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State treasurer's saga takes odd twist with email about supplying drugs
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SACRAMENTO  (AP) — A personal drama involving state Treasurer Bill Lockyer took a strange turn this week after a newspaper received an email from his wife's account that said Lockyer had supplied her with drugs.

A spokesman for the treasurer's office said Lockyer, a former attorney general, denies the allegation. His wife, Nadia Lockyer, told the San Jose Mercury News that her email account had been hacked.

"The claim that he supplied Nadia drugs is 100 percent false," the treasurer's spokesman, Tom Dresslar, said Friday. "Whoever wrote the email is not telling the truth about Bill Lockyer."

The email is the latest twist in a months-long family drama. Nadia Lockyer returned to work as an Alameda County supervisor last month after undergoing treatment for a chemical dependency and injuries she suffered in an alleged assault by an ex-boyfriend in a hotel room.

The state attorney general is investigating the assault allegation and declined to comment about the case Friday.

The email arrived in the reporter's inbox Wednesday. It referred to the ex-boyfriend and how the Lockyers' 8-year-old son is suffering because of the public attention given to the case. It continued, "Bill bought and gave me drugs years before meeting (the boyfriend), then called me crazy when I sought help."

The email ended by saying, "I simply can't bear this any longer. Goodbye to everyone." That prompted the newspaper to call police out of concern for Nadia Lockyer's safety.

Police in the eastern San Francisco Bay area city of Hayward, where the couple lives, went to the home and found that she was fine.

Nadia Lockyer later told a reporter for the Bay Area News Group that she never intended to harm herself but had planned to leave town to get away from her former lover. She told the reporter that she had written part of the email, but that the portion accusing her husband had been added by someone else.

The attorney representing the ex-boyfriend denied Friday that her client assaulted Nadia Lockyer and that he had somehow hacked into her email.

Attorney Adrienne Dell, of San Jose, said her client, Steve Chikhani, has been in a residential treatment facility for nearly two months and has only limited, supervised access to telephones and computers.

Bill Lockyer, a 70-year-old Democrat and former state lawmaker, is serving his second term as treasurer after two terms as attorney general. Nadia Lockyer, 40, did not return telephone messages left at her Hayward and Oakland offices Friday.

The state attorney general's office would not comment about the latest development. Spokeswoman Lynda Gledhill said the original investigation into the alleged Feb. 3 assault at a hotel in the Bay area city of Newark remains ongoing.

The Alameda County district attorney's office asked the attorney general to handle the investigation because Nadia Lockyer once worked for an agency connected to the district attorney's office.