Monthly Archives: March 2011

I’ve been asked countless times over the past 16-months “Are you crazy? Why are you writing a book about the affair and extortion attempt? Don’t you want to forget everything that happened and hope everyone else forgets it too?” But writers write, and I need to tell the parts of the story that the media didn’t capture, or chose to leave out. Sure, there is the tawdry public story that everyone thinks they know – the story of an affair between a state senator and a staffer with the spice of extortion thrown in. The public details answered the “what”, but not the “why.” In fact, the story is much larger than even me. […]

Two years ago my life was quite different. Compared to today it is dramatically different. Back then, I was serving my ninth year in the Tennessee legislature and my third as a State Senator. I chaired of one of the Senate’s most powerful committees, was a husband and father and held a bright political future. All that came crashing down as a result of a series of unfortunate circumstances, brought on by many poor decisions that began with me. The political life I coveted began unraveling when a guy, Joel Watts, attempted to extort $10,000 from me saying that he was the boyfriend of McKensie Morrison and he had a disk with pictures of McKensie and me. McKensie was one of my interns, the one I was having an extramarital affair with. Watts threatened to turn the disk over to the press if I didn’t give “them” money. There were no pictures of Morrison and I and I knew it – just a handful of pictures of McKensie she had asked me to take of her. One of many regrettable decisions I made. […]