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Tennessee Republican State Senator Joey Hensley under scrutiny for writing fraudulent opioid prescriptions, xesual relationship with cousin

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Sen. Joey Hensley faces conflicting testimony on opioids, xes with second cousin​

Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, poses in front of an American flag inside the Maury County Republican Party headquarters in Columbia, Tenn., on Saturday, May 30, 2020.

The medical license of state Sen. Joey Hensley, a doctor in the small town of Hohenwald, was put on probation last year after he admitted to writing prescriptions for a second cousin with whom he was in a xesual relationship.

During a discipline hearing before the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, a state investigator testified Hensley wrote his cousin 47 prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances between 2011 and 2018.


But because xes was the root of the charges against Hensley, this case largely ignored most of those prescriptions. Hensley swore the xesual relationship lasted just 10 weeks, from December 2014 to March 2015, so he was disciplined for only two opioid prescriptions that fell within this timespan. Any prescriptions written for his cousin after March 2015 weren’t considered unethical because, as Hensley explained it, their relationship was over.

“We continued to be friends, but that was all,” Hensley said, speaking under oath.

Court records tell a different story. Transcripts and depositions obtained by The Tennessean raise consequential questions about whether the senator was honest while testifying at his discipline hearing last October.

Sworn statements from Hensley’s cousin, filed in an unrelated court case, insist their xesual relationship spanned years, not months. And Hensley himself confirmed in a sworn deposition they spent the night together at a Nashville hotel in 2017 — nearly two years after he told the board they were just friends.

If a longer relationship was disclosed at Hensley’s hearing, he likely would have faced more allegations of unethical prescribing and the possibility of harsher consequences, according to two of the three board members who ruled on the case.

Dr. Neal Beckford and Dr. Stephen Loyd each said the board would have at least considered a longer probation term if they'd heard evidence of a relationship that encompassed more prescriptions. Both board members said Hensley's sworn statements in the case should be re-examined by the proper authorities.

"First, I don't know of any precedent where this has happened, so I don't know what the procedure would be," Beckford said. "I don't know what the board's powers are in this kind of situation. And second … I don't like to be lied to."

The Tennessee Department of Health, which initially brought Hensley's case before the board and would be responsible for re-examining his testimony, declined to answer questions about the case.
Board members could restart a Hensley investigation by filing a new complaint about conflicting testimony with the health department, said a former agency attorney who requested anonymity to speak freely about the Hensley case.

That attorney, who previously worked on other cases of unethical prescribing, said evidence of a longer relationship would have "most certainly" exposed Hensley to larger fines. Board members could also invoke a harsher punishment specifically because they felt Hensley had been dishonest, the attorney said.

“Just lying to the board in itself is disciplinable,” the attorney said. “And in addition to that, the kind of deception we are talking about here also potentially shows a person is not accepting responsibility for the full breadth of their conduct.”

Hensley declined to comment for this story. His attorney, David Steed, would not comment on if Hensley told the truth, but said "one should be reluctant to suggest Dr. Hensley was being untruthful." Steed also said the woman provided conflicting testimony about the xesual relationship.

Hensley's cousin could not be reached for comment. The Tennessean is not identifying her in this story because she is a private citizen who is not accused of any legal wrongdoing.

Doctors are largely forbidden from prescribing drugs to immediate family members or romantic partners because these relationships can obscure a physician's judgment and hamper care. Hensley wrote prescriptions for his then-wife, his mother, his brother, his children and his cousin. The board fined him $2,000 and put his medical license on probation for three years.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a sworn deposition of Sen. Joseph Hensley, filed in Williamson County court, Hensley confirms spending the night at a Nashville hotel with his cousin in February 2017.

At least one board member is likely to push for further investigation. Loyd, an expert on prescribing and addiction, was the lone board member who sought to suspend Hensley's license during the hearing last fall.

Loyd said the medical records reviewed in Hensley's case revealed a pattern of unjustifiable prescriptions at the senator's clinic. After reviewing Tennessean documents showing conflicting testimony, Loyd said he believed Hensley intentionally misled the board about the relationship to minimize the number of prescriptions they scrutinized.

“In deliberation, our focus kept narrowing and narrowing, and I was really upset about that because I thought it should have been broadened,” Loyd said. “None of those prescriptions were written within the scope of accepted medical practice and for legitimate medical purpose.”

The medical records available to Loyd and other board members are sealed documents that have not been independently reviewed by The Tennessean. The third board member who ruled on Hensley's case, Dr. Deborah Christiansen, declined to comment.

Hensley confirms hotel rendezvous in 2017​

Hensley, R-Hohenwald, who has served in the General Assembly since 2003, is a longstanding member of the Republican supermajority that controls much of the state policy in Tennessee. He sits on the Senate education and health committees and holds a leadership position on the Finance, Ways and Means Committee.

Outside of the legislature, Hensley owns and operates a doctor’s office — the Hensley Clinic — in Hohenwald, a town of 3,700 about 80 miles southwest of Nashville.

The Tennessee Department of Health began investigating Hensley in 2017 after a story by the Nashville Scene unearthed allegations he was writing unethical prescriptions. The Scene reported Hensley’s cousin testified at her divorce trial that Hensley was simultaneously her employer, her doctor and her lover.

In an official transcript of the divorce trial — independently obtained and reviewed by The Tennessean — the cousin testified she was working at The Hensley Clinic when she started a xesual relationship with Hensley in December 2014.

She testified the relationship continued until April 2016, ended for a few months, then restarted in the fall, according to the transcript. The woman also said she and Hensley met to have xes in Nashville hotel rooms twice in 2017 and were still in a relationship as of the date of her testimony, according to the trial transcript.

“And it's ongoing to this date?” the cousin was asked in court on March 1, 2017.

“Yes, it is,” she responded.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a Williamson County court transcript, the cousin of Sen. Joseph Hensley testifies under oath that she was in a romantic relationship with Hensley as of March 1, 2017.

Hensley did not testify during the divorce trial, but he was deposed in the case about three weeks later. Under questioning, Hensley affirmed the approximate start time of the xesual relationship but did not say if it was over or ongoing.

Hensley also confirmed at least one of their hotel rendezvous. He admitted in the deposition to using per diem funds available to lawmakers when they are in session to spend the night with the woman at Nashville’s Clarion Hotel in February 2017.

Hensley did not explicitly say they had xes. His cousin testified they did.

Steed, Hensley’s attorney, said the hotel stay did not necessarily mean they had xes.

"(Hensley) agreeing to share his hotel room with a lifelong friend from his small town who has to stay in a city alone before a stressful event the next morning does not mean that it was a xesual encounter," Steed said in a statement to The Tennessean.

Steed questioned the credibility of the woman, pointing out that at one point during the 2017 divorce trial she said she could not remember the last time she had xes with Hensley, even though she later testified they’d had xes twice the prior month. Steed said it was “impossible to reconcile” her forgetfulness.

He also cited an argument by the woman's ex-husband's attorney, who claimed in divorce filings she was "not a credible witness."

Opioid prescriptions for cousin were not documented​

In the months following this divorce trial, the health department began to push forward with an investigation of Hensley’s prescriptions.

Brandi Blair, an agency investigator, traveled to Hohenwald to examine about 90 medical records at The Hensley Clinic. Flanked by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Blair interviewed Hensley about his prescriptions while secretly recording the conversation, according to her testimony at Hensley’s medical discipline hearing.

“Dr. Hensley stated that, yes, he had a xesual affair with a patient from around Christmas, I believe, of 2014 to around March of 2015,” Blair said. “And that during that time he had prescribed some controlled substances to the patient in question.”

When Blair dug deeper, she found more. By querying the Tennessee Controlled Substance Monitoring Database, Blair discovered Hensley wrote this woman 47 prescriptions between 2011 and 2018. Blair testified that a majority of the prescriptions “didn’t have any documentation whatsoever” and said Hensley “did not deny that he wrote the scripts without performing an office visit."

As a result of Blair’s investigation, the health department filed a professional discipline case in 2018 alleging Hensley wrote multiple unethical prescriptions for immediate family members and his lover. These charges, while not criminal in nature, prompted a discipline hearing in which Hensley could have potentially lost his medical license.


Hensley defended the prescriptions at the hearing, arguing Hohenwald was so small his family members would need to travel to another town if he did not treat them himself. When pressed, Hensley conceded the 30-mile journey to another town was not insurmountable.

When asked about his cousin, Hensley and his attorney said the relationship was short.

Hensley testified the relationship lasted from December 2014 to “the middle of March, so about 10 weeks.” His attorney, David Steed, stressed that only two opioid prescriptions fell within the time span of the "brief" romance.

“It was a short – relatively short – relationship,” Steed said in his opening statement. “In February … he wrote her a prescription for a limited number of Lortab. That’s the case. That’s the case.”

The Board of Medical Examiners never heard evidence about a longer relationship. Hensley’s cousin was not called as a witness. It does not appear the transcripts or depositions from the 2017 divorce trial were ever introduced in the case.

State officials aware of testimony 'discrepancy'​

But the health department was aware of the conflicting stories.

On the first day of the discipline hearing, Blair testified to a “discrepancy” in the timeline of the relationship between Hensley and his lover. Before she could explain, an administrative law judge temporarily removed the board members from the virtual hearing so attorneys could debate this testimony out of their earshot. With the board gone, Blair continued.

“As I had explained,” she said, “there was a discrepancy in the timeline. The patient had admitted to having another xesual encounter with Dr. Hensley in January of 2017. Yet Dr. Hensley denies that.”

Hensley’s attorney objected by arguing this testimony was hearsay. The law judge agreed, halting this line of questioning before the board members returned.

The case moved on.

Hensley got probation.

And the board never got an explanation about the “discrepancy.”

Loyd, the board vice president, recalled how this testimony was left unfinished. Without more information on the relationship or discrepancy, board members were left to make their ruling with an incomplete story, he said.

“And I just feel like that decision was influenced by non-truth,” Loyd said.
 
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Disgusting and not at all surprising.
It’s all very in-line with Hohenwald— basically Switzerland sent their trash to Middle Tennessee, and said trash built a little village that still sends men like this to Nashville to police the state’s collective uterus
2ceb4e76e4dd5094f952c38cddad99be.gif
 

baladar

genius lives only one story above madness....
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So he out here living that Giuliani kissing (and fvcking) cousin life?

Republicans, can't live with them, can't leave them alone with cousins of the opposite gender.
 

Omarcomin

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He needs to hire Rudy, fellow cousin-fucker. Rudy actually married his!

Anyways this is plain nasty.
 

MeOhMeOhMy

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Sen. Joey Hensley faces conflicting testimony on opioids, xes with second cousin​

Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, poses in front of an American flag inside the Maury County Republican Party headquarters in Columbia, Tenn., on Saturday, May 30, 2020.

The medical license of state Sen. Joey Hensley, a doctor in the small town of Hohenwald, was put on probation last year after he admitted to writing prescriptions for a second cousin with whom he was in a xesual relationship.

During a discipline hearing before the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, a state investigator testified Hensley wrote his cousin 47 prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances between 2011 and 2018.


But because xes was the root of the charges against Hensley, this case largely ignored most of those prescriptions. Hensley swore the xesual relationship lasted just 10 weeks, from December 2014 to March 2015, so he was disciplined for only two opioid prescriptions that fell within this timespan. Any prescriptions written for his cousin after March 2015 weren’t considered unethical because, as Hensley explained it, their relationship was over.

“We continued to be friends, but that was all,” Hensley said, speaking under oath.

Court records tell a different story. Transcripts and depositions obtained by The Tennessean raise consequential questions about whether the senator was honest while testifying at his discipline hearing last October.

Sworn statements from Hensley’s cousin, filed in an unrelated court case, insist their xesual relationship spanned years, not months. And Hensley himself confirmed in a sworn deposition they spent the night together at a Nashville hotel in 2017 — nearly two years after he told the board they were just friends.

If a longer relationship was disclosed at Hensley’s hearing, he likely would have faced more allegations of unethical prescribing and the possibility of harsher consequences, according to two of the three board members who ruled on the case.

Dr. Neal Beckford and Dr. Stephen Loyd each said the board would have at least considered a longer probation term if they'd heard evidence of a relationship that encompassed more prescriptions. Both board members said Hensley's sworn statements in the case should be re-examined by the proper authorities.

"First, I don't know of any precedent where this has happened, so I don't know what the procedure would be," Beckford said. "I don't know what the board's powers are in this kind of situation. And second … I don't like to be lied to."

The Tennessee Department of Health, which initially brought Hensley's case before the board and would be responsible for re-examining his testimony, declined to answer questions about the case.
Board members could restart a Hensley investigation by filing a new complaint about conflicting testimony with the health department, said a former agency attorney who requested anonymity to speak freely about the Hensley case.

That attorney, who previously worked on other cases of unethical prescribing, said evidence of a longer relationship would have "most certainly" exposed Hensley to larger fines. Board members could also invoke a harsher punishment specifically because they felt Hensley had been dishonest, the attorney said.

“Just lying to the board in itself is disciplinable,” the attorney said. “And in addition to that, the kind of deception we are talking about here also potentially shows a person is not accepting responsibility for the full breadth of their conduct.”

Hensley declined to comment for this story. His attorney, David Steed, would not comment on if Hensley told the truth, but said "one should be reluctant to suggest Dr. Hensley was being untruthful." Steed also said the woman provided conflicting testimony about the xesual relationship.

Hensley's cousin could not be reached for comment. The Tennessean is not identifying her in this story because she is a private citizen who is not accused of any legal wrongdoing.

Doctors are largely forbidden from prescribing drugs to immediate family members or romantic partners because these relationships can obscure a physician's judgment and hamper care. Hensley wrote prescriptions for his then-wife, his mother, his brother, his children and his cousin. The board fined him $2,000 and put his medical license on probation for three years.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a sworn deposition of Sen. Joseph Hensley, filed in Williamson County court, Hensley confirms spending the night at a Nashville hotel with his cousin in February 2017.

At least one board member is likely to push for further investigation. Loyd, an expert on prescribing and addiction, was the lone board member who sought to suspend Hensley's license during the hearing last fall.

Loyd said the medical records reviewed in Hensley's case revealed a pattern of unjustifiable prescriptions at the senator's clinic. After reviewing Tennessean documents showing conflicting testimony, Loyd said he believed Hensley intentionally misled the board about the relationship to minimize the number of prescriptions they scrutinized.

“In deliberation, our focus kept narrowing and narrowing, and I was really upset about that because I thought it should have been broadened,” Loyd said. “None of those prescriptions were written within the scope of accepted medical practice and for legitimate medical purpose.”

The medical records available to Loyd and other board members are sealed documents that have not been independently reviewed by The Tennessean. The third board member who ruled on Hensley's case, Dr. Deborah Christiansen, declined to comment.

Hensley confirms hotel rendezvous in 2017​

Hensley, R-Hohenwald, who has served in the General Assembly since 2003, is a longstanding member of the Republican supermajority that controls much of the state policy in Tennessee. He sits on the Senate education and health committees and holds a leadership position on the Finance, Ways and Means Committee.

Outside of the legislature, Hensley owns and operates a doctor’s office — the Hensley Clinic — in Hohenwald, a town of 3,700 about 80 miles southwest of Nashville.

The Tennessee Department of Health began investigating Hensley in 2017 after a story by the Nashville Scene unearthed allegations he was writing unethical prescriptions. The Scene reported Hensley’s cousin testified at her divorce trial that Hensley was simultaneously her employer, her doctor and her lover.

In an official transcript of the divorce trial — independently obtained and reviewed by The Tennessean — the cousin testified she was working at The Hensley Clinic when she started a xesual relationship with Hensley in December 2014.

She testified the relationship continued until April 2016, ended for a few months, then restarted in the fall, according to the transcript. The woman also said she and Hensley met to have xes in Nashville hotel rooms twice in 2017 and were still in a relationship as of the date of her testimony, according to the trial transcript.

“And it's ongoing to this date?” the cousin was asked in court on March 1, 2017.

“Yes, it is,” she responded.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a Williamson County court transcript, the cousin of Sen. Joseph Hensley testifies under oath that she was in a romantic relationship with Hensley as of March 1, 2017.

Hensley did not testify during the divorce trial, but he was deposed in the case about three weeks later. Under questioning, Hensley affirmed the approximate start time of the xesual relationship but did not say if it was over or ongoing.

Hensley also confirmed at least one of their hotel rendezvous. He admitted in the deposition to using per diem funds available to lawmakers when they are in session to spend the night with the woman at Nashville’s Clarion Hotel in February 2017.

Hensley did not explicitly say they had xes. His cousin testified they did.

Steed, Hensley’s attorney, said the hotel stay did not necessarily mean they had xes.

"(Hensley) agreeing to share his hotel room with a lifelong friend from his small town who has to stay in a city alone before a stressful event the next morning does not mean that it was a xesual encounter," Steed said in a statement to The Tennessean.

Steed questioned the credibility of the woman, pointing out that at one point during the 2017 divorce trial she said she could not remember the last time she had xes with Hensley, even though she later testified they’d had xes twice the prior month. Steed said it was “impossible to reconcile” her forgetfulness.

He also cited an argument by the woman's ex-husband's attorney, who claimed in divorce filings she was "not a credible witness."

Opioid prescriptions for cousin were not documented​

In the months following this divorce trial, the health department began to push forward with an investigation of Hensley’s prescriptions.

Brandi Blair, an agency investigator, traveled to Hohenwald to examine about 90 medical records at The Hensley Clinic. Flanked by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Blair interviewed Hensley about his prescriptions while secretly recording the conversation, according to her testimony at Hensley’s medical discipline hearing.

“Dr. Hensley stated that, yes, he had a xesual affair with a patient from around Christmas, I believe, of 2014 to around March of 2015,” Blair said. “And that during that time he had prescribed some controlled substances to the patient in question.”

When Blair dug deeper, she found more. By querying the Tennessee Controlled Substance Monitoring Database, Blair discovered Hensley wrote this woman 47 prescriptions between 2011 and 2018. Blair testified that a majority of the prescriptions “didn’t have any documentation whatsoever” and said Hensley “did not deny that he wrote the scripts without performing an office visit."

As a result of Blair’s investigation, the health department filed a professional discipline case in 2018 alleging Hensley wrote multiple unethical prescriptions for immediate family members and his lover. These charges, while not criminal in nature, prompted a discipline hearing in which Hensley could have potentially lost his medical license.


Hensley defended the prescriptions at the hearing, arguing Hohenwald was so small his family members would need to travel to another town if he did not treat them himself. When pressed, Hensley conceded the 30-mile journey to another town was not insurmountable.

When asked about his cousin, Hensley and his attorney said the relationship was short.

Hensley testified the relationship lasted from December 2014 to “the middle of March, so about 10 weeks.” His attorney, David Steed, stressed that only two opioid prescriptions fell within the time span of the "brief" romance.

“It was a short – relatively short – relationship,” Steed said in his opening statement. “In February … he wrote her a prescription for a limited number of Lortab. That’s the case. That’s the case.”

The Board of Medical Examiners never heard evidence about a longer relationship. Hensley’s cousin was not called as a witness. It does not appear the transcripts or depositions from the 2017 divorce trial were ever introduced in the case.

State officials aware of testimony 'discrepancy'​

But the health department was aware of the conflicting stories.

On the first day of the discipline hearing, Blair testified to a “discrepancy” in the timeline of the relationship between Hensley and his lover. Before she could explain, an administrative law judge temporarily removed the board members from the virtual hearing so attorneys could debate this testimony out of their earshot. With the board gone, Blair continued.

“As I had explained,” she said, “there was a discrepancy in the timeline. The patient had admitted to having another xesual encounter with Dr. Hensley in January of 2017. Yet Dr. Hensley denies that.”

Hensley’s attorney objected by arguing this testimony was hearsay. The law judge agreed, halting this line of questioning before the board members returned.

The case moved on.

Hensley got probation.

And the board never got an explanation about the “discrepancy.”

Loyd, the board vice president, recalled how this testimony was left unfinished. Without more information on the relationship or discrepancy, board members were left to make their ruling with an incomplete story, he said.

“And I just feel like that decision was influenced by non-truth,” Loyd said.
After reading this, I feel the need to bathe.
 

Queena

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He was the towns connect. Must've been nice to have your cousinlover write you a script for dope. No one even cares about y'all bumping uglies because they're also having xes with their unclelovers and sistermama's.
 

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Sen. Joey Hensley faces conflicting testimony on opioids, xes with second cousin​

Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, poses in front of an American flag inside the Maury County Republican Party headquarters in Columbia, Tenn., on Saturday, May 30, 2020.

The medical license of state Sen. Joey Hensley, a doctor in the small town of Hohenwald, was put on probation last year after he admitted to writing prescriptions for a second cousin with whom he was in a xesual relationship.

During a discipline hearing before the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, a state investigator testified Hensley wrote his cousin 47 prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances between 2011 and 2018.


But because xes was the root of the charges against Hensley, this case largely ignored most of those prescriptions. Hensley swore the xesual relationship lasted just 10 weeks, from December 2014 to March 2015, so he was disciplined for only two opioid prescriptions that fell within this timespan. Any prescriptions written for his cousin after March 2015 weren’t considered unethical because, as Hensley explained it, their relationship was over.

“We continued to be friends, but that was all,” Hensley said, speaking under oath.

Court records tell a different story. Transcripts and depositions obtained by The Tennessean raise consequential questions about whether the senator was honest while testifying at his discipline hearing last October.

Sworn statements from Hensley’s cousin, filed in an unrelated court case, insist their xesual relationship spanned years, not months. And Hensley himself confirmed in a sworn deposition they spent the night together at a Nashville hotel in 2017 — nearly two years after he told the board they were just friends.

If a longer relationship was disclosed at Hensley’s hearing, he likely would have faced more allegations of unethical prescribing and the possibility of harsher consequences, according to two of the three board members who ruled on the case.

Dr. Neal Beckford and Dr. Stephen Loyd each said the board would have at least considered a longer probation term if they'd heard evidence of a relationship that encompassed more prescriptions. Both board members said Hensley's sworn statements in the case should be re-examined by the proper authorities.

"First, I don't know of any precedent where this has happened, so I don't know what the procedure would be," Beckford said. "I don't know what the board's powers are in this kind of situation. And second … I don't like to be lied to."

The Tennessee Department of Health, which initially brought Hensley's case before the board and would be responsible for re-examining his testimony, declined to answer questions about the case.
Board members could restart a Hensley investigation by filing a new complaint about conflicting testimony with the health department, said a former agency attorney who requested anonymity to speak freely about the Hensley case.

That attorney, who previously worked on other cases of unethical prescribing, said evidence of a longer relationship would have "most certainly" exposed Hensley to larger fines. Board members could also invoke a harsher punishment specifically because they felt Hensley had been dishonest, the attorney said.

“Just lying to the board in itself is disciplinable,” the attorney said. “And in addition to that, the kind of deception we are talking about here also potentially shows a person is not accepting responsibility for the full breadth of their conduct.”

Hensley declined to comment for this story. His attorney, David Steed, would not comment on if Hensley told the truth, but said "one should be reluctant to suggest Dr. Hensley was being untruthful." Steed also said the woman provided conflicting testimony about the xesual relationship.

Hensley's cousin could not be reached for comment. The Tennessean is not identifying her in this story because she is a private citizen who is not accused of any legal wrongdoing.

Doctors are largely forbidden from prescribing drugs to immediate family members or romantic partners because these relationships can obscure a physician's judgment and hamper care. Hensley wrote prescriptions for his then-wife, his mother, his brother, his children and his cousin. The board fined him $2,000 and put his medical license on probation for three years.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a sworn deposition of Sen. Joseph Hensley, filed in Williamson County court, Hensley confirms spending the night at a Nashville hotel with his cousin in February 2017.

At least one board member is likely to push for further investigation. Loyd, an expert on prescribing and addiction, was the lone board member who sought to suspend Hensley's license during the hearing last fall.

Loyd said the medical records reviewed in Hensley's case revealed a pattern of unjustifiable prescriptions at the senator's clinic. After reviewing Tennessean documents showing conflicting testimony, Loyd said he believed Hensley intentionally misled the board about the relationship to minimize the number of prescriptions they scrutinized.

“In deliberation, our focus kept narrowing and narrowing, and I was really upset about that because I thought it should have been broadened,” Loyd said. “None of those prescriptions were written within the scope of accepted medical practice and for legitimate medical purpose.”

The medical records available to Loyd and other board members are sealed documents that have not been independently reviewed by The Tennessean. The third board member who ruled on Hensley's case, Dr. Deborah Christiansen, declined to comment.

Hensley confirms hotel rendezvous in 2017​

Hensley, R-Hohenwald, who has served in the General Assembly since 2003, is a longstanding member of the Republican supermajority that controls much of the state policy in Tennessee. He sits on the Senate education and health committees and holds a leadership position on the Finance, Ways and Means Committee.

Outside of the legislature, Hensley owns and operates a doctor’s office — the Hensley Clinic — in Hohenwald, a town of 3,700 about 80 miles southwest of Nashville.

The Tennessee Department of Health began investigating Hensley in 2017 after a story by the Nashville Scene unearthed allegations he was writing unethical prescriptions. The Scene reported Hensley’s cousin testified at her divorce trial that Hensley was simultaneously her employer, her doctor and her lover.

In an official transcript of the divorce trial — independently obtained and reviewed by The Tennessean — the cousin testified she was working at The Hensley Clinic when she started a xesual relationship with Hensley in December 2014.

She testified the relationship continued until April 2016, ended for a few months, then restarted in the fall, according to the transcript. The woman also said she and Hensley met to have xes in Nashville hotel rooms twice in 2017 and were still in a relationship as of the date of her testimony, according to the trial transcript.

“And it's ongoing to this date?” the cousin was asked in court on March 1, 2017.

“Yes, it is,” she responded.

Excerpt: In the following excerpt from a Williamson County court transcript, the cousin of Sen. Joseph Hensley testifies under oath that she was in a romantic relationship with Hensley as of March 1, 2017.

Hensley did not testify during the divorce trial, but he was deposed in the case about three weeks later. Under questioning, Hensley affirmed the approximate start time of the xesual relationship but did not say if it was over or ongoing.

Hensley also confirmed at least one of their hotel rendezvous. He admitted in the deposition to using per diem funds available to lawmakers when they are in session to spend the night with the woman at Nashville’s Clarion Hotel in February 2017.

Hensley did not explicitly say they had xes. His cousin testified they did.

Steed, Hensley’s attorney, said the hotel stay did not necessarily mean they had xes.

"(Hensley) agreeing to share his hotel room with a lifelong friend from his small town who has to stay in a city alone before a stressful event the next morning does not mean that it was a xesual encounter," Steed said in a statement to The Tennessean.

Steed questioned the credibility of the woman, pointing out that at one point during the 2017 divorce trial she said she could not remember the last time she had xes with Hensley, even though she later testified they’d had xes twice the prior month. Steed said it was “impossible to reconcile” her forgetfulness.

He also cited an argument by the woman's ex-husband's attorney, who claimed in divorce filings she was "not a credible witness."

Opioid prescriptions for cousin were not documented​

In the months following this divorce trial, the health department began to push forward with an investigation of Hensley’s prescriptions.

Brandi Blair, an agency investigator, traveled to Hohenwald to examine about 90 medical records at The Hensley Clinic. Flanked by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Blair interviewed Hensley about his prescriptions while secretly recording the conversation, according to her testimony at Hensley’s medical discipline hearing.

“Dr. Hensley stated that, yes, he had a xesual affair with a patient from around Christmas, I believe, of 2014 to around March of 2015,” Blair said. “And that during that time he had prescribed some controlled substances to the patient in question.”

When Blair dug deeper, she found more. By querying the Tennessee Controlled Substance Monitoring Database, Blair discovered Hensley wrote this woman 47 prescriptions between 2011 and 2018. Blair testified that a majority of the prescriptions “didn’t have any documentation whatsoever” and said Hensley “did not deny that he wrote the scripts without performing an office visit."

As a result of Blair’s investigation, the health department filed a professional discipline case in 2018 alleging Hensley wrote multiple unethical prescriptions for immediate family members and his lover. These charges, while not criminal in nature, prompted a discipline hearing in which Hensley could have potentially lost his medical license.


Hensley defended the prescriptions at the hearing, arguing Hohenwald was so small his family members would need to travel to another town if he did not treat them himself. When pressed, Hensley conceded the 30-mile journey to another town was not insurmountable.

When asked about his cousin, Hensley and his attorney said the relationship was short.

Hensley testified the relationship lasted from December 2014 to “the middle of March, so about 10 weeks.” His attorney, David Steed, stressed that only two opioid prescriptions fell within the time span of the "brief" romance.

“It was a short – relatively short – relationship,” Steed said in his opening statement. “In February … he wrote her a prescription for a limited number of Lortab. That’s the case. That’s the case.”

The Board of Medical Examiners never heard evidence about a longer relationship. Hensley’s cousin was not called as a witness. It does not appear the transcripts or depositions from the 2017 divorce trial were ever introduced in the case.

State officials aware of testimony 'discrepancy'​

But the health department was aware of the conflicting stories.

On the first day of the discipline hearing, Blair testified to a “discrepancy” in the timeline of the relationship between Hensley and his lover. Before she could explain, an administrative law judge temporarily removed the board members from the virtual hearing so attorneys could debate this testimony out of their earshot. With the board gone, Blair continued.

“As I had explained,” she said, “there was a discrepancy in the timeline. The patient had admitted to having another xesual encounter with Dr. Hensley in January of 2017. Yet Dr. Hensley denies that.”

Hensley’s attorney objected by arguing this testimony was hearsay. The law judge agreed, halting this line of questioning before the board members returned.

The case moved on.

Hensley got probation.

And the board never got an explanation about the “discrepancy.”

Loyd, the board vice president, recalled how this testimony was left unfinished. Without more information on the relationship or discrepancy, board members were left to make their ruling with an incomplete story, he said.

“And I just feel like that decision was influenced by non-truth,” Loyd said.
Lies, drugs/crime and incest . . . well he had to do something to appeal to Republican voters.
 

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