One toe over the line?

Article available without subscription -- Claims of toe-sucking and private inurement emerge from unsealed testimony asserting that Maddox Foundation chief had affair with high-priced attorney, former Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove

Email | Print By Richard Lawson

Ronnie Musgrove

Former Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove and Dick Morris, the notorious former advisor to President Bill Clinton, apparently have a trait in common, if testimony unsealed yesterday in a Nashville court is true: They both have a thing for women's toes.

Musgrove, unlike Morris in an infamous incident a decade ago, is said to have focused his peculiar ardor not on a prostitute but on Robin Costa, the trustee and director of the Maddox Foundation. He has been representing her in fending off a legal effort by Tommye Maddox Working, step-granddaughter of the late Dan Maddox, and Davidson County District Attorney Torry Johnson to move the foundation and its millions back to Nashville from Mississippi.

Musgrove's taste for Costa's toes was revealed Tuesday, along with other details of the supposed relationship, when Davidson County Probate Court Judge Randy Kennedy ordered a portion of former Maddox Foundation employee Tera Hermansen 's 2004 deposition unsealed. According to Hermansen's testimony, Costa would tell her and other female employees about her romantic encounters with Musgrove while he was still governor.

The stated purpose for unsealing the testimony was to so show that Musgrove has had a less than professional relationship with Costa, even as he is among the attorneys who have received $1 million in fees to defend the foundation.

"Ms. Hermansen's testimony regarding the relationship between Ms. Costa and her principal Mississippi lawyer underscores the extreme degree of waste to which trust assets are subjected and raises the specter that Ms. Costa is using tax-exempt assets to confer a private benefit to others and obtain a private instrument for herself," Woody Woodruff, an attorney with Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis representing Maddox Working, wrote in his motion (a copy of which is available at this link).

Musgrove, a Democrat who left office in 2004, hasn't returned calls to his Mississippi office.

Costa's Nashville attorneys, Aubrey Harwell Jr. of Neal & Harwell and Michael Dolan of Paulus & Dolan, challenged the relevance of the unsealed testimony to the facts of the lawsuit in Nashville. "For one thing, the events in question (according to Ms. Hermansen) go back to the spring of 2002, long before the filing of this action," their motion said of the lawsuit filed in 2004. "Plaintifffs' motives are transparent, and they have nothing to do with relevancy or admissibility under the law of evidence."

Now, the juicy stuff. Hermansen testified in her deposition (the newly unsealed portion of which is available at this link) that in 2001 or 2002, Costa told her and another employee about an encounter with the governor at a house. "She told us that he undressed her and proceeded to lick her toes, and that's just not something I was used to hearing in a business setting, so that made me very uncomfortable," Hermansen said.

In another conversation reported by the witness, during a business meeting in 2002 at Costa's house, the foundation director took her and two other female employees to the bathroom and showed them the seat where she had made out with the governor. "She said, 'This seat is just the right height,'" Hermansen said in her testimony. There were other make-out sessions as well, one on the couch in Costa's office, according to the testimony.

In her portion of testimony that hadn't been sealed (a copy of which is available at this link), Hermansen described the office environment at the foundation as chaotic and confusing. "My first concern was seeing the money that was being spent on inappropriate trips," she said. "There was a lack of information, lack of structure, lack of leadership, changes constantly."

According to her testimony, Costa and Paul Morris, secretary of the foundation, charged charter flights for trips to University of Tennessee-Knoxville football games. She also described questionable foundation expenses on the minor league hockey team Memphis RiverKings and indoor football team Memphis Xplorers.

One of the claims in the Maddox Working lawsuit is that the foundation squandered assets on the money-losing teams. According to Hermansen's testimony, the hockey team alone lost $1.1 million from June 2003 to December of that year.

In one part of her testimony, Hermansen described Costa's giving philosophy for organizations in Nashville. Costa called them "GAG" gifts, or "go away gifts." Hermansen recalled that Costa had said, "You know, I just want them to go away and leave me alone."

She added Costa had explained to her when she started in the fall of 2000 "that the way it would work is at first she would continue giving some money to the Middle Tennessee area, but eventually all the money would stay in Mississippi."

Costa's attorneys in Nashville wrote, trying to nix unsealing the salacious parts of her testimony, that Hermansen had left her employment "under less than amicable circumstances."