Daddy's Girl

In court papers, Linda says Bruce showed her Elena's affidavit and asked her to make a sworn statement of her own, denying their incestuous relationship. When she refused, their relationship began to deteriorate.

"This was a difficult if not unbearable time of my life as I continued to be abused and subservient to Bruce's sexual demands while at the same time knowing that I had lost any semblance of my marriage with Sargent," Linda said in a sworn statement this past August.

In July 2005, Linda refused to continue sleeping with Bruce. In her August sworn statement, Linda says Bruce responded to the breakup by saying on the telephone: "I am going to preemptively destroy you. If you want to know how I am going to do it, meet me for lunch."

Two months later, a legal conflagration was sparked that spread like wildfire: Bruce sued Linda through one of his firms, claiming she had stolen company computers and trade secrets. Linda then sued her father for the income she would have made as his employee. Her estranged husband, Schutt, sued Bruce in Mississippi, where it's still legal for one man to sue another for ruining his marriage. McMahan then filed another suit against the two of them, as well as Schutt's father, accusing them all of conspiring to extort $10 million from him.

Bruce McMahan has a long history of litigating his breakups, both personal and financial. In his divorce from Melinda Ewell, for example, he took the case to New York's appellate court, challenging an order compelling him to turn over tapes and files that investigators had made while he had her under surveillance.

Ewell describes him as an egomaniac who lives his life in a series of ongoing sagas. The drama he creates feeds his ego and shapes the story of his life, she says.

"When you live with someone like that, it's not fun when you challenge them," she said.

"[Bruce McMahan is] basically a very wealthy stalker," Shani Robins tells New Times. Robins had been McMahan's latest target in court and is Linda's new boyfriend. He says McMahan is a bruiser in court "because he has the resources to do it."

In May, Bruce McMahan sued Robins in Superior Court in Connecticut, alleging wrongdoing when Robins accepted some donations Linda made from McMahan's National Cristina Foundation. (That lawsuit was also dropped as part of the September 13 settlement.)

Consistent with his litigious past, McMahan fought his daughter and son-in-law's lawsuits aggressively. But they fought back with what appeared to be solid evidence.

Court records show, for example, that in Sargent Schutt's lawsuit against McMahan, his attorney had a "rabbit" vibrator Schutt found in Linda's luggage tested for DNA. According to the results, skin cells from Linda and sperm cells from her father were found on the device and its black cover. Five other vibrators were also sent to labs for testing.

Through a spokesman, Bruce responded that he believed the evidence was "fabricated" but didn't elaborate.

Also, after spending more than a decade integrating her into the family, Bruce has now questioned in court records whether he is Linda's father.

Ex-wife Melinda Ewell tells New Times that McMahan never had any doubt Linda is his daughter. "There was never a question," she says. "She looks like some of the other kids. He had no qualms."

Some of McMahan's extended family did have their doubts. His eldest daughter, Alison McMahan, says she never trusted Linda. "All I can tell you is that nothing Linda will tell you can be believed," she writes New Times in an e-mail. "She is an unreal person who does not even know herself."

Ewell can't quite believe the man slept with his own daughter.

"How much of this is reality, I don't know," Ewell says. "There is a far greater chance that this is in her head. Way, way back when, I noticed she was very possessive of him. At my son's wedding eight to ten years ago, she really hung around him, and if anyone else was trying to talk to Bruce, she would try and get his attention. She would move in. From what I have observed, money appears to be the motivator."

Bruce makes that allegation in his lawsuit against Linda and Schutt, claiming he was the victim of an extortion scheme. But he apparently never made a formal complaint to law enforcement about the conspiracy against him. One of his attorneys, Angela Agrusa, said a San Diego prosecutor considered the extortion allegations while investigating charges that Schutt had hit Linda during a July 2005 argument over who owned the computers containing the e-mails and photos detailing Linda and McMahan's love affair.

But the case was dropped, Agrusa said, because Linda decided not to testify against Schutt.

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Sargent Schutt filed to divorce Linda in July 2005, and the proceedings are pending. She is now dating Robins, also a psychology PhD, and the couple is expecting its first child, a son, in January.

Bruce has reconciled with his fifth wife, Elena.