Tired of encountering roadblock after roadblock in his attempt to get mortgage relief from HSBC, West Chester chemist Dean Moore finally penned an angry letter to the U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, who is overseeing the bank’s $1.9 billion money-laundering settlement case.

As Rachel Louise Ensign writes for the Wall Street Journal, nobody, least of all Moore himself, could have anticipated the enormous consequences that his letter would have on the bank, his wife Ann Marie Fletcher-Moore and himself. Soon after, the couple found themselves embroiled in a battle over whether HSBC Holdings has to release a secret report on its compliance with the settlement.

In his letter to the judge, Moore stated that releasing the report would help show that the bank had systemic issues which caused it to slip up on its record-keeping duties in his mortgage case. While Judge Gleeson commented that he receives similar complaints from people around the globe regularly, he decided to elevate Moore’s case and in a shocking move, ordered the release of the report.

The decision, which is the first of its kind, could have huge ramifications on the current systems where banks that get accused of illegal practices, enter into a settlement agreement instead of being prosecuted and agree to be supervised by monitors whose findings remain secret. However, prosecutors are claiming that this ruling could threaten the confidentiality of the process, and endanger the validity of such settlements in the future.

HSBC and Justice Department prosecutors have already opposed the case on the grounds of relevance and the decision has been sent for appeal with a ruling not due for months.

The Moores, who live in West Chester with their four children, have called the entire experience surreal and their time in court evocative of a “Law and Order” episode. Even so, they are not backing down, and have managed to hold their own in the courtroom against a mass of lawyers from HSBC and the Justice Department.

“I feel like a very small boat in a very large ocean,” Moore wrote in one of his letters to the court.