1999-2010

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Miami Vice: Multimillionaire marries his daughter!

The tabloid story of the year has broken out on Miami’s exclusive Fisher Island and Tabloid Baby's pal, America's most intrepid newspaper editor Tony Ortega, has shepherded it from a tawdry posh hiding place to the cold light of newsprint.

It’s Chinatown meets Miami Vice on the corner of Wall Street, a sordid, diamond-encrusted scandal that Tony calls a "doozy," proves that South Florida is the reigning hotbed of tabloid lojinks, and is definitely the material from which movies are made:

A multimillionaire loves his daughter... so much… he marries her... in a ceremony at Westminister Abbey.

Allegedly, of course. With photos.

To top it off, when the taboo-bending affair is exposed, the multimillionaire denies it, but according to reporter Kelly Cramer, “he doesn't explain how his and Linda's DNA turned up on a vibrator that Linda's husband uncovered in her luggage.”

"Linda" is Linda Marie Hodge McMahan Schutt. The multimillionaire dad is D. Bruce McMahan. According to the extraordinary story in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, she was 35 when she and he was thirty years older when they exchanged rings and pronounced themselves husband and wife on June 23, 2004.

Cramer writes:

Afterward, she flew home to her legal spouse in Mississippi and he went home to his compound on Fisher Island, a ferry ride from Miami…

What followed was a breakup on an even grander scale than their wedding and a legal battle every bit as obsessive as each has been about the other. For more than a year, attorneys have been kept busy in Miami, New York, Mississippi, and San Diego with the fallout over the breakup of McMahan and Linda in five lawsuits involving not only father and daughter but also their legal spouses, as well as Linda's current boyfriend and soon-to-be father of her child…


On September 13, as Tony and his team was preparing the New Times article for print, all five lawsuits were settled. As part of the settlement, a federal judge in San Diego sealed the files of the California lawsuit and took the rare step of wiping out any record that the lawsuit had ever existed.

There's lots more: court documents and exhibits that include his denial of paternity, the paternity test that allegedly proves him wrong, details of McMahan and Linda's extraordinary wedding and their years as lovers, and Linda's videotaped deposition, all on the New Times website.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FBLA can't wait for New Times to charge into town and lay waste to the LA Weekly and scare the LA Times. In the Palm Beach edition of the alt-weekly, Tabloid Baby found what may be the greatest tabloid story ever:

A multimillionaire loves his daughter...so much... he marries her... in a ceremony at Westminister Abbey.

This story has everything--sex, money, scandal, low doings in high places. If that's going on in Palm Beach, imagine what might be happening here.

Anonymous said...

Oh, man. I'm going to be reading the news story all morning. Top of the list of life's stranger than fiction.