Civil suit against ex-Bass family advisor and hedge fund manager ends in mistrial
The case of Emily Wright v. Renegade Swish ended in mistrial Wednesday.
Testimony in the civil suit against hedge fund manager and ex-Bass family investment advisor Geoffrey Raynor’s company Renegade Swish (a subsidiary of his investment firm Q Investments) began Wednesday with the plaintiff Wright describing her time under Raynor’s employ.
She described her two years as his executive assistant, then subsequent year as the assistant house manager for his 18,000 square-foot Westover estate.
In her testimony, she described working 60 to 70 hours a week as Raynor’s executive assistant, traveling often to California where the family spent the summers in their vacation home and also abroad, scouting out ski homes in Switzerland and elsewhere.
As his assistant, she said Raynor often asked her to be on-call 24-7, checking her email every hour during waking hours and running personal errands for him.
At one point, Wright described having to write a research paper for Raynor when he and his wife got into a disagreement over shampoo and conditioner.
When she became assistant house manager, she carried out much of the same duties. She recalled an instance when a manufacturer discontinued producing his favorite bedsheets, and he told her to call the manufacturer and request they make more, and he was willing to pay any price.
The mistrial was called when Wright’s father and attorney Brett Agee started asking her about the aftermath of her dismissal from Renegade Swish. Wright said she started going to therapy and learned coping mechanisms to deal with stress and anxiety. She was losing sleep and weight after she was served with the suit.
When Agee asked why she was scared, she answered, “I was scared because I knew that Mr. Raynor had a history of--” but before she could finish her sentence, she was cut off by an objection from Brett Martin, attorney for Renegade Swish.
Though Wright wasn’t allowed to finish, the defense said it was clear she was going to talk about outside litigation. In her complaint filed earlier in the case she alleged that Raynor regularly files “recreational litigation against anyone who falls into Mr. Raynor’s disfavor.”
The presiding judge Susan McCoy declared that any outside litigation was inadmissible, meaning that jurors were not allowed to hear about it. When the jury left after Martin’s hasty objection, the defense requested a mistrial. After reviewing the record, McCoy said, “There’s no way a juror can’t infer what the rest of the answer would have been,” and granted the mistrial.
The main point of contention in the lawsuit is the payment of Wright’s bonus during her time as Raynor’s employee.
In an email exchange shown during her testimony, Raynor offered Wright two different job options when she said she wanted a change from being his executive assistant. The option he encouraged her to take was the assistant house manager position, which paid $60,000 in the first year with a $5,000 bonus at the end of the year and $65,000 the second year with another $5,000 at the end of the year.
At the end of her first year in the assistant house manager position, Raynor told Wright that, while she was good at her job and very detail-oriented, she was clearly not passionate about the job because she did only what she was asked and never went above and beyond.
According to Wright’s testimony, he suggested that she find a job she was passionate about. She also said he promised that he would pay her $5,000 bonus.
Wright left Raynor’s employ at the end of May 2015, and she never received her bonus. Later Renegade Swish sued her for $200,000, alleging she would leave work before she was supposed to, and she also broke confidentiality. Wright filed a countersuit insisting that she never received the $5,000 bonus.
Martin said the company later dropped the suit eight weeks after it was filed, but Wright continued forward with her suit. She sought punitive damages and emotional stress.
It’s unclear what will happen after this, but defense attorney David Keltner said he and Martin and the rest of the defense team still have a legal basis to refute the rest of Wright’s claims.
“We look forward to trying the case and vindicating Q Investments and Mr. Raynor,” Martin said. “We will prove that Mr. Raynor is not a recreational litigant.”
