Jeff “Slim Shady” Cooper and former Rutherford County Administrator of Elections Nicole Lester have something in common. They both bit the hand that might have fed them.

Shortly before a Circuit Court hearing July 18, according to witnesses, Cooper cussed out District Attorney General Bill Whitesell in the Judicial Building hallway when Whitesell told him he was going to ask that assault and abduction charges be dismissed against Rutherford County Commissioner Matt Young, Bubba Hutson and Harvey Felsher, of Mississippi.

“He told him to f— himself and called him a mother——,” said Will Fraley, the attorney for Hutson, who saw the incident play out in the hall.

The incident clearly displayed Cooper’s character, added Fraley.

The credibility of Cooper’s charges had been in question almost since he filed them against the trio last year. After all, he has a sketchy background and shaky mental status.

But more to the point, on the night he was allegedly tortured, abducted and assaulted at Hutson’s East Main Street home, Cooper went out to eat with the men—who’d been his friends for years—and then went home with them after they took him to the sheriff’s office and tried to have him arrested for conning them out of $20,000 in a ticket-scalping scheme for a Justin Beiber concert. (The ride to the sheriff’s office constituted the abduction charges.)

Maybe he didn’t have anywhere else to go or he just didn’t think he’d been kidnapped and assaulted until months later when he and Young got into some sort of disagreement on a trip to Kentucky. (They were roommates at the time?) Cooper served time in jail there for assaulting Young, who later filed theft charges against him for taking his pistol.

Anyway, Whitesell said Cooper’s outburst of gutter language had no impact on his decision to move forward with the request for dismissal. (But it sure didn’t help Cooper’s cause.) Whitesell said he felt it was the right move because he couldn’t prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. I got the feeling Whitesell didn’t think much of the case, or the indictment, from the outset. He was out of town when the case went to the grand jury. Facing attorneys such as Fraley and Terry Fann, he probably would have lost because he didn’t have enough strong evidence.

If someone burns you with cigarettes, beats you up and holds a gun to your head, you don’t go out to eat with them, spend the night in the house and then room with one of them later. Whether they roughed you up or not, if you file assault and kidnapping charges against them, don’t expect a DA or jury to spend much time listening to your pleas. That’s just not how it works.

So how does this relate to Lester? Good question.

The night she was fired in a unanimous vote by the Election Commission, I felt bad for her. I don’t like to see anyone lose a job, because I know how it affects families.

But Lester was her own worst enemy in this mess and whether Chairman Ransom Jones was already looking to replace her or not, she used the wrong strategy to keep her job.

In late 2012, Jones put a letter in her personnel file ordering her to keep regular office hours, clock in and out on her office computer and learn better management skills to improve office morale. She didn’t make enough improvement over the last year and a half, at least not enough to suit commissioners.

And in the aftermath of her firing, people shouldn’t feel sorry for her. In some instances, according to Jones, she was going to the office for an hour or two in the morning, clocking in and then coming back after office workers left and clocking out. He declined to confirm that she got paid for working while on a trip to the beach. But he did say that the two times she used the office virtual private network (VPN), it had to be taken away from her.

“There are no winners in this,” Jones said after leading the move to fire her. He was extremely disappointed because it was his decision to hire her three years ago when Hooper Penuel resigned over an early voting scheduling error.

Lester might have had an outside shot at keeping her $92,000-plus job if she’d sought reconciliation with the commission. Instead of telling them she’d do whatever they wanted, she wrote an eight-page letter justifying her every move and bragging on accomplishments over the last three years. Jones called its tone “defiant.”

Going into the Election Commission vote, I thought Lester might get at least two votes in favor of keeping her job. But when your husband, father and other supporters accuse the commission’s chairman of bullying and name-calling that’s not going to win friends and influence people.

Lester apparently forgot that she worked at the pleasure of the commission and was getting paid by taxpayers. Certainly, it is difficult to have two small children and be at the office eight hours a day. In this case, something had to give, and it was Lester, mainly at her own doing.

• During her last meeting, Lester said Jones was right when he told her earlier he had the votes to fire her. She also made a pretty good prediction when she said that MTSU Associate Athletic Director Alan Farley or State Rep. Joe Carr were likely replacements for her. Farley got the job in a 4-1 vote and in spite of one commissioner’s claim that the Republican Party’s Executive Committee demanded he leave the Election Commission in 2002 for “dereliction of duty and absenteeism” for missing the Aug. 1 vote that year.

• All sorts of stuff has come across my desk over the last few months, much of it designed to make political candidates look bad. One showed business cards being passed out by longtime Rutherford County Commissioner Robert Peay, an Independent candidate in the 4th District. The front of the cards looks like an official county business card while the back says “Asking for your vote!” Peay was campaigning door to door and leaving his card if people weren’t home. On one, he wrote, “Sorry I missed you. Robert.”

Although the county mayor purchases cards for county commissioners, Peay said he bought these cards from Shacklett’s Photography. No problem there, but one observer had pointed out to me that election hand cards and other items are required by state law to say who paid for them. The cards Peay was handing out didn’t have the obligatory statement.

I asked District Attorney Bill Whitesell about the matter, and after looking up the law, he wasn’t certain if there was a violation, because of a provision that exempts pens, pins, buttons and other campaign items. He wasn’t inclined to prosecute, either, pointing out that the penalty is only a $50 fine. Considering the number of criminal cases his office deals with each day, Peay’s cards would hardly be blip on the radar.

When I talked to Peay about the matter, he said he’d been handing out the cards for years during elections but would quit using them if it was a problem. This time, he’s running against Jon Jacques and Jon Frazier, and in some people’s eyes they are, or at least they’re trying to make them, a problem. But it’s really up to Whitesell, so Peay is problem in the clear.

• A young woman named Rachel Orman was shot (non-fatally) in a September 2013 robbery on Mt. Tabor Road in Christiana, purportedly involving prescription drugs.

During a preliminary hearing on charges against the two men accused in the robbery/shooting, her husband, Shane Jacobs, described himself and the group he dealt with as “trailer park trash.” One defendant’s attorney accused him of dealing prescription drugs.

The detective investigating the case said the incident was either a drug deal gone bad or a drug robbery.

Either way, a recent obituary stated that Orman was dead. She was a member of the 2007 Riverdale Lady Warriors state championship basketball team and a nice-looking young woman. She was my daughter’s age. What a tragedy.