Dan Price, the credit card CEO who made headlines for slashing his salary and raising the minimum wage for employees to $70,000, has denied allegations that he beat and waterboarded his ex-wife in an article published by Bloomberg.
According to the report published in Bloomberg Businessweek, Price's ex-wife Kristie Colón made the allegations in a TEDx talk that will be published online on December 7.
On October 28, Colón spoke at the University of Kentucky about the power to overcome trauma. She did not name Price, but read from a journal entry she said she wrote in 2006 about her then-husband (Price and Colón were married at this time).
"He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” she read.
“He also threw me to the ground and got on top of me. He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face. I was shaking so bad.”
Later in the talk, Colón apparently recalled once locking herself in a car, claiming she was “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.”
The Bloomberg reporter read these quotes to Price, who at first said he didn't want to comment on them unti, he had seen evidence of the allegations. He later called the reporter to say: "The events that you described never happened."
Price later denied the allegations in the Guardian: "Unfortunately, people in the public eye are subject to speculation and criticism. Sometimes it’s fair, other times it isn’t. The recent story in Businessweek contained reckless accusations and baseless speculations that are unequivocally false."
Bloomberg Businessweek told the Guardian that they stand by their reporting.
