There's dumb. There's really dumb. And then there's Verrill Dana LLP.

The once-prestigious Portland law firm lost much of its hard-earned luster this week when it acknowledged, under duress, that its investigation showed that former partner John Duncan for years had pilfered tens of thousands of dollars from his clients and from the firm.

That, in itself, looks bad. But what well may look worse in the long run is how the firm handled the scandal -- starting with its treatment of Ellie Rommel, Duncan's secretary-turned-whistleblower.

"My mother raised me to tell the truth. I raised my kids to tell the truth," Rommel said Thursday. "So what choice do I have but to tell the truth?"

Her story will be told in painstaking detail in the coming months -- first to the Maine Human Rights Commission and then (unless Verrill Dana comes to its senses and settles) in civil court.

It boils down to this: Last May, after months of peeking into files to confirm her suspicions that Duncan was stealing from an elderly client who'd entrusted her sizeable assets to him, Rommel gave two weeks' notice, handed the evidence of Duncan's skullduggery to her higher-ups and decided to run, not walk, away from Verrill Dana.

But then, after meeting with a therapist who told her to keep the job and go on short-term disability leave to deal with her perpetual anxiety attack, Rommel sat down with managing partner David Warren and said she wanted to rescind her resignation.

"(Warren) said, 'Can't let you do that,'" Rommel recalled.

Why? Because Rommel, who had previously told the firm's human resources department that she was leaving for non-work-related reasons, would now have to tell them the whole sordid story -- a story very few people at the firm knew about at that point.

"(Warren) told me, 'I don't want anybody else to know about this until I've had a chance to investigate it,' " she said.

(In an interview later Thursday, Verrill Dana spokesman Gregg Ginn said Rommel's claim that she asked to take back her resignation "is not at all consistent with my recollection of the facts." Warren's three objectives in meeting with her, Ginn said, were to tell her the firm was looking into her allegations, to promise that someone would get back to her and to "thank her for bringing this to the firm's attention.")

A month later, Rommel said, Verrill Dana counsel Gergory Foster called to tell her she'd been right about Duncan and could keep her job after all.

And what about Duncan? Rommel said she was told the executive committee had declared the whole mess an "internal matter" and voted unanimously to keep him on after he returned the $77,500 he'd taken from the client. (The elderly woman, never the wiser, had passed away last January.)

Rommel said she was dumbstruck that Duncan had kept his job. She went on a previously scheduled vacation and, upon returning in August, was summoned to meet once again with Warren. She said he offered her four weeks' back pay and again invited her back to work.

"I said to him, 'What happens if I'm in the elevator and the door opens and John (Duncan) walks in?'" she said. "And (Warren) said, 'Well, you'll be embarrassed for awhile, but you'll get used to it.'"

Rommel, who six years earlier had pinched herself at the mere thought of working for one of Maine's largest law firms, couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"I said, 'Me be embarrassed? What about John?'" she said. "I was astounded."

She hasn't set foot inside Verrill Dana since that day. And only when she hired Portland attorney Dan Lilley did all hell finally break loose.

In October, Lilley sent a letter to Verrill Dana asking that they preserve all e-mails, records and other evidence in anticipation of legal action against the firm by Rommel. Suddenly, the "internal matter" became the focus of in-depth audits and investigations by two outside law firms and an accounting firm.

Last month, in a letter...