A sex tape, blackmail and Waffle House. This bizarre court case is nearing its end.

The high-profile lawsuit between a former Waffle House CEO and his former housekeeper reached a new height Monday as arguments for the case began in the Georgia Supreme Court.

The saga has lasted more than five years and amassed a prodigious amount of litigation along the way.

The lawsuit comes from a woman who worked as a housekeeper and personal assistant for Joe Rogers Jr., a former CEO of the Waffle House franchise. His father was a co-founder of the franchise and also a former CEO.

According to the state, the woman and Rogers became engaged in sexual activity. Rogers claims that the relationship was consensual, but the woman says that she was a victim of harassment.

In 2012, the woman hired two attorneys to represent her in a sexual harassment lawsuit she intended to bring against Rogers. The attorneys met with private investigators and talked with them about making a possible covert video of Rogers having sex with the woman to use against him in court.

The investigators told the attorneys that this would be illegal, but helped them purchase a “spy camera” anyway.

On June 20, 2012, the woman allegedly used the camera to film Rogers during a sexual encounter the two had in his bedroom. She turned over the recording to a private investigator, who then gave the footage to her attorneys. The woman quit her job soon after.

About a month later, one of her lawyers sent a letter to Rogers on her behalf threatening an imminent lawsuit, stating that Rogers had engaged in “a long history of unwelcome sexual demands...and abuse” that was documented by “numerous” video and audio recordings.

But the letter included a curious addendum.

The layer encouraged Rogers to settle with the woman for what Rogers’s lawyers called “exorbitant sums” rather than go to court.

“I have been involved in numerous matters where defendants engaged in a scorched earth strategy of counter-accusations, denial, attempted delay, obfuscation and refusal to address the core issues promptly and properly. Never have I seen that strategy successful,” the attorney wrote in the letter.

Rogers sued the woman in Cobb County, and the woman sued Rogers back, making good on the threat. After years of litigation, a grand jury eventually indicted the woman and her lawyers on charges of extortion, conspiracy to commit unlawful surveillance, and unlawful surveillance.

In other words, Rogers argues that his relationship with the woman had always been consensual, and that at some point, she decided to videotape their affair and then blackmail him with it. It wasn’t about harassment, Rogers says — the woman (and her lawyers) just wanted money. The woman and her lawyers, of course, dispute that.

The indictment was eventually thrown out, but the state appealed, pushing this contentious case up to the Georgia Supreme Court.

Now the defense argues that merely to threaten a lawsuit does not count as extortion, but as free speech. The defense also argues that “a person engaged in an extramarital relationship loses his right to privacy as to the extramarital conduct.”

The state says that neither of these is true, and that the details of the case fit into the narrow exceptions to free speech that are prosecutable.

This story was originally published June 27, 2017 at 10:06 AM with the headline "A sex tape, blackmail and Waffle House. This bizarre court case is nearing its end.."