A towing outrage made Amanda Ogle a Seattle celebrity. Here's the twist
When Hollywood shines its studio lights on you, it's a thrill of a lifetime. A dizzying and flattering ride. Right?
Not exactly, says Amanda Ogle.
"I feel I've got this big societal pressure bearing down on me," she told me the other day in the lobby of a Seattle apartment building, where she now lives. "I mean I'm not the CEO of Microsoft or anything. But I've got the movie industry holding me out as this person who has her (bleep) together.
"And I don't. I really don't."
Ogle, 57, is the subject of a movie coming out next Friday about her time homeless in Seattle, when she was living in her '91 Toyota Camry. The story is fictionalized but based on a column I wrote in 2018, when Ogle was fighting, often alone with zero resources, to wrest her car back from a towing company that kept it for more than a year.
A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell, read the headline back then.
The photo with that column, taken by now-retired Seattle Times photographer Mike Siegel, was cinematic, like a movie poster - which it now is. Ogle is played by Rose Byrne, who is up for an Academy Award this year, albeit for a different role.
I can't vouch for the movie, called "Tow," which I was not involved with. I'm also not a movie reviewer.
But I figure it is right in my line of work to catch up with the real person at the center of this story, to ask her: What kind of odyssey has this taken you on?
"When the film people first called, we were like ‘Yeah, right. You're making a movie,' " she joked.
What piqued filmmakers' interest was the Erin Brockovich-like fight Ogle waged in 2018 to claim back her old car - which for her was priceless, because it doubled as her home.
The car was stolen one day from North Seattle and later towed from an apartment building in SeaTac. This turned into an existential crisis for Ogle when the tow lot demanded $427 in fees to turn over the car. That was about $400 more than she had to her name.
She was forced to relocate into a night women's shelter, at University Lutheran Church in Seattle, yet managed to file a towing appeal in court. She relied on a Fred Meyer fax center as a makeshift office to file and receive documents. She won the appeal when a judge ruled, commonsensically, that because she was the victim of the crime in this case, and she was destitute, she should obviously get the Toyota back.
"Everyone assumed that because I was a homeless person, I would just give up and say screw it," she said.
What happened next was straight out of a Kafka novel. The company that towed the car, Dick's Towing in SeaTac, twice had given Ogle court forms already filled in with a sister company's name, Lincoln Towing. Due to this foul-up, both companies were able to claim ignorance of any court proceedings. In the meantime, they had sold off her car. For just $175. So even though she won she lost.
Later, Lincoln got the car back but wouldn't return it to Ogle unless she first released any claims against the companies. She got a lawyer at the Northwest Consumer Law Center, a legal aid nonprofit. They finally won back the car in a second judgment - after months of professional and personal struggle.
"They held a homeless woman's car hostage for a year," recalls the lawyer, Kevin Eggers. (He's played by Dominic Sessa in the movie.)
"I went to rehab for my drinking during that case," Ogle said.
The punishing real-life bill held over Ogle - $21,634.95 to claim her $175 car - is still posted on The Seattle Times' website.
This story was like a case study in how crushingly expensive it is to be poor, especially in our shimmering city. Nearly 4 in 10 Americans don't have $400 to cover an emergency - coincidentally the original tow bill. Had that been my car, I would have cursed at the indignity but paid up. No year lost to a paper ordeal. No outrageous add-on charges. No story.
Precisely because Ogle didn't have the means, she faced byzantine layers of corporate and legal bureaucracy over what to you or me would be a triviality. It's a system designed, as she astutely points out, to grind people down.
She wasn't having it. As she told me in 2018: "They thought I would break and go away. They ignored the wrong person."
Fast forward to today. Ogle is no longer homeless. She lives in a subsidized apartment building, run by the Seattle nonprofit Solid Ground. She's been sober since 2018. The neck and back injuries that prompted her slide into homelessness in the first place still nag, as does depression.
"The depression clouds me," she told me. "It's uncomfortable because the movie holds me out as somebody who did something brave. When I wake up in the morning, I don't feel brave."
The moviemakers paid her for the rights to her story, though not enough yet, she said, to boost her out of low-income housing. "I'm still poor," she said.
She also still has that '91 Camry. It isn't running; in fact, there are blackberry brambles growing into its trunk. She keeps it as a sort of badge of resilience. It's a junker but at least they don't have it. At least she's not living in it.
Here's the twist ending. That yearlong ordeal, the fight out of tow-company hell?
Maybe the injustice jolted something in her. Or maybe it was the logistical requirements of facing off against the powers that be. But it became an organizing principle for Ogle - a reason, she said in retrospect, to get her (bleep) together.
"I don't think I'd have a roof over my head or be sober today if I hadn't been screwed over by those towing companies," Ogle said.
"I think it saved my life. Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard?"
It's said that truth can be stranger than fiction. And sometimes, every bit as beautiful.
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This story was originally published March 14, 2026 at 6:36 AM.