A Graham attorney has been temporarily barred from continuing to practice law until she undergoes a mental health evaluation and can demonstrate she doesn’t have a condition that impairs her judgment.
The attorney, Taylor Dant, appears to maintain an office at 24 NW Court Square, Suite 202, in downtown Graham, according to the online listing for her law practice.
Dant has been barred from practicing law in North Carolina until she can prove “by clear, cogent, and convincing evidence via a completed mental health evaluation…that she does not have ‘a mental and/or physical condition which significantly impairs her professional judgment, performance, or competence as an attorney,” based on an order that superior court judge George R. (“Robby”) Hicks, III of Cumberland County entered late last month following a hearing in Wake County.
The North Carolina State Bar currently lists Dant as ineligible to practice law in North Carolina. She was admitted to practice law in North Carolina on May 21, 2021, according to the organization, which is responsible for regulating the legal profession in the state and investigating lawyers who violate the State Bar’s code of ethics.
The State Bar filed motions for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order against Dant, which Hicks heard in Wake County superior court last month.
Two judges – including Alamance County’s then-senior resident superior court judge Tom Lambeth, Jr., who retired in October 2024, and Graham Shirley, a special superior court judge from Wake County – previously heard motions in June 2024 related to alleged misconduct by Dant, based on Hicks’ order.
In ordering Dant to prove that she does not have “a mental and/or physical condition that impairs her professional judgment or competence as an attorney,” Hicks pointed to a federal suit that Dant filed earlier this year.
Dant filed a 130-page federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of N.C. in February against 60 defendants, including four buildings: the Alamance County Historic Court House; the J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House; the civil annex; and an apartment complex, the Lofts on Haw River.
“As inanimate objects, buildings lack any legal personhood or capacity to be sued,” Hicks pointed out in his order.
“In the complaint, Dant alleges a state-wide conspiracy against herself, while making reference to alleged human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, [the Vietnamese] car manufacturer Vinfast’s CEO, the Bissell Pet Foundation, and the North Carolina Board of Elections,” Hicks wrote.
“As Dant’s [federal] complaint continues, there is a noticeable increase in incomplete thoughts, sentence fragments, and, at times, the wholesale abandonment of the structural conventions that generally govern writing,” Hicks concluded.
Dant accused one of the implausible targets of her federal suit – former Alamance County commissioner Craig Turner, now an Alamance County district court judge, whom she listed among the 60 defendants – of convincing Shirley, the special superior court judge from Wake County, to dismiss one of his own clients from an unspecified court action.
“Plaintiff(s) are also violated by Defendant Alamance County, and Defendant Craig Turner; toxic mold in around eleven schools shut down schools, and to this day; there is mold in the schools,” Dant wrote in her federal complaint, which she voluntarily dismissed in mid-April. “Continuously there is missing money paid by the citizens through taxes, this year, it is reported to be around $1.6 million dollars; “nobody knows how.” Alamance County Commissioner Craig Turner was responsible for knowing how…The plan to repay that amount is to take money from the School’s [sic] riddled with mold.”
Dant also included an Alamance News story about a delay in posting the county’s results for the 2024 general election among her exhibits for the federal suit, insinuating that Turner won his race for judge “after three hours of counting votes by the Defendant North Carolina Board of Elections.”
Dant further claimed in her federal suit that another defendant, Alamance County, “ forces Non-Disclosures for Jane Doe’s suffering from illness, and attacked, by resident(s), threatening to behead them, with felonies, the building allowed in…At one time, blood stains that looked as if someone had been dragged through the [Lofts on Haw River] and reaching on to the wall. The response of the building was not to inform the Haw River PD, but to immediately clean it up.”
Dant made headlines last year when she allegedly disguised herself as a veterinary inspector in order to recover two dogs that had been taken to the Animal Rescue Corps (ARC) in Gallatin, Tennessee in April 2024, WRAL News reported at the time. More than 150 dogs had been seized from a client that Dant was representing in a suspected animal cruelty case in Chatham County, according to the report.
“On April 30, [2024], Dant arrived at ARC’s shelter dressed in medical scrubs matching those worn by the shelter’s staff, surgical gloves, a fanny pack, and carrying a clipboard and camera,” Hicks wrote in his order.
Dant told the shelter’s director that “she had come to inspect ARC’s shelter and presented him with a subpoena that purported to authorize Dant search ARC’s entire property, including outbuildings, storage units, and vehicles, and to take possession of two dogs and return to North Carolina,” Hicks wrote. She left when the director said she could see the two dogs but wouldn’t be allowed to inspect the premises, according to the judge’s order.
Statements by one of Dant’s former clients, who he identifies as Kecia Pugh, as well as an Alamance County trial court administrator, along with a host of other evidence, ultimately led Hicks to conclude that “prompt action is necessary to protect the public, clients, and administration of justice from Dant’s continuing misconduct, particularly when the available evidence as described in this petition demonstrates that Dant’s mental health status is becoming increasingly unstable over time.”
The injunction against Dant will remain effect until another order may be entered. An earlier temporary restraining order against Dant expired on April 21, 2025, according to documents on file with the State Bar.
