INC Cover dan priceGravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who gained worldwide fame for boosting employee salaries to a minimum of $70,000, is facing new questions about his motivations, along with public allegations of abuse from his former wife.

The claims, made in a lengthly Bloomberg BusinessWeek story today, are drawing a pointed response from Price and the company. A statement released by Gravity Payments says, in part, that the article “contained reckless accusations and baseless speculations that are unequivocally false.” (Full statement below.)

In the story, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Karen Weise cites court documents showing that Price was served with a lawsuit from his brother, Lucas Price, challenging Dan Price’s compensation, weeks before the Gravity Payments CEO announced that he was boosting his employees’ salaries, and reducing his own.

The article suggests that Dan Price may have implemented the wage hike as a pre-emptive strike against his brother’s lawsuit, rather than the lawsuit serving as a response to the salary announcement, as has been suggested in earlier reports.

Weise also cites statistics to show that Price’s salary as CEO of Gravity Payments before the compensation changes — $1.1 million — was “atypical for a company its size.”

The Bloomberg article also describes how Price’s ex-wife — who has since changed her last name to Colón — spoke at a TEDx event in October about the “power of writing to overcome trauma.” From the article:

Colón stood on stage wearing cerulean blue and, without naming Price, read from a journal entry she says she wrote in May 2006 about her then-husband. “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 recalled once locking herself in her 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.”

Price denied the allegations of abuse in a follow-up interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. When asked for comment today by GeekWire, a Gravity Payments spokesperson issued this statement:

“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. Sometimes it’s fair, other times it isn’t. Today’s story in BusinessWeek contained reckless accusations and baseless speculations that are unequivocally false.

As a company, we’ve faced many challenges in our history. Each time we’ve banded together, worked hard and focused on our mission to help our community businesses, we have eventually emerged stronger. This has been a truly memorable year in many ways. We’re looking forward to working harder than ever in pursuit of our mission.”

This past July, GeekWire similarly questioned the timing of the lawsuit in relation to the salary announcement, noting that the complaint against Dan Price was signed by Lucas Price’s lawyer on March 12, about a month before Price’s salary announcement was first reported in a story in the New York Times. The document uncovered by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, showing that Dan Price was served with the suit a month in advance of the announcement, is a new twist.

Tdanpricehe suit wasn’t officially filed in King County Superior Court until April 24, about 12 days after Price made the announcement.

In the suit, Lucas Price claims that Dan Price “improperly used his majority control of the company to pay himself excessive compensation” prior to the wage changes. Some suggested that Lucas Price sued his brother in response to the wage hikes, “perhaps to pressure Dan to sell when Gravity was in the limelight, thus maximizing the value of Lucas’s share,” as writer Paul Keegan noted in this Inc. magazine cover story in October.

In the story today, Weise writes, “If the lawsuit wasn’t a reaction to the wage hike, could it have been the other way around?”

Dan Price also told the Seattle Times, which first reported the lawsuit, that “I know the decision to pay everyone a living wage is controversial. I deeply regret the rift this has caused in my relationship with my brother.”

Price repeatedly told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he was “only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise.”

The disagreement between the brothers dates back several years, to long before Dan Price made international news with his announcement of Gravity Payments’ new salary structure, according to the timeline laid out in Lucas Price’s complaint.

“As I read through the court record and media reports, I began to see how Price was writing his own origin myth one interview at a time,” Weise wrote in her story.

Price, who reportedly emptied his retirement accounts and is now renting out his house in Seattle to make ends meet, told Weise earlier this year that he was becoming “sick of the attention” from media for his decision to increase employee salaries. From the piece:

Price told me the hoopla has him feeling torn. “This might sound weird, because I do a lot of stuff, but I’m so sick of attention,” he said. “It just feels like a lot of investment of yourself, you know?” He recalled when he was on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine last December and the relief he felt when the next issue went on sale. “I was so happy when they changed issues and I wasn’t on the cover anymore,” he said. “I’m in the airport a lot, and I was just so happy to not see myself.” Yet for all the relief, Price and his team asked six times if he’d be on Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover.

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