(RNS) — In early 2019, Dave Ramsey, the finance guru and national radio host, began to think that he’d made a terrible mistake.
For months he and other leaders at Ramsey Solutions had been backing Chris Hogan, a bestselling author and speaker for the Franklin, Tennessee, media and publishing company, in a dispute with Hogan’s wife, who had accused him of adultery.
Ramsey had learned of the allegations against Hogan in the fall of 2018, on the eve of a major tour planned for Hogan’s “Everyday Millionaire” book. For Ramsey Solutions, the allegations presented a particularly thorny problem. Founded by Ramsey in 1992, the company offers financial advice — famously, stern warnings to avoid debt — with a Christian foundation. Much of its revenue comes from the personal finance courses and books it sells to churches and from his daily radio show.
The biblical ethic extended to Ramsey Solutions’ employees: Ramsey personally enforced the company’s “righteous living” rules, which, among other things, bar premarital and extramarital sex. Ramsey Solutions has been sued by former employees; one who was fired after higher-ups learned she was pregnant without being married, and another who alleges she was terminated for being a lesbian. (In the latter case, the company settled.)
But Hogan was a star, with his own slot on the company’s radio programming and multiple books. Rather than fire Hogan, Ramsey and other leaders let Hogan go out on the tour while setting up a “restoration plan” for his marriage.
That plan failed. And Ramsey began to worry that Hogan had been lying to him.
“I am afraid we are being played after we were warned that he is a world class liar and manipulator,” Ramsey wrote other leaders at his company in an email dated Feb. 25, 2019. The email was part of a trove of documents recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee for the lawsuit filed by Caitlin O’Connor, the former Ramsey employee who claims the company fired her for being pregnant and not married.
“We owe God to steward a huge situation with wisdom and thoroughness,” he went on to write. “If it breaks that he has done some huge things and it looks like we did not dig for truth, and checked boxes, we will not only have lost (name redacted), but will also have a legitimate PR problem of scale, because we covered up a horrible act to line our own pocketbooks.”
In this July 29, 2009, file photo, Dave Ramsey sits in his broadcasting studio in Brentwood, Tennessee. (AP Photo/Josh Anderson, File)
The email did not mention Hogan by name but described a situation identical to his. Hogan’s former wife, Melissa Hogan, confirmed in a phone call with Religion News Service that the email referred to her former husband, who later left Ramsey Solutions for violating company policy.
Ramsey Solutions did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Chris Hogan.
The company had argued O’Connor was fired for having premarital sex in violation of Ramsey Solutions’ “righteous living” rule. The documents also include depositions of Ramsey and other company leaders, providing insight into the scrutiny that Ramsey’s nearly 1,000 employees are subjected to about their sex lives.
Lawyers for Ramsey Solutions and O’Connor have fought in court for months over the documents, with Ramsey lawyers arguing that they all should be sealed. O’Connor’s lawyer argued that she needed to refer to the depositions and other documents in responding to Ramsey’s motion for summary judgment in the case.
