Does Lynn Tilton Defraud Investors?

Lynn Tilton fights to save struggling companies. So why has the SEC accused her of fraud?

- Sheelah Kolhatkar, photograph by Simone Lueck

Lynn Tilton was rushing to get dressed at her home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., when she got a tip that the Securities and Exchange Commission was about to charge her with fraud. Taking in the news, she froze for a moment, then grabbed her laptop. It happened to be March 16, the 35th anniversary of her father’s death, a devastating event that occurred when Tilton was 19. She took the timing as an omen.

For more than five years, Tilton had known that the SEC was investigating her and her company, Patriarch Partners, a private equity firm based in New York. Months earlier, settlement negotiations had broken down. In typical SEC fashion, the agency hadn’t communicated its intentions afterward. Now that Tilton knew they planned to proceed against her, she decided to go to war.

Two weeks later, when the SEC formally announced its administrative action accusing her of defrauding investors in three funds that Patriarch operates, she was ready with a pretaped television interview denying the charges. Two days after that, on April 1, she filed a counter suit in federal court. “So that’s why, if you remember it, it goes from ‘Lynn Tilton Sued’ to ‘Lynn Tilton Fights Back’ to ‘Lynn Tilton Sues the SEC,’ ” she says, beaming. “That was not at all by accident.”