With that said, getting fired was probably one of the best things that happened to me creatively because it freed me from that negative environment. I began to mature in a way that I would not have been able to under that oppressive relationship with my father. It was as though scales had fallen off my eyes, and I realized how dramatically I had been held back—that the people who had described my relationship with my father as unhealthy were correct. In a very short period of time, I knew I would never accept an emotionally abusive relationship like that again.
Going out on my own provided an opportunity, which I don’t think I ever would have received without leaving, to run a business the way I wanted to run a business. For the first time, I could represent myself as me, not a company that I had problems with. That was liberating.
THE LAWSUIT
In July 2009, around the time the Coleman grill was going public, I was served papers at my home by a local police officer. My father was suing me for my shares in OCC.
The patchwork agreement we had signed after I had been fired that allowed me to remain on the show as an independent contractor—completed under a tight deadline set by Discovery—included a stipulation that my father could purchase my shares in the company (still at 20 percent interest) for fair market value to be agreed upon.
One day in May 2009, I had been sitting by my pool when my father called and asked what I wanted to do with my shares in the company. I hadn’t thought much about it, so I told him that we’d just have to figure out what was fair and go from there.
My father then informed me that he’d had the shares appraised and their fair market value was zero. He wanted the shares and wouldn’t pay me anything, he said.
“How’s that fair?” I asked.
“That’s just what it is,” he said. “And I want to let you know that I’m suing you.”
I was shocked. The lawsuit that followed seemed so personal and so unnecessary because I was willing to work things out with him to determine the fair market value.
My father withdrew the lawsuit but in November filed another lawsuit for more than $1 million in damages, likely hoping the judge would force me to sell my shares to him. I think my father sued in the hopes that I would buckle and hand him my shares to get out of the lawsuit. He knew I wouldn’t like being tangled up in a legal mess like that. If that failed, he probably believed that he could simply outspend me into submission or that he would win in the courtroom.
By the grace of God, I became aware of an amazing attorney—and a really special person—named Bill Larkin. To this day, Rachael and I thank God for Bill because he has been a great friend and made it possible for me to defend myself against my father’s lawsuit without going broke. Ours would have been a perfect situation for an attorney who wanted to feast on our bones, because the way the lawsuit dragged on, our resources could have been drained. If my father hoped that I would run out of money and have to give him my shares, Bill prevented that from happening. Bill made money representing me, but he was fair with us.
My father booked a radio show interview that would be filmed for American Chopper, and the television crew asked me to phone in during the interview. Of course, the lawsuit came up. I asked my father how much my OCC shares were worth, and he answered, “Nothing.”
I responded with, “If my shares are worth nothing, then how about I buy your 80 percent for nothing?”
My father didn’t accept the offer, and that zinger put things in perspective and exposed how ridiculous the lawsuit was.
Our dispute centered on the fair market value of the shares. The legal dispute centered on the drafting of the document between my father and me that had prevented OCC from being in breach of contract with Discovery. My lawyer argued that I could not be forced to sell my shares because no method had been agreed upon to determine fair market value and our opinions on their value differed.
On April 21, 2010, a judge ruled that my father’s option to purchase was valid and that we should jointly select a neutral appraiser. If we could not do so, the court would determine the shares’ value. I appealed and in December, an appellate court sided with me, determining that, in layman’s terms, an agreement to agree is not enforceable. That blocked my father from taking my shares for nothing.
A couple of months later, my father and I settled the matter out of court. I cannot talk about details of the settlement other than to say that I received the Black Widow bike. Out of the fifty or so bikes that my father and I built together, the Black Widow was the only one I received. My father kept the rest. Those early bikes are iconic, and it makes me sick to think what might happen to them.
More than money and bikes disappeared, though. As the person responsible for overseeing OCC’s licensing, I always made sure that the company received at least two free pieces of the OCC products we made so that we could have them as keepsakes. We’re talking about years of saving hundreds of products that were stockpiled next to the old shop.
I came in one day from a long weekend and they were all gone. My father didn’t take one of everything—he took everything. I don’t know where all those products went, and I hope my father has kept them somewhere only he has access to. I have almost nothing out of everything that was produced at OCC.
The entire process with the lawsuits and settlement was an ugly mess, just a terrible experience. First of all, as a Christian, I believe family members should be able to work out issues like that without going to court. Or at least first make a genuine effort. But we were a father and son, and to me, fighting in court seemed inappropriate, outrageous, ridiculous, and obscene.
That drama dragged on for a year and a half, and it was very public, making the newspapers, television news, and industry media from start to finish.
Being sued by your father is not the kind of headlines you want your name in.
Between the judge’s ruling in my father’s favor and my successful appeal, I married the love of my life, Rachael, on August 20, 2010. Our story is one of redemption.
We had met a month shy of three years earlier. I had recently ended a relationship with someone I had lived with for five years, and I wanted to take some time away from having a relationship. Then Rachael came along and that changed!
At the time, I was not living a Christian lifestyle, and a few friends and I went to the Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for a weekend of partying.
A casino host had set up my reservation for the weekend, and I remember asking him where all the girls were. He told me to go to the club MurMur that night. When I arrived, I saw this beautiful blonde in white shorts.
“Look how tall that girl is,” I told my buddies.
When they saw her, they were like, “Whoa!”
I’ll never forget that first time I saw Rachael. She looked great. And tall. Rachael is five ten, but in heels she was over six feet and gorgeous.
Her being there that night was kind of random. She typically would have been working at one of her jobs, but she was there to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Someone who worked at the club told Rachael that “Paul Jr. from American Chopper” was there and that she should meet him.
Rachael knew of the show, but she had not watched it and was only vaguely familiar with me.
“He’s in the bathroom,” the worker said. “I’ll go get him when he comes out.”
Rachael thought the whole situation was strange, and when the guy walked away, so did she. Rachael quickly made her way back to her friends and told them what happened. When I came out of the bathroom, she was gone. I went on with my night, but the host later managed to try again to bring us together for an introduction. Since this was her second time being asked, Rachael decided she would come over for a quick “Hi.”
We started talking at a table near the dance floor. We both smiled at each other, and Rachael pointed out that we both had dimples on our left cheeks. From there we laughed and continued to chat. I was smoking cigarettes at the time, and I lit one.
“What are you d
oing?” Rachael asked. “You can’t do that down here. You have to go upstairs to smoke.”
I asked if she would go upstairs to the entrance with me, and she agreed. While I smoked, we talked—nothing romantic, just getting to know each other—and then decided to go play roulette. I was not having a good night at the wheel, and she told me that I was a bad gambler. Despite her frank analysis, we hit it off well. Time went fast, and before we knew it, the club was closing.
My mom raised me to be a gentleman, so I wasn’t going crazy or anything trying to hit on her. I was just trying to be myself—while hitting on her. We were having a good time, and I asked if she would like to go up to my room and watch a movie. I did not have the purest of intentions. Rachael turned me down and said that it was late and she was going home.
The next morning, my friend Johnny and I went downstairs to a little store to buy cigarettes. Johnny motioned for me to look at the Borgata calendar on a merchandise rack. “Is that the girl you were talking to last night?”
“Her?” I asked, pointing to the cover.
“Yeah,” Johnny said, “that’s the girl you were talking to.”
She had previously worked at the Borgata and had made the cover of their annual calendar. I immediately bought one.
Rachael had told me that she had to work the next night but that she would come back to the Borgata after work to hang out with friends who were working there. The way she tells the story, when she arrived at the club, I was surrounded by a small group of girls, and she decided not to come over because I looked busy.
Fortunately, I saw her across the room. She was wearing a Hurley camo hat and looked so good. I went over to her and we hung out again for a few hours.
That was a Saturday night. My friends and I left for home the next morning, and I called her from the car and asked her to come up to Montgomery for a visit. She was noncommittal, but then again, she didn’t shut down the idea.
Over the next week, we talked on the phone and I politely badgered her to come to Montgomery. I even tried to play it cool and offered to send a car service to pick her up. She declined, but after another week of talking on the phone, she finally told me that the only way she would come to see me was if she drove her own car—I guess so she could escape if need be—and brought a friend. She lived a three-hour drive from Montgomery, and she didn’t know me that well, so whatever it took for me to see her again was fine with me. Her trip almost fell through at the last minute, though, when her friend had to back out. She was going to cancel, but thankfully another friend volunteered to step in.
OVERWHELMING CONVICTION
Two weeks after we met in Atlantic City, Rachael (and her friend) came to Montgomery. Two weeks later, Rachael came back by herself. Her visits increased in frequency to the point that she was driving back and forth a lot, staying at my house when she had a few days off work.
Rachael was hauling her travel bags on each trip, but then on one visit, the lady who cleaned my house hung Rachael’s clothes in my closet. That freaked Rachael out a little bit because it seemed pretty serious for her to have her own space in my closet. I was fine with it. In fact, if I could have had my way, she would have moved in with me full time.
According to Rachael—and I deny this in the strongest terms—I would hide her car keys so she couldn’t leave to go back home or to work. Now, I will admit that I would try to guilt her into staying or try to convince her that the snow was dangerous and she shouldn’t drive home until the roads were safer.
The way I tell the story, I finally succeeded in getting her fired from her job, which meant she could spend more time at my place. She kept coming to see me and then returning home, but by spring 2008, she had moved into my house.
Bike Week was an annual ten-day event in Daytona Beach that drew half a million bike enthusiasts. American Chopper was in the middle of its fifth season then, and the show was big. We had fun but long days selling Orange County Chopper merchandise, signing autographs, and talking bikes.
Rachael and I were relaxing inside a motor home. I was lying with my head on her lap when I looked up at her and told her, “I’m a Christian.” I don’t know if she knew that or not. Probably not, because I wasn’t living like one. Then I shared how I was feeling convicted about my whole life, basically.
“I miss going to church,” I told her. “Would you want to go to church?”
Rachael had attended church very little. Her mother had worked Sundays when Rachael was growing up. But her father was raised Catholic, so church was not like a foreign language to her. She said she was open to attending church with me.
After we got back home from Bike Week, we started going to church together, and that set us down a road that led toward really good things for us.
A couple of years later, Rachael and I were still attending church and still living together. That’s when God brought an awesome man named Michael Guido into our lives. Guido had an organization called PR Ministries; he was like a road pastor for people in the entertainment industry. Guido and his wife, Celeste, began mentoring Rachael and me. They would come up to visit and spend time getting to know us. They did not agree with us living together, but they didn’t judge us.
During a crazy busy time for me, Guido called and asked me to spend a weekend with him and Rick Marshall, a great guy who had directed crusades for Billy Graham.
After my father fired me from his company, Rachael and I had launched Paul Jr. Designs out of my house. We were extremely busy trying to get the company up and running while also doing design work. My friend Jack was visiting from out of town, and as Guido kept pushing me to go meet with him and Rick for the weekend, I kept telling him that Jack was in town, that I had too much work going on…blah, blah, blah. It was just a bad time for me to be taking a weekend off. Nothing about a weekend getaway made sense.
I still don’t know why, but at almost the last minute, I told Guido I’d go.
I had to drive more than three hours to Philadelphia to where Rick lived. Rachael was, and still is, my navigator. Without her, I got lost looking for the address and wound up in what had to be one of the worst parts of Philly. Some guy who recognized me came up to me and asked, “What are you doing here?!?”
“Dude, I’m lost,” I admitted.
“You must be lost,” he said. “Don’t get out of your car here.”
I called Rachael, and after finding out exactly where I was on a map, she stayed on the phone and talked me through every turn until I arrived.
Getting lost makes me pretty angry. I was upset about being lost and thinking about all the work that needed to be done at home, asking myself why I had even committed to this weekend. So when I showed up at Rick’s house, I wasn’t in the best mood.
Soon after we arrived, Rick said, “I think we should go into our rooms and just get quiet before God. And then we’ll come back and talk about what God is saying to each of us.”
So I went off to my room, and I felt a strong, almost overwhelming, conviction about living with Rachael. There was no doubt in my heart or mind that what we were doing was wrong, that we could not continue living together, and that I had a decision to make.
After our time alone, the three of us gathered, and I shared with Guido and Rick what I sensed God telling me. Up until then, I had been unwilling to make a serious commitment to Rachael. I came from a messed-up home, and I did not want my future kids dealing with a divorce. I had determined that I would not marry until I was 1,000 percent sure I had found the right woman. I knew that I would rather remain single my entire life rather than rush into a marriage that wouldn’t last.
I told Guido and Rick that if I were married to Rachael and anything tragic happened to me, like I was badly burned in a fire or something like that, she would take care of me for the rest of my life. In that moment, I knew that Rachael was the one.
But first, she needed to move out. I could not expect God to bless our relationship, to bless what I anticipated would become our marriage, if
we continued to live together after I had been convicted that it was wrong. I knew that was the correct decision for us, but I did not know how I would bring it up with Rachael.
I told God, If You want her to move out, You’ll have to tell her Yourself.
That was my cowardly way of handling the situation. I didn’t want to tell her to move out; I wanted her to reach the same conclusion on her own. So I went back home and didn’t say anything about my decision. But that conviction stayed heavy on me.
HONORING GOD AS A COUPLE
What I didn’t know then was that Rachael had been having similar thoughts for a few weeks. Her feelings were strong enough that she had told her mother and some friends that she believed she needed to move out.
A couple of weeks after my time away with Guido and Rick, Rachael and I were lying in bed. She turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “I have to move out.”
Perhaps too quickly, I answered, “Okay.”
So then I had to explain to Rachael why I so readily agreed with her.
We found her an apartment in town and, of course, her moving out set off a firestorm of speculation and questions from her family and friends. She had to work to shoot down the natural assumptions that something was wrong between us. In her parents’ minds, our relationship appeared to be ending, so they wanted her to move back home instead of staying in Montgomery.
When Rachael moved out, we committed to abstaining from sex. We wanted to honor God and each other in our relationship, and we viewed abstaining from sex as a way to get back a portion of what we had given up by living together.
That meant separate rooms when we traveled together. Coleman had become a major client for Paul Jr. Designs, and because Rachael and I ran my company together, we had been traveling to various events for Coleman. We told Coleman that we would require two hotel rooms instead of one for future travel. That surprised them, but they agreed to the additional expense.
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