The Legal Saga of LaDonna Humphrey, and the Boss She Brought Down

LaDonna Humphrey started working for a Bentonville pediatric therapy clinic in May 2018, and four months later she was fired.

Then the emailing began.

Anonymous mails sent to clients and medical providers accused clinic owner Anthony Christopher of being unethical, committing billing fraud and not paying his employees.

Before the smoke cleared and Humphrey was held responsible, Absolute Pediatric Therapy’s business had been wrecked, Christopher had been charged with four felonies and the Arkansas attorney general’s office had been forced to stand down.

Arkansas Business reviewed hundreds of pages of transcripts and court documents to track the rise and fall of a business that quickly outgrew its management and the role a disgruntled employee played in its collapse. Christopher sold the clinic in 2020.

“This is a story about survival, and it’s a story of hope,” Christopher said in an interview. “Because I never want somebody to ever go through what has happened to me.”

Founded in 2017, Christopher’s clinic had about 30 therapists offering an array of services from speech to occupational therapy by the following year, when Humphrey joined and then left the company.

The emails disturbed clients and other providers; referrals dried up.

“The business drastically halted in its tracks,” Christopher said at a 2019 court proceeding in a civil case he filed against Humphrey. “Everybody was paranoid. … Nobody knew who to trust.” Sixteen therapists left the clinic.

After some “very dark days,” Christopher proved to a Benton County Circuit Court judge that Humphrey was behind the email campaign and had tried to cover her tracks by destroying evidence.

“I lost my career, I lost colleagues, I lost friendships, I lost employees,” Christopher, 36, told Arkansas Business. “I lost patients that we cared so deeply about.”

Humphrey, who referred all questions to her attorney, maintained in court filings that she didn’t send the emails. She also said she had submitted her resignation before she was fired. In her version, Christopher sued her in retaliation for her blowing the whistle on his Medicaid fraud, although there is no public document supporting her claim that she complained to the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit while still employed by Absolute. She also filed a counterclaim.

The litigation didn’t go well for Humphrey.

In October 2019, Benton County Circuit Judge Xollie Duncan handed Humphrey an overwhelming defeat. In the early stages of the case, Duncan struck Humphrey’s answer to Christopher’s suit and dismissed her counterclaim as a sanction for destroying evidence. Duncan ultimately ordered her to pay $3.57 million in damages to Christopher and his clinic.

The judge also sent her to jail for 10 days for contempt of court.

“So then, I think to myself, I’m free,” Christopher said. “I’ve cleared my name — like, this is amazing. I got my reputation back.”

He was wrong. When he was celebrating his civil court victory, the state attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit had been investigating Absolute for more than a year and would continue its investigation for another six months.

In March 2020, Christopher was arrested and would later be charged by the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney’s office with four felonies, including fraudulent Medicaid billing of at least $38,000. The charges, which he has reason to believe were based on Humphrey’s allegations, hung over him for 3½ years.

Days before Christopher was finally to go on trial in Pulaski County Circuit Court in October 2023, defense attorney John Wesley Hall of Little Rock discovered that unspecified emails Humphrey sent to the attorney general’s office had been deleted and paper printouts had not been turned over to the defense.

Hall asked that the charges be dismissed.

The attorney general’s office on Oct. 13 said it was abandoning the case because the investigator and the assistant attorney general assigned to the case no longer worked for the AG. Witnesses had become unavailable, the office said in a court filing. “At this point, the State cannot go forward because it is not possible to meet our burden of proof on the charges filed.”

A spokesman for the AG said there are no plans to refile the charges.

Creating a Job

Humphrey’s children were patients at Absolute Pediatric Therapy when Christopher received a desperate message from her in May 2018. She had been fired from her job at the Northwest Arkansas Home Builders Association, Christopher said during a court proceeding.

She was in the process of adopting her fifth child from foster care, he said, and feared the loss of income would interfere with the adoption.

Christopher offered to hire her and created the position of community outreach director. He said her annual salary was $50,000.

“I’m bawling,” Humphrey said in a text message that Christopher shared with Arkansas Business. “Are you kidding? That’s my dream.”

She said she couldn’t stop crying. “God is amazing,” she texted.

But Humphrey turned out to be a poor employee, Christopher said in a subsequent court proceeding. She frequently missed work, and when she showed up, she was distracted, he said. Among other things, Christopher said, Humphrey was running background checks on co-workers, which was not her role.

That’s why she was fired on Sept. 20, 2018, Christopher said.

But in court filings, Humphrey said that “it is clear to me I was fired for reporting Medicaid fraud.”

Stolen iPhone

Referrals dwindled almost immediately after Humphrey left Absolute. In a lawsuit filed Oct. 9, 2018, by attorney Glenn Ritter of Wright Lindsey Jennings in Rogers, Christopher alleged that Humphrey schemed to ruin him and his company’s reputation and business.

After the suit was filed, Christopher discovered that anonymous emails to other health care providers were part of that scheme.

Humphrey, 50, has consistently denied that she wrote the emails.

One of the emails, dated Sept. 22, 2018 — two days after Humphrey’s employment ended — included allegations that Absolute scheduled evaluations that weren’t ordered. The email alleged that Christopher and another employee “often tell the referral source that the parents requested the additional testing OR that the ‘office person’ lost the original script and the additional testing was an ‘accident’ … but it isn’t an accident,” the email said. “Myself and others have seen with our OWN eyes these practices and/or scripts being altered. It’s a hot mess. I am trying to understand how this is legal or appropriate?”

The same email referred to Humphrey as “reputable” and “really well respected in the community.”

As part of the lawsuit, Christopher’s attorney wanted to submit Humphrey’s electronic devices to an electronic discovery and forensic company to see whether she was behind the anonymous message campaign. “The electronic evidence does not stay around forever,” Ritter said during the case.

Humphrey refused. “I did not want to give you full access to my devices, Mr. Ritter,” Humphrey said at a 2019 hearing.

So Ritter filed a motion on Nov. 8, 2018, for expedited discovery of Humphrey’s electronic records.

That night, Humphrey and her husband called police to their Bentonville home. While watching TV, they told police, they heard the car alarm on their Chevrolet Suburban go off. They said Humphrey’s purse and its contents were stolen, including her iPhone, a key piece of evidence in the case.

Police found no signs of forced entry, but Humphrey’s husband said the vehicle had a faulty door lock.

Humphrey said she bought a new iPhone the next day and discovered her Apple ID account and the data it contained had been deleted.

In January 2019, Ritter filed a motion for contempt and sanctions, alleging that Humphrey “deleted, concealed, and failed to preserve relevant evidence in this case.” Ritter wanted the severest sanction against Humphrey — striking her answer to his lawsuit and dismissing her whistleblower counterclaim.

Humphrey “has taken Plaintiffs’ ability to prove their case away from them,” he wrote.

A hearing on his motion began on April 15, 2019. In it, an expert witness hired by Christopher’s team testified that something else happened to Humphrey’s phone.

The SIM card, the small electronic card that stores user data and allows connection to a cellular network, from Humphrey’s old phone had been placed into her new iPhone, expert Peter Kohler, of QDiscovery of Boston, testified.

“Well, how could she do that if the phone was stolen?” Ritter asked.

“You would need to have physical control of the SIM card,” Kohler said. “It was either retained or the phone was not stolen.”

The expert said a person might insert an old SIM card into a new phone to copy the contacts off of it.

Kohler also had an opinion about who sent the anonymous emails. It seems “more than likely that a single person sent all these emails. … [It] seems most likely that that person is Ms. Humphrey,” he said.

Kohler said the IP address, the numeric designation that identifies a device’s location on the internet, for emails from Humphrey’s personal account matched the IP address on email accounts used to send the anonymous emails.

“She didn’t send those emails,” Humphrey’s attorney, Thomas Stockland of Fayetteville, told Arkansas Business. He also said that the plaintiff’s expert “would say whatever he was paid to say.”

Ritter, Christopher’s attorney, told Arkansas Business that both sides hired expert witnesses to testify about the evidence. “I did not think their expert was credible, and, obviously, neither did the judge,” Ritter said.

‘An Atmosphere of Fear’

In a July 31, 2019, letter to the attorneys, Judge Duncan said that she found that Humphrey “has not been forthcoming with the Court.” She struck Humphrey’s answer and dismissed her counterclaim, resulting in Christopher winning the case. He then had to prove damages.

At the hearing for damages on Sept. 17, 2019, several Absolute employees told Duncan how uneasy the anonymous emails made Christopher and the clinic’s therapists as business tapered off.

Heather Johnson, the clinic’s compliance officer, said the emails “produced an atmosphere of fear that … are we going to have jobs?”

Johnson worked closely with Christopher and said there were days when Christopher “didn’t want to get out of bed. This was that difficult for him, tearing him down, not only as a business owner, as a person in the community, but as a human being, as a father, as [a] partner.”

Duncan awarded Christopher and his clinic $1.78 million in compensatory damages and an equal amount in punitive damages.

The judgment also “permanently enjoined [Humphrey] from bullying, harassing, intimidating, or otherwise annoying any party or attorney to this lawsuit, including their employees and families.”

Duncan also ordered Humphrey, who didn’t attend the damages hearing, to appear in person to be sentenced for contempt of court.

“I found your testimony at the hearing [for sanctions] to be contradictory and not credible,” Duncan told Humphrey on Oct. 2, 2019. Duncan found that Humphrey “aggressively destroyed evidence.”

Duncan sentenced her to two days in jail for each of five findings: that Humphrey claimed the phone was stolen, when Duncan found that was not true; that she destroyed evidence; that she sent spoof emails; that she falsely claimed her accounts were hacked; and that she falsely claimed that someone else had deleted her Apple account.

Humphrey has appealed Duncan’s judgment to the Arkansas Court of Appeals. (See sidebar below.)

Problems Acknowledged

Christopher acknowledges billing and documentation problems at Absolute Pediatric Therapy. In early 2018, months before he hired Humphrey, Christopher discovered systemic errors by a employee. “So we had to self-report it to Medicaid,” he said. He terminated the employee and hired a certified biller.

The state Office of the Medicaid Inspector General audited a sample of Absolute’s cases for March-May of 2018 and eventually found that about $41,000 should be refunded to the Arkansas Medicaid program.

The inspector general’s report said the office had received a complaint through the fraud hotline — apparently not from Humphrey — alleging that Absolute had “improper billing and service delivery.” The IG said it found no evidence to support the allegations for the dates of service it reviewed.

But the Medicaid inspector general isn’t the only state office that investigates Medicaid payments.

In late October 2018, a month after she was fired and weeks after Christopher sued her, Humphrey emailed an investigator for the state attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit with the names and contact information of more than two dozen people or entities that she said should be contacted.

The investigator, Terry Rolfe, had opened a file on Absolute in August, possibly because of the overpayments found by the Medicaid inspector general. Her case log shows she looked into the allegations off and on for a year and a half, ultimately talking to some of the people Humphrey had mentioned as well as others. Former staff and therapists reported Medicaid fraud, Rolfe said.

Rolfe’s affidavit for Christopher’s arrest warrant in 2020 included allegations from some of the clinic’s former therapists, a provider and Humphrey.

Rolfe concluded that in the 18 months between August 2017 and February 2019, Absolute billed Medicaid at least $38,000 for services that were not provided, not medically necessary or both. Medicaid paid at least $15,219 for the services, Rolfe said.

Rolfe’s allegations included Christopher using Medicaid provider numbers of therapists and a doctor without their knowledge. This was the basis of the three identity fraud charges.

Christopher vehemently denied wrongdoing. He pleaded not guilty and vowed to fight the criminal charges “to show that we had done nothing wrong.” Christopher said that he and his lawyer offered to answer any of Rolfe’s questions, but Christopher said she never met with them. No meeting with Christopher is noted in Rolfe’s log.

The arrest was the undoing of his business.

“Medicaid immediately shut off my Medicaid billing number and they also didn’t pay me for my last reimbursement,” Christopher told Arkansas Business. He sold Absolute Pediatric Therapy to two therapists who worked there, and they assumed the clinic’s lease.

The new owners changed the name to Emerge Therapy Services.

“I gave them like … $30,000 or $35,000 so that they could pay the payroll to keep the doors open, and I walked away,” he said.

Email Destruction Alleged

After several delays, Christopher’s criminal trial was scheduled for Oct. 17, 2023, in Pulaski County Circuit Court. Less than two weeks out, Little Rock defense attorney John Wesley Hall asked that the charges be dismissed “because of the State’s knowing and bad faith destruction of impeachment material during the investigation back in 2018.”

Rolfe’s investigative log referred to communications between the AG’s office, Humphrey and her lawyer that were part of the case file yet weren’t turned over to the defense.

On Nov. 15, 2018, according to Rolfe’s log, Assistant Attorney General Donna Galloway told Rolfe that she had reviewed documents that Humphrey’s attorney, Stockland, had received from Christopher’s attorneys. This was about a month after Christopher had sued Humphrey.

Galloway “suspects that they will want to look at any emails that LaDonna Humphrey may have sent and told me to keep them in print only. Delete them from my computer in case they FOI us. I verified that everything was printed off prior to deleting them.” (Galloway’s name was blacked out in Hall’s motion. Arkansas Business copied and pasted his motion into a Google document, which revealed her name.)

Hall told the court that the printed copies of Humphrey’s emails weren’t provided to him in discovery, nor were the emails from Stockland.

Hall said the investigative log showed that the instruction to “destroy” emails during the investigation “was a conscious decision to make Humphrey’s emails undiscoverable” through the Freedom of Information Act. “Thus, the [assistant attorney general] and investigator, apparently in cahoots with Humphrey’s lawyer, chose to hide potential evidence knowing exactly what they were doing.

“There is one inference: They were seeking to bolster Humphrey’s credibility,” Hall said. “Yet, she crashed and burned in her 2019 trial in Judge Duncan’s court.”

Forty-three months after he was charged and four days before his trial was set to start, the AG’s office dropped the case against Christopher. Stockland told Arkansas Business that Humphrey was not going to be a witness in the trial.

Jeff LeMaster, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, told Arkansas Business that the case was handled by lawyers who were no longer employed by the AG’s office by the time Tim Griffin succeeded Leslie Rutledge in 2023. He did not comment on how they handled the case.

He also said that the office couldn’t discuss allegations based on work product materials and or protected discovery. He pointed out that the emails that were supposedly deleted to protect them from the FOIA would never have been available under the FOIA anyway; they would fall under a specific working papers exemption.

Regardless of an FOIA exemption, “deleting the electronic version of a record does not change the obligation to disclose [to the defense] a paper copy retained by this office,” he said. LeMaster said that the “email evidence was not destroyed. It was kept in hard copy, paper form.”

Galloway, who is now a circuit judge in Arkansas County, told Arkansas Business via email that she didn’t remember the case, which dated back to 2018. But she said she was not “aware of any situation where information was deleted so that it would not be subject to FOI.”

She said the paper copies would have been equally subject to FOI requests, so that could not have been the reason for deleting the emails.

Stockland said that neither he nor Humphrey had anything to do with the emails being deleted. “We found out that they had deleted those emails the same time everyone else did,” he said.

‘The Future Is Bright’

Humphrey is now executive director of Oasis of Northwest Arkansas Inc., a provider of sober housing and resources for women in recovery and their children. The Bella Vista nonprofit told the IRS that Humphrey was paid $15,600 in 2022 for working an average of 65 hours a week. That year, Oasis’ total revenue and total expenses matched: $189,000.

In 2022, Humphrey published a true-crime book about a 1994 murder in Fort Smith.

Humphrey said in an October 2020 podcast that her jail sentence was an opportunity for her.

God showed “me how to love people who are different than me,” she said. “People who need to be loved in places that maybe I would have never reached and because of that, that situation which was very, very painful, … I’ve been able to minister to almost, I think it’s close to 41 women.”

For Christopher, “The future is bright again.” He said that he’s in the process of becoming a certified electronic discovery expert and plans to start a business to help others in similar situations.

“And you know what’s sad, is even though I’ve been cleared, even though I’ve won a multimillion-dollar judgment, in the back of people’s minds, they will always ask themselves, ‘Did he do something wrong?’” Christopher said.