Daddy's Girl

"He made an attempt to quote Winston Churchill.... He told all the guests during his toast at my wedding that, öThis is the beginning of the end. '"

Bruce was no doubt cribbing from Churchill's line from a speech he gave in 1942 at a turning point in World War II: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Linda said Bruce never explained what he meant by it.

Bruce moved on, beginning a new romance with a Ukrainian woman who eventually became his fifth wife. And he provided his daughter employment. He named Linda president and CEO of McMahan Center for Human Abilities, a nonprofit foundation he had created to extend the efforts of his primary charity, the National Cristina Foundation, which provides computers to disabled children. It is named after another of his daughters, who has cerebral palsy. Linda was being paid $10,000 a month to run the foundation in the spring of 2002 when family members gathered to have dinner in a Sonoma restaurant.

Linda testified she was asked in front of the others when she and Schutt planned to have children. "Soon," she replied.

The next day, Bruce asked to meet her in the lobby of a hotel. When she arrived, carrying paperwork for the McMahan Center, she began to speak with him about ideas for the foundation. But he became enraged.

"His face became red. He clinched his fists, and he raised his voice.... He told me that having children was not part of the plan."

Bruce told her he was ending the foundation and no longer planned to pay her. (He did cut her off, but the foundation still exists.)

"He told me that I was not able to have children and be committed to the project," she testified.

She returned to her career in psychology and accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Mississippi. She and Schutt moved to suburban Jackson. She and Bruce didn't speak for months. Then, on May 25, 2003, Linda's adoptive father, Laird Hodge, a retired government contractor, died in San Diego. Linda and Schutt traveled to the funeral in La Mesa, California. Bruce sent flowers and e-mailed Linda his condolences, but they still didn't speak.

The stress of losing both fathers — Hodge to death, Bruce to indifference — weighed on Linda, she testified. It also wrecked her health. From Bruce she had inherited a genetic condition called Reiter's syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation of the soft tissues and can affect the eyes and, more seriously, the heart. Linda had a bad flareup and developed cataracts in both eyes.

"I became very ill. I was experiencing heart problems, and the doctors at the University [of Mississippi] Medical Center indicated to me that I would need surgery on my heart," she testified.

Bruce sent one of his two private planes to ferry her from her home in Mississippi to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The treatments she received there helped, and she began to recover. Her father insisted she come to Fisher Island to recuperate so she would have access to a spa and to the Argent Center, a posh retreat McMahan had built to entertain his family and his billionaire clients. Bruce, she testified, didn't want her to go back to Mississippi or her marriage. He wanted her to leave behind the fellowship in clinical and rehabilitative neuropsychology, and he persuaded her to return to work for him.

"I told him that I had given up opportunities based on his promises to me in the past," she testified. "And I told him that he wasn't to abandon his promise to me and that it was to be a strictly normal father-and-daughter relationship."

She accepted a position as executive vice president of marketing for two of her father's financial firms, Argent Funds Group LLC and McMahan Securities. But things didn't stay normal for long.

"It changed from a loving, supportive father caring for an ill, vulnerable daughter to a manipulative, contingency-based rewards/punishment relationship that created my dependence on him and gave him control and dominance over me," Linda testified. According to Linda's court complaint, Bruce again initiated an incestuous sexual relationship in April 2004 that lasted for more than a year.

In June the couple flew to London with a twisted plan: to get married where the kings and queens of England are crowned.

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"We traveled to London for some business, and during that trip Bruce took me to the Westminster Abbey and we exchanged vows," Linda testified in her deposition.

Besides her testimony, there are the cheek-to-cheek photographs documenting this unusual ceremony.

There is little description in court records of how the couple made the ceremony happen in the very public church on June 23, 2004. Photographs inside the sanctuary are prohibited, so only the two of them would know if there was anything more to it than two well-dressed tourists walking up and performing a little ritual during visiting hours.