A Missouri lawyer has been accused of posting naked photos of a Virginia prosecutor to Twitter after they broke up.
Denise Lunsford, the elected prosecutor for Albermarle County, has filed for a retraining order against David Cosgrove, claiming that the St Louis lawyer harassed her after they split in August.
Lunsford, who has been in a lengthy relationship with another man despite her illicit meetings with Cosgrove over an 11-month period, claimed she did not even know the images had been taken.
Cosgrove has countered that she not only knew the photographs had been taken, but she even went through the pictures to delete the most unflattering and keep the best ones.
She has asked that Cosgrove be required to stay away from her, stop communicating with her and stop posting her image or name on social media. A hearing is scheduled for October 3.
In her complaint, Lunsford said she and Cosgrove dated in the late 1980s while attending Washington & Lee School of Law and rekindled the relationship last September.
After the relationship began again, they had a dozen romantic rendezvous in various cities including Louisville, Lexington, Washington, D.C., and on Captiva Island, Florida.
NBC 29 reported that the meetings came even though she is in a ‘longstanding relationship’ with another man in Virginia. The couple is not married.
Lunsford said that when the most recent relationship ended, Cosgrove posted naked photos of her on his Twitter account, which have since been removed. They were not included in court documents.
Lunsford, 49, said she was unaware that most of the photos had been taken.
She added that Cosgrove phoned, texted and emailed her so much after their relationship ended that she had to change her phone number.
Her St. Louis County attorney, Susan Roach, said he also started posting other disturbing images such as one of a bloodied female figure.
‘I can’t think of anything too much more unsettling,’ Roach said. ‘I think it’s very disturbing.’
Neither Cosgrove nor his attorney, Michael Downey, responded to phone messages left Wednesday seeking comment. But in his response to the Lunsford’s filing, Cosgrove called the allegations baseless and said he would seek sanctions against her and Roach.
Cosgrove said in his response that Lunsford knew he took the naked and semi-naked photos of her that he posted online and even went through the images to delete the most unflattering ones.
He accuses Lunsford of abusing the protective order process by trying to use it to punish him and to protect her political ambitions.
The documents from Cosgrove also accuse his former flame of continuing a friendship with former Albemarle County supervisor Chris Dumler after he’d been charged with forcible sodomy.
He claims that Lunsford even invited Dumler and his girlfriend to her home, where they watched an R-rated movie with Lunsford and her children – calling into question her professional ethics, he said.
Cosgrove was once former Governor Bob Holden’s chief legal counsel.
He was also an assistant attorney general in Missouri from 1993 to 1999, then worked for three years as chief consumer protection prosecutor for the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, according to his law firm’s website.
Lunsford was elected Albemarle County Commonwealth’s attorney in 2007 and re-elected in 2011. The county, which includes Charlottsville, is about 115 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.
