Firm that accused ex-Mercy executive of bribery and extortion sues the health system (2024)

CHESTERFIELD — A construction company based in Springfield, Missouri, is accusing Mercy Health of retaliation after the company reported allegations of bribery, extortion and sexual assault involving a former top executive of the Catholic health care system.

In a lawsuit filed in Greene County, Pitt Development Group says Mercy stopped working with it in April 2022, a few months after Pitt’s leaders told Mercy’s chief financial officer and others about allegations involving Donn Sorensen, who left as Mercy’s executive vice president of operations in December 2021.

Pitt Development Group claims Mercy launched an internal investigation, and other court filings indicate Mercy reached a confidential settlement with a woman involved in the allegations after she was contacted by the hospital’s investigators in December 2021.

Sorensen quietly left Chesterfield-based Mercy in December 2021, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed, leaving behind a chief role at the tax-exempt hospital chain that had paid him over $4.5 million the prior year, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Pitt Development Group — owned by actor Brad Pitt’s brother — and Mercy have been feuding for two years, but the lawsuit’s allegations about Sorensen elevate the litigation into something far more salacious than a construction contract dispute.

Mercy hasn’t directly responded to the allegations in court filings, but its lawyer, former federal prosecutor Thomas Rea of Thompson Coburn, has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit for failure to state a claim.

The hospital system doesn’t deny that Sorensen and another top development official, John Farnen, left Mercy.

“While Mercy does not comment on personnel issues or comment on pending litigation, we can confirm both Donn Sorensen and John Farnen have not been employed by Mercy since December 2021,” Mercy spokeswoman Bethany Pope said in an email. “We will always vigorously defend and safeguard Mercy’s excellent reputation and uphold our long-standing commitment to sound business practices.”

Reached by phone briefly Wednesday, Sorensen said he wasn’t a party to the lawsuit between Pitt Development Group and Mercy. He said “the time will come” when he will tell his side of things but didn’t respond to follow-up requests for an interview.

Sorensen was a regular on the local philanthropic gala circuit, appearing with St. Louis sports legends while serving as one of the public faces of the multibillion-dollar health system founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1871.

It was Sorensen who brought on Pitt Development Group to build out more than a dozen Mercy clinics from St. Louis to Springfield, the southwest Missouri city where he got his start in the system and, according to media reports, became friends with Doug Pitt, the actor’s brother. Pitt, who ran a technology business in Springfield, only incorporated Pitt Development Group in 2015, after Sorensen brought him on to scout land and begin building the Mercy clinics in 2014.

While Pitt’s family had some experience in development — his father built the subdivision he lives in — the new firm was focused on Mercy work. Pitt brought on homebuilder and developer Brian Hayes, the former mayor of the Springfield suburb of Nixa, as general manager. Pitt told the Springfield Business Journal in 2018 his new development firm exclusively did medical offices and that it wasn’t taking on new clients so it could focus on its Mercy projects.

‘Disturbing’ connection

But by late 2021, Pitt Development Group says its employees discovered a “disturbing” connection between Sorensen and an architect who used to live in St. Louis, Steve Warlick.

It started, according to Pitt Development Group’s lawsuit, when Sorensen and Farnen, Mercy’s vice president of planning design and construction, told the company in late 2021 to pay Warlick $65,000 in order to continue its agreement to build clinics for Mercy. Pitt, however, was already using another architect on the Mercy clinics.

“When PDG advised it had no need for Warlick’s services, Sorensen told PDG to consider the payment ‘social capital,’” the builder’s lawsuit says. “PDG became concerned about Sorensen and Warlick’s reasons for wanting Warlick paid despite him doing no work. PDG then discovered a disturbing connection between Sorensen and Warlick that related to business dealings, personal dealings and the sexual exploitation of women.”

The lawsuit is sparse on other details. Pitt Development's report to Mercy executives included allegations of “potential bribery, extortion and sexual assault of women, including those below the age of 18," according to the suit.

But it says that after the company informed Mercy Chief Financial Officer Cheryl Matejka and the hospital’s former Vice President of Financial Planning Brian Day about “Sorensen’s conduct,” Mercy opened an internal investigation into Sorensen. Following the December 2021 investigation, Sorensen and Farnen left the hospital system, Pitt Development Group’s lawsuit says.

Farnen, who worked for Kwame Building Group for a year after leaving Mercy and now lives in Florida, acknowledged he had heard about Pitt Development Group’s allegations but denied asking Pitt to pay Warlick.

“Honestly, I don’t remember anything about that, and I haven’t heard about that,” Farnen said. “I really have no idea what they’re talking about.”

Asked if he left Mercy on good terms, he replied, “Yes, and I really don’t have anything else to say” before ending the phone call.

Mercy did open an internal investigation in late 2021, according to other court documents reviewed by the Post-Dispatch, and Mercy reached a confidential settlement with a woman involved in the conduct alleged by Pitt Development Group. The Post-Dispatch is not identifying her because of the allegations of sexual exploitation. She declined to comment.

Mercy did not answer questions about why it entered into a settlement with the woman or why Sorensen and Farnen left.

Warlick, in a statement, denied the allegations.

“I was never brought in for questioning in Mercy’s internal investigation and only became aware of these allegations against me after filing a lawsuit for defamation in October 2023,” he said. “I categorically deny any allegations as to wrongdoing of business dealings, personal dealings and/or sexual exploitation of women.”

Warlick’s lawsuit is against the woman who reached the settlement with Mercy. The two were in a relationship, according to the court filings, and it says her allegations of domestic abuse “were utterly and completely false without one scintilla of truth.”

The suit says she has made “malicious” and false allegations “to third parties” that he subjected her to “sex trafficking” and that her claims and an order of protection she filed were made in an attempt to interfere with Warlick’s business relationship with Mercy and take some of the hospital’s business for herself.

The two filed orders of protection against each other in early 2020 but dismissed them later that year.

Warlick, in a statement, said that he had become aware of his own “disturbing connection between Pitt Development Group and Sorensen” prior to Pitt Development’s “whistleblowing.”

Construction dispute

Pitt Development Group’s lawsuit was filed in the wake of an ongoing dispute with Mercy over the construction of one of its clinics. The Springfield builder had already filed one lawsuit in November, shortly after Warlick’s defamation suit, accusing Mercy of stiffing the firm on more than $2 million in payments for a clinic in Oklahoma.

Mercy has countered that Pitt Development Group had blown its February 2022 deadline to finish the project by almost a year, and the construction project was plagued with problems.

The underlying dispute involved Mercy’s push, when Sorensen and Farnen were still leading the development project, to significantly bring down costs on its small clinics, according to legal filings and a person familiar with the matter. Mercy pushed Pitt Development Group to develop a prototype for such clinics. But problems arose with the project due to the push for what court filings say was a new “cost-effective” clinic design. But once Sorensen and Farnen left, new management didn’t agree with the cheaper cost and butted heads with Pitt Development Group.

Mercy used a construction firm that was a Pitt competitor to find problems with construction and then sought to void its agreements with Pitt, the company says in court filings.

An attorney for Pitt Development Group did not respond to a request for comment.