Taletha Coles defends township spending, as attorney general sues for audit costs
Former Fairfield Township trustee, defending herself against attorney general’s lawsuit, files response: ‘It didn’t need to come to this.’
Targeted by an Indiana attorney general’s lawsuit filed in December, Taletha Coles – a former Fairfield Township trustee who served jail time for charges related to how she mishandled township money – filed a response in court this week that she doesn’t deserve to be on the hook for state investigation costs for the audit that led to her criminal charges.
Coles, acting as her own attorney, filed a 10-page response Wednesday that repeated many of the claims she made during her tenure in office and ahead of her guilty plea in 2023 that cast of people were to blame for how she accounted for spending or for going out of their way to undercut her authority as trustee.
The audit happened, Coles wrote in court documents, “due to (the State Board of Accounts) not helping me after the many times of pleading for assistance and due to board, employee, contractors and previous trustees sabotage and deliberately and knowingly wrongdoing.”
“I will take the blame for unknowingly not doing very few things incorrectly but refuse to take the major costs these people caused the township to have,” Coles wrote. “It didn’t need to come to this.”
