Some 18 months after a lawsuit was filed against Nadia Cavner in Greene County Circuit Court, the case brought by her daughter’s ex-boyfriend and his then-girlfriend appears nowhere near a conclusion.
Douglas Rudman, the St. Louis attorney representing plaintiffs Patrick McFarland, the ex-boyfriend, and Kristen Stancher, the girlfriend who is now McFarland’s wife, said the lawsuit still is in the discovery phase, and he doesn’t expect a trial until at least 2016.
“We anticipated this would be very detailed and complex litigation in light of the breadth of the allegations,” Rudman said.
The case is the first of two civil cases the financial adviser is battling since her felony conviction for interstate stalking in August 2014. On April 15, the buyer of Nadia Cavner Group filed a civil lawsuit in federal court for interfering with its clients.
The first civil case, filed in October 2013, is based largely on details from the criminal case that led Cavner to plead guilty in April of that year to a felony stalking charge in Memphis, Tenn., acknowledging intentions to injure, harass or intimidate McFarland. In August 2013, a federal judge sentenced Cavner to five years of probation and six months of home detention.
The original 85-page filing ballooned to a 291-page amended filing submitted to the court on Nov. 17, and it includes new details about Cavner’s efforts to harass her daughter’s ex-boyfriend and Stancher.
Among the claims in the case, the lawsuit alleges Cavner hired two private detectives to carry out surveillance of McFarland and/or Stancher before they went to authorities when Cavner began talking about bugging homes and breaking McFarland’s arms.
According to the case, Cavner employed multiple means of harassing McFarland, a medical student at the University of Tennessee in 2011, including making and causing others to make harassing phone calls; leaving intimidating notes in university mailboxes; having the ex-boyfriend followed on trips; paying to have electronic listening devices installed in his home; and plotting to have drugs planted on McFarland and have him physically assaulted.
Khulan Denny, a former Cavner associate who, according to the filings, temporarily moved to Memphis, Tenn., to enact some of the stalking, is one of three parties named in the suit who have now settled their individual portions of the case, Rudman said. The other two defendants are Rodney Stafford and Devona Breeden. Stafford was an employee of BancorpSouth – where Cavner worked for eight years – and Breeden was listed as an assistant to Cavner. The amended case says all three were operating under the control of the financial adviser at the time the harassing actions took place in 2011.
“Certain parties have settled in their individual capacities, but remain involved as third parties in their official capacities,” Rudman said, referring to Breeden, Denny and Stafford.
He added that only Cavner, and her former employer, Tupelo, Miss.-based BancorpSouth Inc. (NYSE: BXS), remain as defendants.
According to claims in the amended filing, there are now 46 counts against the defendants, each seeking at least $25,000 judgments for a total of at least $1.15 million.
Among the charges in the filing, an account under Cavner’s management was “improperly utilized for the furtherance of conspiracies,” with said funds deposited in the account of Denny’s father. A cover story was developed that the accountholder was planning a trip to Mongolia. However, the filing states the 90-year-old client was in a nursing home with no intent to travel.
There were other claims of collateral damage. On Dec. 1, 2011, Cavner, or Breeden at Cavner’s request, drew “a financial instrument” from a BancorpSouth account of Helen Johnson, without Johnson’s authorization, in the amount of $10,000 for the purpose to fund activities against the plaintiffs.
Cavner declined to comment for this story, and BancorpSouth spokesman Randy Burchfield did not respond to requests for comment by press time. Previously, Burchfield has declined to comment on pending litigation.
The suit claims, in part, BancorpSouth allowed Cavner a significant amount of freedom to operate independently, which led to the failure of the bank to prevent improper acts.
The plaintiffs state McFarland had “an informal relationship” with Cavner’s daughter before March 2011. In an attempt to make it a formal relationship, Cavner sent McFarland and her daughter to a professional basketball game by plane. Thereafter, McFarland terminated the relationship and began dating Stancher. In June 2011, McFarland’s father died of a heart attack. Beginning at the July 9 memorial service and continuing through Nov. 15, 2011, McFarland received harassing communications from unknown sources now attributed to Cavner and her staff, according to the filing.
Stafford attended the memorial service, the suit states, and wrote an anonymous note on a program he received with which he intentionally defamed Stancher. In August, Stafford allegedly left McFarland an anonymous message on a disposable phone warning him against involvement with Stancher. He’d also allegedly visit the Tennessee campus to leave anonymous letters he’d written about Stancher in a campus mailbox of McFarland.
Stafford, now listed as the branch office administrator at Lawing Financial’s Springfield office, could not be reached for comment by press time. Lawing last year purchased the assets of Nadia Cavner Group, which Cavner formed in 2013 after leaving BancorpSouth.[[In-content Ad]]
