Fight over a Cowles fortune includes claims of sexual abuse and financial exploitation

Fifteen years after Russell Cowles II paid $1.5 million for allegedly sexually abusing his daughter as a child, she turned to him for help.

The daughter, Gretchen “Greta” Hentsch-Cowles, was going through a divorce and needed $270,000 to buy out her husband’s half interest in their Texas home. Her father, an heir to the Cowles family fortune, jumped at the chance to reconcile with his estranged daughter and his four grandchildren in 2019, court records say.

Cowles left the financial details to his adviser, Justin Stone, a member of a special unit at U.S. Bank that helps manage the finances of wealthy Americans.

The reconciliation collapsed four years later and spiraled into a complex and lurid legal fight pitting members of a wealthy family with deep Minnesota roots against the state’s largest bank and one of its former employees.

At the center of the dispute is the relationship between Stone and Hentsch-Cowles. In court filings, Cowles accused his former adviser of betraying his trust after becoming romantically involved with his daughter.

Hentsch-Cowles sees it differently. In a recent court filing and police reports, she accused Stone of sexually assaulting her in his hotel room in 2019, just hours after their first face-to-face meeting in Minneapolis. She claims he later texted her about 1,000 pornographic images and videos, and sexually assaulted her again in 2022.

Stone, through his attorney, denied those allegations. He has not been criminally charged or disciplined by state or federal regulators.

Attorneys who specialize in misconduct cases involving financial advisers say there are no rules that specifically bar advisers from having sex with a client, but they said such conduct could violate their obligation to act in a client’s best interest. They note that allegations over such conduct are extremely rare.

“Brokers generally know better than to get romantically involved with their clients,” said Adam Gana, president of Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, a national trade group that promotes stronger consumer protections.

Gana, who has represented more than 3,000 investors over two decades, said just one of those cases involved a client who became personally involved with her adviser. He said he’s never heard of anything similar to the allegations against Stone, who was a registered securities broker until 2019.

“That’s horrific,” Gana said.

Every party sued in the contentious court cases declined requests for comment after receiving a summary of the Minnesota Star Tribune’s reporting. After Stone briefly spoke to a reporter in May, his lawyers sought approval to seal court documents, saying dissemination of the “salacious and unsubstantiated” information would cause “irreparable harm.” (The request was still pending when this story was published.)

“We dispute her allegations,” Stone’s attorney Allison Christensen said of Hentsch-Cowles’ claims. “We will vigorously — and I believe successfully — defend against them.“

Stone voluntarily resigned from U.S. Bank in 2022, court records show. Until recently he was a partner at Canopy Partners, an independent financial advisory firm based in Cincinnati. The firm’s managing partner said Stone no longer worked there, and declined to comment further.

A U.S. Bank spokesman said the company was unaware of a possible relationship between Stone and a U.S. Bank customer until the issue was raised in court.

U.S. Bank’s code of ethics did not specifically bar employees from having a personal relationship with a client during Stone’s time there. But it did require employees to protect clients from “abusive” practices and prohibit them from approving transactions for any client “with whom you have a significant personal relationship.” Employees could be fired for violating the company’s ethics rules.

The spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Russell Cowles is the son of former Star Tribune publisher and owner John Cowles Sr., who built a media empire in Minneapolis. The family raised millions of dollars for local causes and was credited with helping the Twin Cities land an NFL team, a baseball stadium and the Guthrie Theater.

In 1998, the Cowles family sold the Star Tribune and other media properties to McClatchy Newspapers for $1.4 billion, at the time one of highest prices ever paid for a company whose primary assets were newspapers.

As a young man, Russell Cowles worked briefly for his family’s newspapers in Florida and Minnesota before opening an art gallery in Minneapolis. He depended heavily on his family for financial support, telling his father in a 1973 letter — part of a special collection in Drake University’s archive — that his parents’ wealth “has resulted in my being able to live where I want to, comfortably and happily free of day-to-day routine.”

“He did not distinguish himself like Junior and to a large degree dedicated his time and resources simply to himself,” Hentsch-Cowles said in a 2024 court filing, referring to Russell’s brother John Cowles Jr., who also served as publisher of the Star Tribune.

Hentsch-Cowles is one of four daughters. In a 2002 lawsuit filed in Hennepin County, she alleged that Russell Cowles sexually abused her at their Minneapolis home from 1973 to 1978, starting when she was 2. She said she did not recall the events until she underwent therapy in 2001, court records show.

Cowles denied the allegations, claiming in legal filings that his daughter was “the victim of an unqualified, untrained ‘intuitive healer’ who convinced her through inappropriate conduct that she was the victim of sexual abuse by her father.”

Yet an arbitrator in 2004 agreed Hentsch-Cowles had been sexually molested by her father and awarded her $1.5 million in damages, legal records obtained by the Star Tribune show.

Cowles and Hentsch-Cowles went years without speaking. In 2019, she tried patching things up with her father after divorce left her with custody of her four children and a $270,000 debt to her ex-husband.

Court records show Cowles agreed to lend her the $270,000, leaving key details of the arrangement to Stone.

During his decade at U.S. Bank, Stone worked in Ohio as part of its wealth management arm Ascent, a service reserved for clients with a net worth of at least $75 million. Stone joined the bank in 2012, one of the first hired in a newly opened Cincinnati office that would ultimately handle a few dozen families with billions of dollars invested, court records show.

In addition to Russell Cowles, Stone became an adviser to at least five other members of the wealthy family through Ascent’s Midwest branch office in Cincinnati.

Some of those family members transferred assets in 2023 to Canopy Partners, Stone’s former firm, according to a lawsuit U.S. Bank filed against Canopy. U.S. Bank has accused the firm of poaching top Ascent employees and customers; Canopy denies the allegations.

In 2019, Cowles arranged for Stone to meet Hentsch-Cowles at a family dinner in downtown Minneapolis, according to the police report she filed in 2024. She spoke to the police a year after her father sued her in federal court over the unpaid $270,000 loan.

Hentsch-Cowles said Stone suggested the two of them have a drink after dinner while discussing her financial situation.

Hentsch-Cowles agreed to the meeting, but she said she felt “off” after taking two sips of her drink. Unable to drive home, she said Stone suggested she come up to his room at the Westin Minneapolis hotel, where he undressed her and began sexually assaulting her, according to the police report. She said she was so “out of it” in his hotel room she couldn’t defend herself.

She said Stone sexually abused her again in the morning, then told her “he has never done anything like that and that he has a wife,” according to the report. She said Stone begged her not to say anything since that could be “detrimental to his job.”

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office reviewed her allegations but determined the case did not warrant prosecution because it was unclear whether Hentsch-Cowles was legally “mentally incapacitated” at the time. The report does not show whether police talked to Stone.

The Minneapolis police report indicates Hentsch-Cowles filed a second complaint against Stone with a police department in Texas over a 2022 incident in which she claimed she had been the victim of a “more aggressive sexual” assault after being manipulated into taking THC gummies. Texas authorities have declined to provide records relating to the case.

In her court filings, Hentsch-Cowles did not address her reasons for continuing her relationship with Stone after the alleged 2019 incident. Her lawsuit also includes screenshots of sexually explicit messages, including videos and images, that she alleges Stone sent while working as her adviser.

Reached by phone, Stone declined to comment. In court, he has not addressed the allegations of nonconsensual sexual intercourse and other misconduct Hentsch-Cowles raised in April. His attorney denied the allegations in an email.

In November 2019, about two months after the Westin hotel encounter, Hentsch-Cowles said Stone invited her to visit his office in Cincinnati, where his team reassured her they would be able to secure her financial future upon the death of her father, who is now 88. The family’s will stipulated inheritances would not be transferred to the next generation until Russell Cowles died, legal records show.

At Cowles’ suggestion, Stone also addressed her short-term financial needs. Besides arranging the $270,000 loan to Hentsch-Cowles, Stone drafted letters from Cowles to each of his four grandchildren — then aged 12 to 14 — promising money to cover private school tuition, health insurance and housing costs. Altogether, those pledges totaled about $875,000, according to court records.

“It means so much to me and is long overdue, and I am glad that we can look forward to creating a bright future together,” the letters each said. “I am ... thankful to have the resources to do so, and over time your mother and I will spend time with you to inform you of the source of the wealth and the values we hold in high regard with respect to the purpose of wealth in our family.”

In February 2021, while living in Spain with her children, Hentsch-Cowles said she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and began treatment. Her lawsuit said her father offered to cover her medical costs if she moved back to the U.S.

But things allegedly changed when Cowles married his fourth wife in 2021. Suddenly, his daughter said in court filings, Cowles did not want to live up to any of his financial commitments to Hentsch-Cowles and her children.

Court filings suggest Stone sympathized with Hentsch-Cowles, telling her in text messages that Cowles’ new wife “must be on the warpath for as much money as possible” and “[She] loves only the money.”

In 2023, Cowles — who now lives in a $5.8 million Florida mansion — sued Hentsch-Cowles in federal court, demanding the $270,000 he loaned to her in 2019.

Cowles, a beneficiary of a trust worth nearly $22 million in 2017, according to a financial statement in the court record, also said his other pledges of financial support to Hentsch-Cowles’ family in the letters Stone drafted were “gratuitous.” In court filings, he argued the letters to his grandchildren were “purely expressions of intent” and should not constitute “legally binding obligations.”

What began with a father suing his daughter over an unpaid loan has mushroomed into a complex legal fight involving U.S. Bank and Stone.

Soon after Cowles sued her, Hentsch-Cowles countersued him for nearly $2 million over his alleged failure to provide continued financial support to her and her children, plus damages for emotional distress. She also claims he is trying to spend down her inheritance at the expense of her family.

The father claims he was unaware of a sexual relationship between Hentsch-Cowles and Stone until he sued his daughter. He subsequently added U.S. Bank and Stone as defendants in the case.

U.S. Bank then sued Stone for any damages the bank incurs if it winds up owing family members for “Stone’s wrongful acts.”

And Stone is suing U.S. Bank, arguing any harm the family suffered is the bank’s fault and that his former employer should cover his legal costs.

Cowles alleges Stone conspired with his daughter to dupe him into providing financial support for her family. Hentsch-Cowles says Stone and U.S. Bank “were playing both sides” by failing to protect her from her father’s fickleness, and by trying to persuade her to move a “very significant” family trust to the bank.

Her filings include copies of texts Stone allegedly sent following their 2019 encounter. One sent in 2023 — when it became clear Cowles was going to sue his daughter — suggested the two “delete all of our text messages … just in case their is an investigation.”

Charles Field, a San Diego attorney who specializes in financial mismanagement cases, said the alleged conduct “breaches everything that I have ever known” about securities professionals.

“This,” Field said, “crossed the line in so many ways.”

Illustrations using court documents by Jake Lovett of the Minnesota Star Tribune.