NEW information Supports Allegations That gravity payments ceo Dan Price abused EX-WIFE, built business on FRAUD

PREAMBLE

On April 13, 2015, Dan Price became the planet’s first—and likely last—celebrity credit card processor. 

The story goes something like this. It’s early afternoon at Gravity Payments. the fintech business that Price has co-owned with older brother Lucas for more than a decade.

Price has laid out bench seating eight rows deep in the nexus of his relatively small office space—enough to temporarily accommodate roughly 75 dutiful employees beholden to the peculiar stagecraft.

The most obvious employee in absentia is Lucas. Apparently, he didn’t get the memo. Or, perhaps he did.

Price stands at the head of the room. His hipster hair and beard strike a strong note of contrast to dress clothes that don’t exactly flatter him. Price holds a Shure 57 stage mic, despite the fact that it was entirely unnecessary in such close quarters. More bewildering are the network cameras and New York Times reps fixed squarely upon the rather wobbly spectacle.

Price announces that he is gifting every employee with a $70K minimum wage… caveat being that it transitions over three years. The room gets all confusingly warm and fuzzy. Price concludes by failing to click his mic back into its clip, so he lays it down on the floor while his worker bees buzz into a standing ovation.

That day, Price’s fairy tale zipped around the mediaverse at the speed of sound. After all, this was the time of Occupy Wall Street with the crush of an ever-encroaching 1% gobbling up the nation’s wealth. Chatter about inequitable wage distribution had bounced around from beer halls to boardrooms day after day for two years straight.

Price timed his dog and pony show just right. And the rest, as they say, is his story.

Thereafter, his story included a defining chapter in which the seemingly benevolent boss whipped up the whole fandango to distract from the reality that Lucas’ absence was due to the fact that he had just sued his now-famous little brother for unjust enrichment. Translation: Dan was pocketing way too much cash from business coffers.

This story is also riddled with a nefarious passage of alleged domestic violence. Price’s ex-wife hinted at stomach blows, body slams and even borderline drowning. Former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity mentioned Price’s workplace abuse and bizarre behavior.

One such employee said, “Because of those days [at Gravity], I absolutely believe that his ex-wife was not lying about the abuse.”

But as things go in the hit-and-run world of big media and hero worship and abuse survivors suffocated by threats of physical, financial and reputational retribution by their abusers, Price barely suffered a scratch.

In fact, a wide and deep bench of high-profile influencers ignored the sirens and instead anointed the Seattle millennial who curiously stormed the national wage debate... book deal, speaking gigs, talk show appearances, celebrity hangouts, Harvard studies, sexy globetrotting opportunities.

And then there’s the Tesla.

Turns out the very same employees Price underpaid for years used their new wages to buy their boss a brand new sporty Tesla. Huh? Ironically, the man that makes that car—billionaire space rocket-launcher Elon Musk—is the very same man Price publicly eviscerated for not being charitable.

It all plays out like a farce. Or maybe it’s better described as some sort of hyper-public cult-building exercise. Word on the street is that Price’s nonstop proselytizing signals a run for some political seat in the very near future.

Bottom line: Price has hardly been a passing fancy. He has sustained a very real diet of both profiteering and potential criminality without but an ounce of consequence. Such matters are far from farcical.

Volumes of stark accounts spell out Price’s alleged abuse in shocking detail. They all but etch in stone the dark past of someone overtly obsessed with winning a national prom king contest.

Sometimes, however, the unyielding quest for fame and fortune leads to a not-so-happy ending. In this case, documents detail alleged acts that would keep anyone with a conscience up nights.

These documents cannot and will not be released without the consent from the allegedly aggrieved. Honoring that pledge for years is essential on one hand but admittedly frustrating on the other since disclosure could potentially stifle further harm. Journalism is indeed complicated, if not often convoluted.

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February 14, 2018.  Valentine’s Day.  This was also day two of Startup Grind’s Global Conference, a Google-powered Silicon Valley mega-event driven to spread love among 7,000 amped up attendees. 

Startup Grind is Match.com for tech sector business pioneers and venture capitalists—an organization rife with one million such folks who seek professional hookups with potent payoffs.  Guest speakers included founders and C-levels from LinkedIn, Reddit, Houzz, PayPal, FitBit, and Google.   


At 1:45 p.m., 33-year-old Dan Price was expected to occupy the main stage of the historic, 1,400-seat Fox Theater where he would further explain to a swarm of entrepreneurs the meaning behind his explicitly heroic speech titled, “What I learned from setting a $70,000 minimum wage.”

Yet, Mr. Price was nowhere to be found.  If history truly is an apt teacher, one might have wondered if Price were buried under an avalanche of résumés or combating battalions of anti-socialists with his bare hands.  He would later tweet:

This was not like Dan Price. One would be hard-pressed to remember a time when he missed an opportunity to sway even one high-tech hotshot or flash his pearly whites upon an adoring throng.

Over the past three years, Price racked up frequent-flyer miles like nobody’s business.  He gave keynotes at highfalutin forums. He spoke before the United Nations General Assembly. Ivy League schools such as Brown flew him in for a lecture night while Harvard assembled a research team to scrutinize his systems and practices. One moment he was on set at NBC’s Today, the next he was mic’d up on France24.


A month prior to Price’s scheduled speech, Hundred Eighty Degrees (HED) sent an email to Karlie Krieger, the now former chief marketing officer of Startup Grind. HED explained that, based on substantial evidence, one of her featured event speakers apparently committed grave professional and personal acts. The name "Dan Price" was never mentioned nor were mounds of legal documents stacked multi-feet high around the room, all of which enumerated instances of ostensibly gruesome professional or personal abuse. 

Even after sending a follow-up email, HED did not hear from Krieger.  Regardless, Price never romanced a performance hall full of principals.  And to be clear, there is no proof that HED outreach affected his absence.

On April 13, 2015, rapt spectators filled another meeting space. This time, however, Price was front and center with no visible chills or ills. After all, this was his corporate HQ. These were his employee-disciples. And, that appearance would prove to be his crowning achievement. 

Field teams from The New York Times and NBC also happened to be “in the room.” That’s because Price relentlessly pursued them. It’s not every day that a credit card processor gets the Gray Lady to care about a room full of 20-something relative nobodys.

But within minutes, Price publicly proclaimed his epiphany that had already privately piqued enough interest for journos to occupy his sallow meeting room. CEO pay was way out of whack, he said, and this was his time to tell the world enough was enough. “My income is really, really high. I make a crazy, you know, my compensation is really high.”

And it was.

In 2015, his Seattle-based credit card processing company employed roughly 125 people and serviced approximately 17,000 accounts nationwide. Solid by any stretch. Nonetheless, size and lean operating income still placed the company on the smaller end of the small business spectrum.  

However, this did not forestall Price from paying himself $1.1 million each year during 2013 and 2014 and over $2 million during 2012... a whopping 149 percent of net income.  Such a business formula is hardly sustainable.  For Price, it was not.

As a 27-year-old in 2012, he paid cash for his 3,370sf house — currently estimated at more than $2 million — in an exclusive neighborhood overlooking Elliott Bay. He also bought a yacht apparently valued at well over a quarter million dollars new.

For perspective, CEOs of colossal credit card processing conglomerates with thousands of employees and millions of customer locations worldwide earned between 1.5% and 2.5% of net income, well below Price's take. Top 10 credit card processor TSYS earnings and its CEO’s latest salary are a case in point.



Price claims that he faced morale and attrition challenges. So he offered a unique solution for curbing the 286:1 pay ratio between CEOs and average American workers and the massive gap between his very own pay and that of his underlings. 

Gravity staffers, whether they answered phones or brokered sales deals, would be paid a minimum of $50,000 on the spot, $60,000 in a year, and $70,000 within three years. 

Price also pledged to reduce his own salary to $70,000, with the caveat that it would rise again when t’s were crossed, i’s dotted and net income enriched.

Video of his beneficent gesture spread like virtual wildfire. Newspapers, TV networks, radio stations, podcasts, social media platforms, presidential candidates, celebrities, corporate titans, and regular folks celebrated Price’s moxie. 

Enrichment arrived faster than a Wall Street bonus. Book deal with Penguin, check. Speaker deal with WMA, check. TV development interest, check. 

“There were two days [after the announcement] where I was hearing from friends that their friends of friends of friends from other countries were complaining that this dude in Seattle was filling up their Facebook news feed and basically made Facebook unusable.” 

- Dan Price

Paul Keegan is a contributing writer for Inc. Magazine. In his November 2015 article about Price, he said, “The reaction was tsunamic, with 500 million interactions on social media and NBC's video becoming the most shared in network history.”  Curiously, NBC’s “2015 Year in Review” never mentioned Price.  

“Price had not only struck a nerve; he had also turbocharged a debate now raging across the American landscape, from presidential forums to barrooms to fast-food restaurants,” Keegan said. 

HED would later receive an email from a source who illustrated how Keegan was an unapologetic accessory to Price’s inexorable public relations campaigns. 

The deal among Keegan, Inc. and Price was by design. Price would regularly feed Keegan fluff pieces and instruct him on how to overcome any negative press, whereupon Keegan leveraged Inc. and other high-profile print platforms as propaganda arms. 

HED reported this to a variety of sources. The story was eventually picked up.

In addition to numerous lies Keegan peddled about Price, he and Inc. not only agreed to offer Price reverential treatment for the sake of weathering naysayers, but in a clear illustration of quid pro quo, Keegan also requested that he be employed to write Price's book. 

This level of media manipulation would set the tone for Price's control over his own narrative, including misdirection that all but suffocated serious allegations of professional and personal abuses. 

Price apparently lied over and again about how he launched a career in the credit card industry. He apparently lied about being the most "truthful and transparent" credit card processor, when he is in one of the least, according to a multitude of documents. He apparently lied about how he is able to undercut competitive pricing, considering how insider documents and testimony illustrate how he defrauded customers, communities, banks and Price believers for years. 

He has lied about his salary, claiming at one point it was $50,000, when it was more than $1 million. He has lied about the impetus for his brother's lawsuit against him. He has lied to thousands of customers about his business practices. 

And by the looks of all the evidence, he apparently lied about battering his ex-wife.

Whether it is with a spoonful of sugar or a handful of rocks, Price still does his best to gerrymander media perspective, especially that which is less than favorable.

Price assured media outlets that his wage hike “would set the world on fire.”  The truth is, nobody has ever actually made Facebook’s 180,000-server platform “unusable.” And since Price became the world’s first celebrity payment processor, his pledges of global game-changing have proved rather impotent.

Wall Street earnings skyrocketed.  Main street earnings stagnated.  The top 1 percent now controls almost 40 percent of America’s wealth. Not to mention, out of the “hundreds and hundreds” of CEOs who, according to Price, assured him they would reshape their pay policies based upon his munificent example, only a handful of small business chiefs may actually have risen to the occasion.

#MeToo, #WomensMarch, and #TimesUpNow arrived with a sonic boom.  Yet, women still occupy less than 20 percent of Congressional seats, 25 percent of college presidencies, seven percent of CEO jobs at Fortune 1000s, and three percent of Board of Directors seats at Fortune 500s.  Women also still earn 79 cents on a male dollar.  

Donald Trump’s election was absorbed by many as an unbridled indictment of a black man who previously occupied the White House and also a black eye for the women whom he abused, objectified, vilified and muzzled. 

Trump decided to pay female staffers 72 cents on the male dollar.  He is an admitted sexual predator who honors women with identifiers such as fat, pig, dog, slob, disgusting animal, piece of ass, pancake tits, gold-digger, bitch, and bimbo. He also said “putting women to work is a dangerous thing.”

A protracted trail of public statements indicates that Trump does not believe or support survivors of abuse unless they serve a purpose. Women are liars, men are victims. 

Approximately six months after Price made his famous wage pitch, Kristie Colón was scheduled to make a statement of her own. Chances are, not a single one of the hundred purple lecture seats at the University of Kentucky’s Davis Marksbury Building Theater was occupied by a venture capitalist, a corporate titan or a major media operative. 

But neither audience pedigree nor far-reaching anxiety would keep Colón from showing up to explain why, according to her speaker bio, “Kristie was married at 20, divorced at 27, and lived through a relationship that was abusive in every sense of the word.” 

Her roughly 10-minute TEDx Talk underscored how writing had been a means to surmount severe personal trauma. More than halfway through the address, Colón read a 2006 excerpt from her journal.  

“He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face.  I was shaking so bad,” she said. 

She recounted the night when, with no shoes and no phone, she escaped to a bone-chilling parking garage where she locked herself in a car “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.” 

Despite the fact that Colón’s stark accounts of domestic violence comprised a mere scrap of the entire speech, and despite the fact that she never mentioned her accuser by name, that moment would also soon make its way around the planet at the speed of sound.

Price met Colón while a Nampa Christian High School sophomore in southwest Idaho. Colón was the new girl. Price was a bit of a catch. The two became fast friends, then dated, then married — young.  Shortly after they vowed “for better or for worse,” it seems as if worse became a near-daily reckoning for Colón.   



More than six years after she filed for divorce, Price has since repeatedly received paychecks, honoraria, airfare, limo services, hotel rooms, meals, drinks, privileged access, celebrity endorsement and global stages to tell millions of folks why his message mattered, why he was a worthy influencer.  

Price also plausibly tortured a woman he promised to love, comfort and champion. In response to inquiries about the abuse, Price repeatedly offered ambiguous explanations, branding the survivor, Colón, a prodigious phony.

Such deductions are based upon confidential documents that HED has pored over and vetted for months. What is possible to divulge, however, is that said documentation affords highly detailed accounts of abuse and manipulation. 

Dragged by the ankles. Dropped onto hardwood floors. Near-drowned in tubs. Smashed into walls.  Bashed with objects. Strangled. Slapped. Kicked. Days and nights hiding under beds, in closets, in cars.  Strapped over a lap, repeatedly slapped like a battered child for being unworthy, unthinking, unbalanced.  Forced to make unsustainable concessions.  Extramarital sex for him. Isolation for her. Ongoing PTSD that affects career decisions, personal relationships. the list goes on and on.

Price speaks a language that has resonated from Sydney to Sao Paolo. His drive is undeniable. His achievements are perceptible. It would be categorically unjust to dismiss him simply because of ideology or idiosyncrasy. 

Abundant video and social musings also prove that Price is supremely artful in deploying benevolence or social consciousness to stoke his renown. This also is his right. 

Regardless, a considerable portion of his self-promotional ploys are unconventional if not enigmatic. For instance, he consistently promotes the idea that his renowned wage hike has increased not just production, but reproduction. "As a CEO, you could never find anything to be more proud of than the fact that we are bringing humans onto the planet," Price said. Price the credit card processor has become crackerjack baby-maker.

Furthermore, numerous examples showcase his desire to be heralded as an exceptionally venerated employer and human being.

Price may be a product of his time. It comes as no surprise that a considerable slice of the population arches toward an incessant desire to be known, to be heard, to be influential, to be relevant. Hero worship is at a fever pitch, thanks largely due to the overnight sensation-making of social media.

Yes, social platforms can be apt devices for production or promotion or proclamation, but they have also become open invitations to eavesdrop on once exclusive happenings in kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and offices.  Sharing intimate moments with a world unknown is part and parcel of a dangerously rapt generation. 

As one of six children, raising one's voice above the fray can certainly have been Price’s innate survival instinct. His social media engagements have afforded him the megaphone to achieve such an end. 

Colón also grew up in a large household that included four children. And though she deploys writing to assuage angst, it remains unclear as to how she draws privacy lines, especially in light of her avid sharing via Twitter, Instagram and her former blog, the lot of which bears engagements with her inner circle for all the world to see.

The world go to see more of the manufactured Dan Price in early November 2015. Inc. Magazine ran a cover story on Price titled, “Is This The Best Boss In America?”

But by late November, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter questioned Price about potentially darker motives for his wage hike and Colón’s allegations. Incidentally, thanks to a number of sources, HED had been concurrently working on similar material, but without the big media tent, our reporting was hardly a blip on anyone’s radar.

Price initially refrained from responding to reports of alleged abuse because “he wouldn’t feel comfortable.” A few hours later, however, he publicly proclaimed, “The events that you described never happened.”  

Price did not specify which events never happened.

On December 3, 2015, Price released a public statement to The Guardian.  “We’ve been floored at the attention our story has gotten over the past year, and inspired by the millions all around the globe who have engaged and shared their stories with us.  Unfortunately, people in the public eye are subject to speculation and criticism.  The recent story in Businessweek contained reckless accusations and baseless speculations that are unequivocally false.  As a company, we’ve faced many challenges in our history.  This has been a truly memorable year in many ways.  We’re looking forward to working harder than ever in pursuit of our mission.”

It was ostensibly more important to Price that he influence “millions around the globe” with his “story” than explaining what in particular had been “unequivocally false.” He had also officially pronounced himself a victim of worldwide devotion.

On December 17, 2015, Price told Entrepreneur Magazine he was “shocked at the allegations from Bloomberg Businessweek, and I don’t have any evidence that there are actual allegations, but the information that Bloomberg Businessweek claimed to have relayed to me is completely false.”  

Yet, there were in fact allegations made by a woman he had known for the lion’s share of his life. Price had propped up not having “any evidence” as an escape hatch — a familiar trope of those pinned against the wall by truth laid bare. Price was also pinned by something perhaps even more familiar to him than his former spouse.

In May of 2016, he walked passed older brother Lucas en route to the witness stand where he swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but. 

Among six Price siblings, Lucas was Dan’s lifelong wingman. He co-founded Gravity Payments in 2004 and served as best man when Dan married Colón a year later.  

By 2008, things had changed. Dan apparently began making critical business decisions without Lucas’ consent. Lucas also believed Dan was tapping company revenues like his personal ATM.  

Litigation became the only recourse. Lucas sued for minority shareholder oppression and unjust enrichment. In other words, he contended that Dan not only shuttered his position but also pinched excessive amounts of cash for himself.

Dan told anyone who would listen that this lawsuit was a vengeful retort to the $70,000 wage hike. The problem with this assertion was that Dan received Lucas’ summons a month before his announcement. Contrarily, Dan emailed Lucas about the wage hike only four days before he stepped to the mic, after which his name became news.

These facts did not seem to matter to Inc. Magazine’s Paul Keegan who said, “The suit was filed on April 24, 11 days after the pay-raise announcement — perhaps to pressure Dan to sell when Gravity was in the limelight, thus maximizing the value of Lucas's share.”  

All Keegan had to do was pull court documents in order to see that Dan was served on March 16 at 1:25 p.m.  Inc. never retracted. Keegan never apologized.

When challenged by Lucas’ attorney, Dan said it was a “misstatement.”  And when asked as to whether or not he ever assaulted his ex-wife, he refused to answer. It should be noted that Dan prevailed in the suit.

By June of 2016, veteran journalist Stephen Rodrick was knee-deep in a two-week on-location interview of Price, including mornings and afternoons spent at the courthouse where the Price brothers battled.  Rodrick's exposé eventually made its way to Esquire Magazine in August of 2016. 

At first, Price denied Colón’s allegations “forcefully” but then offered Rodrick a disturbing clarification. “The honest truth of it is, there's only two people on earth that know. You could spend ten years with me and you still wouldn't know,” he said. 

Lucas Price later said to Rodrick, ”There have been times when I've sat with Dan, when he's told me something so earnestly that I know is not true, and I think to myself, this must be true.”

On August 11, 2016, NBC’s Today asked Price about the abuse. “There’s no truth to it,” he said. 

Such curt responses might have flown under the radar in 2016, but not in this day and age when enigmatic responses to allegations of brutality are not soon forgotten, let alone forgiven. 

The primary reason #MeToo is ubiquitous is because innumerable instances of gender-based oppression finally reached critical mass. The reactor blew. Men scrambled toward shadows. Women dragged them out.  And, they keep dragging.

Regardless, Price chose to tell the world that Colón made the whole thing up.  She crafted an elaborate, reckless con that caused considerable harm to someone hellbent on SAVING THE WORLD ONE SALARY INCREASE AT A TIME. 

Perhaps Price believed that his global fame post-marriage caused her to become infinitely resentful. Perhaps he believed that she wanted a piece of his ever-growing financial pie. Perhaps he believed his ambitions to be pure, hers polluted. 

Here are the facts. 

Colón divorced Price in 2012, six-and-a-half years after the two slid symbolic rings onto each other’s slight fingers. Other than Price buying her out of her share of the quaint condo they co-owned in the North Queen Anne district of Seattle and driving away in the car that she solely owned, Colón wanted nothing except to leave Price in the rearview. 

Following a few years in a San Francisco suburb, Colón moved east where she currently leads a relatively quiet, seemingly pleasant life closer to family. She travels the world on her own dime. She works as a content writer for the University of Kentucky. 

As of this writing, she is married. She adores her dog. And, she remains a Twitter acolyte. She formerly commanded her own social journaling hub where she and contributors deployed short essays as a means to “own your story.”

Almost six months after Price became a media darling and six-and-a-half years after Colón left him, she hopped a plane from her modest west coast apartment to the University of Kentucky (UK) where her videotaped TEDx Talk commenced.

On December 4, Colón’s bio page mysteriously disappeared. Her video did not go live. Her public moment of catharsis all but vanished in the deep of night.  

Having already been immersed in this Price story since his wage announcement — for reasons that will follow — HED first tweeted the development in what would be a vain attempt to obtain an explanation. 

HED subsequently contacted Margaret Sullivan from Group SJR, the production partner for TED Talks.  She said, “TEDx websites and questions about if/when TEDx talks get published to YouTube is entirely up to the individual TEDx organizers, so you’d have to ask them directly.” 

HED contacted Tori Amason who organized the University of Kentucky TEDx event where Colón presented. Amason said, “Please contact UKPR for any inquiries you have.” 

HED finally landed a call with the Director of the Main Campus News Bureau Kathy Johnson. She confirmed that associates of Price had indeed dangled a threat of legal action before the university. Johnson later issued a formal statement through university counsel confirming that the video was unobtainable, the bio page dumped and the matter closed.

By all appearances, more women were seemingly charged with covering tracks for more men.

Shortly after Colón’s UK appearance, Price set an offensive in motion.  Ryan Pirkle was not only the marketing director at Gravity Payments but also Price’s primary gatekeeper.

Pirkle and HED knew each other. A month after Price’s $70,000 minimum wage play, HED and another party engaged Pirkle in an active dialog about launching a documentary series to track the socioeconomic effects of Price’s decision. Pirkle recommended that "we move forward."

To prep the project, HED took a look at all things Price. It was not long before we tumbled down a rabbit hole fraught with evidence of illicit business practices, disturbing lawsuits, unnerving behavior and a fortress full of lies. 

By November, a month before the Businessweek piece landed, HED aggregated enough content involving Price and company to put the project on hold. HED called Pirkle during the first week of December and posited a wealth of pointed questions. He refused to answer all of them.  Immediately thereafter, HED officially pulled the plug.

Though Pirkle, who has since left Gravity, appears to be a relatively unassuming if not obliging figure, he is no less than duty-bound where it concerns Price. 

Pirkle was the foot soldier who said to the University of Kentucky, “It has come to our attention our company’s CEO, Dan Price, was mentioned in a TEDx speech given by Kristie Colón’ on 10/28 by an article on Bloomberg.com. The article described content within the speech that is categorically untrue, and potentially defamatory.  We’ve been advised to review the speech prior to posting to ensure the content within is not defamatory in nature.  Please send a streaming link or download link to this video immediately.”

Price's time to bask in the warm glow of notoriety was suddenly eclipsed by Colón’s time to exhume demons following years of repressing them. Her trials had evidently interrupted Price’s global PR triumphs.

University management and TEDx organizers relented. Everything associated with Colón’s talk was wiped clean. A university with a total enrollment of 30,000, 16 colleges, 93 undergrad programs, 66 doctoral programs, 15 libraries, thousands of faculty and staff and a $1.2 billion endowment buckled under a threat they did not bother to substantiate made by someone they did not know. 

Despite the fact that free speech is the high-octane fuel that powers the organization's immense engine, TED affiliates ultimately suffocated Colón’s expression thereof. Ironically, the theme for the night of Colón’s engagement was “Dimensions of Progress.”

Once the dust cleared, Colón confessed, “A man [Pirkle] I’ve never met confidently followed up with the institution that hosted my talk and told them my truth was ‘categorically untrue.’  I wish I had been surprised.  Phrases like ‘potential defamation lawsuit’ and ‘disgusting things claimed’ were being texted, emailed, and phoned in to me.  Basically, it was an introvert’s worst nightmare.”

This is what survivors suffer.  The very ones they love, trust, comfort and support suddenly deem them the imposter, the hypocrite, the depraved, the provocateur.  Or, as author-poet R.H. Sin said, “And she was made to go crazy by the man who put her there.”

Victims of abuse must forever forge their way through funnels of fear — fear of physical repercussions, psychological repercussions, professional repercussions, financial repercussions and social repercussions.

Abuse is not logical, especially when it involves known quantities with unknown qualities. Abuse asphyxiates order and scrambles reason. Abuse gives nuclear launch codes to loose canons. Abuse comes in flesh and bone packages of all shapes and sizes, even those that resemble the original hipster who walked on water.

Price does not walk on water. Yet, he does delight in piloting his beloved yacht upon it. He is not a religious leader. Yet, years of video, print and anecdotal evidence illustrate how fixated he is on converting souls in exchange for profit, publicity and nonstop personal praise. 

He was not taken to the house of the high priest to be judged. Yet, multiple legal actions have been waged against him, including those by an employer, an employee, a business client, an innocent bystander, a city, a wife and a brother. 

Price never used to look anything like a Son of God. Yet, he has certainly assumed that heavenly countenance since he went global.  Both Russell Brand and Trevor Noah concurred.

Price has not been mercilessly tortured for being categorically kind.  Yet, administering such torture is something he apparently knows well.

Late in 2016, Colón said, “This past year I spoke about an abusive relationship that nearly killed me.  I shared my story as a survivor to help others with their recovery.”

She held a TEDx Talk clear across the country from Price. She could have held that talk in Seattle — a stone’s throw from Gravity Payments — or the quaint condo where she and Price lived as husband and wife before his fame reigned supreme.

Colón did not alert numerous mass media outlets in advance of her speech. Price alerts media at every turn. She made a brief, unpaid speech to 100 attendees who knew nothing about her or her previous marriage. Price has made countless speeches, many of which garnered handsome fees.  Colón could have invoked his name during her speech. Price ceaselessly invokes his own name.

Colón could have easily expounded upon her ex-husband’s alleged malevolence.  Price himself has actually said as much of his own behavior.  He said to Brown University students and faculty that he “could be a violent person in some ways.”  He said to competitors “…until you kill us or we kill you” or “they are spending a lot of money trying to kill us.” 

When discussing qualities of potential new hires, Price repeatedly referenced Che Guevara and his recruitment of guerrilla freedom fighters who pledged love for the cause and ultimately for him. 

In 2012, Leslie Morgan Steiner gave her own TEDx Talk. Ironically, the speech happened to be in greater Seattle, not long after Colón divorced Price. Steiner not only earned a B.A. in English from Harvard College and a Master of Business Administration from The Wharton School, but she pioneered a celebrated professional path working for iconic brands including Johnson & Johnson and The Washington Post Magazine. 



Like Colón, Steiner was quite young — 22 years old — when she moved to a big city in pursuit of a fulfilling professional challenge. She eventually made a profound connection with a fellow subway rider who would become the love of her life. He too graduated from an Ivy League school after which he became gainfully employed by a Wall Street bank. But not all was what is seemed.  Steiner said:

“But what made the biggest impression on me was that he was smart and funny.  And he seemed so sweet.  That Ivy League degree, and that Wall Street job, and that bright, shiny future meant so much to him.  If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me, would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were, and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you.  I didn’t know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim, and I also didn’t know that the second step is to isolate the victim. The man who I thought was my soul mate, the man who I loved more than anybody on earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember.”

Paige Flink is chief operating officer of The Family Place in Dallas, Texas, one of the Lone Star State's first family violence service agencies. Her February 2018 piece in HuffPost addressed the controversy surrounding Rob Porter, Trump’s embattled former Press Secretary. 

Flink said, “Many batterers are like Porter, a well-educated and well-off professional power player who is a far cry from the crude stereotype.  Many domestic abusers, regardless of socioeconomic status, move among us undetected: men who seem to be in total control, who are tightly wound. The typical batterer is charismatic, manipulative, and demanding of certain behavior. The more traditional the views their relationship was built on, the more reluctant the women were to leave.”

Price and Colón were raised in devout households with traditional views of relationships. Price was home-schooled until the age of 12. Mornings were devoured by hours of bible study after which Rush Limbaugh raged over the radio. Disgust over "living in sin" was palpable, and shared living was acceptable only if it were coupled with the promise of marriage.

Flink said, “We cannot allow abusers who refuse to be accountable rise to positions of power. We cannot let them live their lives, or shape the face of our nation, without first facing the truth.”

But Price did in fact rise to power. And converts keep piling up thanks in part to the heralding by NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Bernie Sanders, Trevor Noah, corporate moguls, Harvard professors and the list goes on.  

Paul Keegan of Inc. Magazine said of Colón’s admissions, “She did not challenge the [Inc.] story's characterization of her marriage to Dan as ending amicably.”  

Keegan failed to understand the tone deaf nature of such a statement as he pleaded with Price for a ghost-writing arrangement. His musings about Price are toothless, quid-pro quo fanboyisms.

Most would wonder how someone like Price, who claims to pilot a profoundly virtuous path, could ever be capable of something so barbaric.  Not to mention, why would Colón stay with someone whom she considered to be potentially life-threatening? 

Women 16-24 are most likely to be beaten. Colón was in her early 20s when the beatings were to have occurred. Approximately 50 percent of these survivors receive considerable injuries like those Colón described. Nearly 66 percent do not seek medical attention.  Colón did not seek medical attention. 

Another 75 percent do not report incidents to authorities. Colón did not report any incidents. And 98 percent of domestic violence cases include financial abuse. The number one reason survivors stay or return is based on that fact that the abuser controls their money supply. Documentation points to the fact that Colón’s financial life was controlled by Price.

Colón typifies survivors. She blamed herself. She Googled “suicide.” She placed her feet on the very edge of that proverbial cliff. In the long run, introspection, support systems and formidable resolve enabled Colón to march forward regardless of indelible damage.

She took to her stage, like Leslie Steiner did, simply because she believed it was an appropriate time to help others who might relate to such cruelty — to prevent abusers from endangering more women. After years of emotional torment, this was supposed to be her moment to speak up without enduring further assaults for doing so.

She was wrong. 

Those assaults kept coming from The University of Kentucky, TEDx, Gravity Payments staffers who never questioned their boss, women who knew she was married to Price and still slept with him, and by media outlets that propped up Price for years, yet largely refused to explore the gravity of Price’s potential depravity. 

Some of those who believe Colón remain unwilling or unready to face Price head on.  This is to be expected, especially considering the prospect of facing legal threats from someone with deep coffers and widespread adoration. 

One of Price’s early professional confidants, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “Dan wants to be loved, respected, and a mentor. But he is selling credit card processing. He is a nuts and bolts company. There is so much more to being a great employer than wages. Dan got a divorce and seemed unaffected by it.  I believe his ex-wife’s story.”

Other than an initial teaser by Businessweek and a more robust follow-up by Geekwire, Colón’s story did indeed fizzle like so many stories before. 

Journalist Stephen Rodrick trailed Price over two rollicking weeks. He bunked at Price’s house, shadowed him at $10,000 buy-in poker games populated by dotcom magnates, shared tapas dinners, consorted with Price on wilderness walks, partied poolside with Gravity Payments staffers and mulled about in the courthouse where the Price brothers waged an all-out civil war over heaps of money.

Rodrick’s insider survey was spicy. His take on Price was less than flattering, although muddying. The problem is, Price could not have cared less, as attested to his promotion of the article and his battery of subsequent tweets to and about Rodrick.

Rodrick’s illustrious list of previous interviewees includes the likes of Tom Petty, Sting, Chris Rock, Serena Williams, Leo DiCaprio, Robert Redford, Ringo Starr et al. Price was among royalty. 

In the end, Rodrick’s zippy, day-in-the-life account did not address why Price might brutalize a wife, bilk millions from an industry, rabidly offer up bald-faced lies and get away with all of it.

Instead, he said, "Last year, Seattle start-up CEO Dan Price slashed his $1 million salary in order to raise his company's minimum wage to $70,000 a year. Overnight, he became a media darling and a folk hero for Millennials.  Then things got weird. His brother sued him for fraud. His ex-wife gave a TED Talk in which she accused him of abuse. And now the question remains: Is Dan Price a sinner or a savior?"

Rodrick failed to understand that Price did not slash his salary to pay the raised wage. Things were not suddenly "weird." In fact, they had been unsettling long before Rodrick and other writers paid attention.

Ultimately, Price did to Rodrick what he adroitly does to many. He seduces even the most seasoned literati with the notion that a devil’s greatest trick is not to convince them that he fails to exist, but to put on one helluva show while they are in town.

Price believed that oblique repudiations of serious allegations were sufficient. Today, we expect his response to read something such as:

“Since the #MeToo movement took off, I have been both horrified and heartened to hear the stories of women who are finally coming forward to share their stories.  Hopefully, this increased awareness will bring about meaningful change and we can live in a world where, as Oprah declared in her recent Golden Globes speech, “Nobody ever has to say ‘me too’ again.  Your time and energy would be better spent listening to these women’s stories and believing any accusations that directly involve you, your company, or those around and take the time to consider how you can rectify the situation.  Dishonesty cannot thrive in cultures that value honesty and in which all parties treat one another with mutual respect.  In an unlikely event that someone is falsely accused, remember that it will be much easier to overcome false allegations than it will be for actual victims to overcome the trauma of harassment or assault.”

In fact, these words were written by none other than Price himself in a January 2018 LinkedIn article. 

The premise of his piece titled “Confused about the #MeToo Movement? Maybe the Problem is Lack of Trust,” is that “business leaders” such as Price must understand “the upside of supporting this movement, and trusting your people to tell the truth is always greater than the downside.” 

Millions of women are being punched for not washing dishes, strangled for not ironing and drowned for having an opinion. A few years after Colón divorced Price, he accumulated substantial sums of money and renown and continues to spend days and nights telling the world of his compassion, his kindness and his keen admiration for the women on his staff.

One can hardly imagine Colón reading those passages in that LinkedIn article upon which 286 commenters stamped their approval for its “touching” perspective; for its “wise words;” for Price being an “advocate” and an “ally;” and for “empathizing with women.”

Colón said she was in an airport lobby when she passed a newsstand where her ex’s sunny countenance conquered the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine, a 40-year-old publication with a combined circulation of four million. Her instinct was to rip every issue top to bottom, but instead of having to buy it, she somehow summoned the strength to read on.  

Four months later, Price turned what easily could have been a private company announcement into a carefully staged, saccharine sweet affair that doubled as a clarion call for C-suite types to remove their alligator skin loafers from the throats of Main Streeters.  

The grief and rage and bewilderment competing for Colón’s attention was palpable throughout her journaling.

The man who apparently assaulted her, humiliated her, cheated on her, psychologically tormented her — that same man was now a world-class hero.

“Watching bad people thrive is a Thing,” she said.  “It happens. A person we know—a boss, a parent, a congressman, a pastor—does something utterly reprehensible, and we are left wondering. Did that just happen?  Did no one else see? Is something wrong with me? When does good win?  Where is justice? Some days it feels as if ‘The Men on The Cover’ are the only ones winning. And us? We are lost, confused, frustrated, and angry.  We are standing in front of a wall we can’t climb.”

It was well over a decade ago when Colón left her beloved family to be with Price. She all but shuddered her own aspirations to support his, even delaying college graduation by a year to accommodate his marriage proposal, she said.

Her reward?  “I married a man I thought might kill me,” she said. “Bad people accomplish good things. I have seen abusers fight for better wages.  I’ve seen cruel individuals champion benevolent causes. Over and over, I have seen how, for some, the end justifies the means. And I have experienced firsthand how these means are often at the expense of women.  This is my America.”

For those who believe Colón to be waxing dramatic, according to The National Domestic Violence Hotline, “If your partner has strangled you in the past, your risk of being killed by them is 10 times higher.”

Steve Albrecht has authored 17 books on workplace, campus, and domestic violence. He said, “One in four women will experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes, and of women at high risk, up to 68 percent will experience near-fatal strangulation by their partner.” 

Approximately 55 percent of female homicide incidents are connected to IPV, which also accounts for over $8.3 billion annually for medical costs, psychological treatment, loss of household support, loss of work, loss of income.

At least 4-8 percent of pregnant women suffer abuse during pregnancy, according to the National Institutes of Health. Colón became pregnant a year into her chaotic marriage. She miscarried less than a month later.  “Huge, blow-up fights” ensued, she said.

Four-and-a-half years ago, Price was arrested for assault, criminal trespass, and property destruction. A restraining order was also issued against him.  Dressed in all white, drunk and alone, he accosted people at a Seattle bar and then ran from the scene as authorities were called. 

Stephen Rodrick’s Esquire exposé briefly addressed the fact the he “knew from ex-employees and court documents that [Price] had a male monster of the id hiding behind the fashionable hair and beard."

HED corroborates this. A year before Rodrick’s piece hit the street, HED had already interviewed former staffers and devoured hundreds of pages of court documents, all of which conveyed a consistent portrait of Price's malevolence, regardless of what his public persona might portend. HED wrote about this in 2016.

Current and former Gravity Payments employees said Price had been known to call meetings for the sake of humiliating employees in front of peers. He would deem them to be "a cancer" on his corporate culture and demeaned them in ways that were deeply affecting. 

One source said a female employee was reported to have taken a leave of absence to abate severe duress caused by Price’s outbursts. Another described how Price physically accosted a customer prospect. Another recalled how Price demanded sales reps lead sales calls by sharing brochures and business cards plastered with his headshots, lifestyle shots and accolades. 

The Gravity Payments website is rife with real estate dedicated to Price, the “celebrated entrepreneur.” And, nearly all sources referred to his deeply cunning harassment and relentless self-promotion.  

The reason for nearly wholesale sourcing anonymity is due to the non-defamation and disclosure agreements that Price mandated before employment, they said.

Lawsuits brought against Price from 2004-2016 consistently reveal a pattern of settlements with non-disclosures, typical of a man who acts dreadfully but has the power and currency to keep victims silent. 

HED interviewed six payment processing professionals, including CEOs from three large corporations, all of whom knew Price and said he was shamelessly self-righteous, even “Machiavellian.” Some of these people have appeared in prior posts.

It is hard to fathom how a CEO who gave his entire company a minimum pay rate of $70,000 could be anything less than principled.  His Twitter posts, LinkedIn articles, speeches and interviews exemplify the yearnings of an unyielding altruist who spreads his gospel with aplomb. 

Gravity Payments personnel pooled portions of the very same raises that Price afforded them two years earlier in order to gift him with a brand new Tesla. 

They bought a sports car for a man with a yacht, a huge house, an immense salary and a rolodex filled with power-players. As one former operations staffer said, “There is a strange cult-like atmosphere at Gravity. Dan thinks he has been chosen.” 

The fact that multiple professional cameras, press folks and marketing staffers are always at-the-ready to exhibit such glorification makes for curiously recurring happenstance.

Approximately half of Gravity Payments' payroll is comprised of women. Price has spent a great deal of time feverishly praising them since Colón’s allegations hit the presses.  In fact, a 10-part blog series titled “Women in Leadership” happened to be created in the months after Colón’s revelations of abuse.  Price also offered up another series titled "Embracing Diversity" just last year.

National, regional, and local media folks have interviewed numerous female and male staffers about Price.  Gravity women staffers have not requested that Price publicly state anything akin to, “I never beat my ex-wife.”  To date, not one staffer has challenged Price's account of the matter. Therefore, it is yet to be known if they believe Colón to have repeatedly lied about their boss or if they are exceedingly worried about the consequences of challenging him.  Incidentally, not one of the thousands of Gravity Payments merchant accounts has weighed in.

Tammi Kroll is Price’s latest lieutenant. The former Google employee is Gravity’s CTO, CIO and COO. In other words she runs the show. Numerous accounts have also accorded her with a title of “cleaner.” She promotes and accommodates Price’s obsessive desire to be on the public stage, after which she cleans up his private messes.

And speaking of messes, Price's father Ron Price has heartily repudiated the domestic violence allegations. Ron said the allegations, “came as a complete shock to us” and that he doesn't "have any evidence that ever occurred." 

Asked about his reaction to the venomous $26 million lawsuit between his very own sons, Ron said, “I guess I’m a little more stoic about it. Even though I wouldn’t want it to play out like this, I realize life is messy.” 

Life was messy for Ron when the FDA harangued him for running a pyramid scheme in which he and his accomplices who helmed American Image Marketing — of which Ron was President at one time — targeted vulnerable populations with bogus herbal products such as "Barley Green" that were supposed to ward off cancer, arthritis, high blood pressure, obesity, and depression through "extensive research" and "divine connections." 

In fact, Ron peddled these assertions without a shred of scientific evidence. He continues to peddle feel-good motivational speaking content.

Dan Price recently told YPO (Young President's Organization) that Ron has had the "greatest impact" on him as a leader.

HED made numerous attempts to speak with the Prices and Pirkle about Colón’s accusations and about Dan Price’s business practices. 

To date, Price and Kroll and other employees including Rosita Barlow have accepted interview invitations from global TV networks to regional bloggers but refuse to comment about these allegations, with the exception of one text from Price in which he said, "Love you man. I'm a big proponent of free speech. I generally follow my conscience, and I hope you do as well!"  

Price and company have yet to deny a single allegation HED has set before them. 

A mountain of evidence also points to a fraud scheme in which Price has bilked the credit card industry of tens of millions of dollars, perhaps considerably more. The perennially embattled Wells Fargo, a long-term Gravity Payments financial sponsor, is implicated in this scam.

According to legal documents Price apparently launched Gravity, not by the odd origin story that he frequently tells, but by stealing clients from a business for whom he, his brother and his father formerly worked. That business successfully sued the Prices.

Finally, HED has had conversations with The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes and many other outlets.

Most expressed considerable interest. None agreed to attribute the work to HED, instead preferring to take the documents and interview notes for their own stories. Some said they did not have resources to vet the information despite repeatedly covering Price with little to no vetting.

Our invitation to partner with them also remains open.

For those who wish to offer additional information, email HED in confidence.