Dave Ramsey does not take kindly to people mocking or criticizing him online.
That was the upshot of a 2014 piece from The Daily Beast, which detailed the evangelical financial guru's come-apart over parody Twitter accounts and other online critics.
The story was bonkers. But the most shocking allegation in the piece came by way of a quote from an anonymous former employee: “This is the guy who once pulled a loaded pistol out of a gift bag to teach us a lesson about gossip,” they said. “It was bizarre, even for Ramsey.”
Well, that crazy anecdote has now been confirmed, under oath, in a deposition by a longtime Ramsey employee.
The deposition took place as part of an ongoing lawsuit over online criticism of Ramsey. The head honcho of Brentwood's Financial Peace Plaza filed suit late last year against a California real estate agent named Kevin Paffrath who had posted several YouTube videos about Ramsey. You can read the complaint here. The videos at the center of it appear to have been taken down, but Paffrath has devoted other videos to criticism of Ramsey. You can see those here.
Last week, Nashville attorney Daniel Horwitz — who is representing Paffrath and knows his way around so-called SLAPP lawsuits — took a deposition from Jack Boone Galloway Jr., a man who has worked for Ramsey's The Lampo Group for almost 20 years. You can read a transcript of the whole deposition here, but early on, as Horwitz is asking Galloway about the Daily Beast article, he brings up the alleged incident with the gun. The attorney representing Ramsey's company, Brandon Bundren, objects all the way through that line of questioning (and others).
[Horwitz]: Has Dave Ramsey ever pulled a gun out of a bag to try to teach a lesson about gossip?MR. BUNDREN:· Objection, harassing, and relevance.· We're getting pretty far afield from the claims made in this case. If we need to call the Judge, we will so I wouldn't spend much time on this. You can answer.
THE WITNESS:· Yes.
Shortly after that, Horwitz asks Galloway if Ramsey has "ever offered a cash bounty for information related to criticism of him online." Bundren objects, instructs Galloway not to answer the question and says he'll call the court to ask a judge to sustain his objection if questioning of that sort continues.
Horwitz declined to comment pending the outcome of the ongoing litigation.
In a filing this week, Horwitz argued that Ramsey's suit should be dismissed. Speaking of Paffrath's YouTube videos, Horwitz writes that "the innocuous and plainly hyperbolic, opinion-based statements that the Plaintiff has sued over uniformly fail to clear — or even approach — the heightened constitutional requirements that govern defamation claims."
Bundren did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
