaits a hearing date, she still replays the night the town singled her out at a council meeting nearly a year ago.
“I still, to this day, do not understand this,” she said. “My husband and I wake up every morning going, ‘Why in the world did the town do this to me?’”
Meanwhile, the future of development on the corner of Carefree Highway and Cave Creek Road, where the entire conflict stems from, is moving along just fine.
In June, the town’s Development Review Board approved a final site plan with a different development company, the Empire Group, clearing the way for big-box stores and restaurants.
The town plans to let the new developers recoup up to $7 million through a tax-revenue sharing agreement.
She didn’t break any laws, and if the company VP lied to her, that’s their bad. The city clearly doesn’t like people exercising their legal rights. I hope she gets millions more from the city for her trouble and to teach them a little about the constitution. Thanks AA and Nicole for writing about this.
Hearts were broken, tears were shed, lives in peril. Sounds more like a bad break up movie than a defamation. It’s really quite funny if it weren’t so sad. This lawyer, Morgan, sounds like a skyster (please don’t sue me for defamation). How silly. The sad point is more cities across Arizona are stepping on free speech and it needs to stop. Conservatives in Surprise, Fountain Hills and Scottsdale need to dramatically rethink their positions. If they can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. They aren’t there forever.