The Rise Of Jeri Thompson

"They've been a team since they got married," one friend said of Jeri and Fred Thompson. (By Steve Helber -- Associated Press)

Growing up in Naperville, 30 miles west of Chicago, Jeri Kehn was a member of her high school's state-champion spirit squad, the Starlettes, known for their white boots and matching Stetsons. She majored in English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where she met the man with whom she would spend much of the next decade: Bernard T. "Chip" Alvey of Owensboro, Ky.

Alvey experienced a brief flash of international notoriety while in college -- he was one of four DePauw students who, on a visit to Moscow in 1985, were detained after taking a photo of a sign they unfurled in Red Square advertising a favorite pizzeria back in Greencastle.

Kehn and Alvey dated after college and eventually lived together in a house he bought in Nashville. Alvey said in an interview that he was working as a stockbroker and helping to support Kehn, who, he said, held a variety of jobs but nothing "career-oriented."

Money was a problem for the couple. In 1994, Kehn was ordered to pay $10,000 in unspecified civil damages related to a 1990 car accident in Naperville in which she swerved across three lanes on a highway and struck another car, totaling it. The outstanding balance was paid off in 1999.

In 1996, the Davidson County court in Nashville ordered a $900 judgment against Kehn in a case brought by an anesthesiologist, and garnished her wages at a communications company. In 1997, the court ordered a $1,700 judgment against Kehn for unpaid medical bills at Nashville's Baptist Hospital and again ordered her pay garnished. But Kehn had left for another job, and the debt is still listed in court records as unpaid.

Alvey has suffered larger-scale financial woes. At one point in the late 1990s he owed $93,000 to a builder, and in 2005, the Internal Revenue Service won a $270,000 judgment against him.

The couple never married, Alvey said, though the court documents involving both of Kehn's medical debts give her name as Jeri Kehn-Alvey. Alvey, who now lives in Louisville, couldn't recall just when he and Kehn broke up but said it was probably before she started dating Thompson. He said they haven't spoken in four or five years.

It was at a Nashville Fourth of July party in 1996 that Kehn met Thompson, a former staff member of the Senate Watergate committee, who built a successful career as a lawyer, lobbyist and Hollywood actor before winning his Senate seat in 1994. They began dating sometime in the next year, according to Roger Schneider, an Internet entrepreneur who was working with Kehn at the time on a venture to create a Web site focusing on Tennessee politics.

At some point during their work together, Schneider recalled in an interview last week, Kehn mentioned that she was seeing Thompson: "She said, 'I'll be speaking to Senator Thompson this weekend,' and I said, 'Oh, really?' She said, 'Yes, we date occasionally.' "

Schneider said he suggested that they approach Thompson's office with a proposal to create a Web site for him separate from his official Senate one. Schneider, a Democrat, said he was aware he might be putting Kehn in an awkward spot by having her pitch the idea to Thompson, but he said she seemed enthusiastic about trying. "She was comfortable with the proposal," said Schneider, who now runs a technology firm in Huntsville, Ala. "She was a big girl and knew what was going on."

On Aug. 5, 1997, Kehn sent Thompson's Senate office a 12-page proposal to "design, develop, host and maintain a world-class multimedia Web site" at a cost of $45,000 per year. As her qualification for the contract, Kehn cited her job at a small Nashville firm that provided daily news summaries to health-care companies.

Two weeks later, Thompson's staff sharply rejected the proposal, according to memos located by the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the Thompson Senate archives, stored at the University of Tennessee. "I consider this project technically vague and stunningly overpriced," a staff member wrote.