{"id":257,"date":"2011-03-25T11:54:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T16:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulstanley.org\/blog\/?p=257"},"modified":"2011-03-25T11:54:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-25T16:54:57","slug":"the-extortion-of-forgiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulstanley.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/25\/the-extortion-of-forgiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Extortion of Forgiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two years ago my life was quite different. Compared to today it is dramatically<\/em> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t give \u201cthem\u201d money. There were no pictures of Morrison and I and I knew it \u2013 just a handful of pictures of McKensie she had asked me to take of her. One of many regrettable decisions I made.<\/p>\n

Within hours of their initial demands, I contacted the state\u2019s top law enforcement agency and agreed to wear a wire in a sting operation to obtain information from Watts and Morrison. It was an intense thirty-three hours of text messages, phone calls and recorded conversations. It ended with the exchange of the disk and marked money from the TBI, with Watts being thrown to the ground by a dozen TBI Agents, guns pointed at this head, and arrested in the finale.<\/p>\n

TBI agents had been watching Morrison all day, too. At the time of Watts\u2019 arrest, she was smoking a cigarette behind the legislative cafeteria, cell-phone in hand, waiting to hear from him. That call never came, and it was her last day as an intern.<\/p>\n

I drove to my home in Germantown later that afternoon, fully realizing what had transpired; the danger I had been in and the damage I had caused. The next day, Good Friday of 2009, I sat down with my wife and told her everything. The story would not become public until three and a half months later when Watts\u2019 was brought before the judge for a preliminary hearing on July 20. Neither Watts nor Morrison expected me to show up and testify; it wasn\u2019t the first time they had underestimated my actions nor would it be the last.<\/p>\n

Joel Watts was indicted by a grand jury in the winter of 2010 and charged with Extortion, a Class D felony under Tennessee law. Yesterday, he pled guilty to \u201cFacilitation of Extortion\u201d, a Class E felony. He received a sentence of one-year probation. I did not attend the hearing; I trusted the Assistant District Attorney to handle the matter as he and his office best saw fit. Yet the story doesn\u2019t end there.<\/p>\n