NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A state trooper has been fired over allegations that he disregarded a drug possession charge in exchange for oral sex from a Knoxville porn star, the Tennessee Highway Patrol announced Thursday.
James Randy Moss, 40, was suspended over the allegations earlier this week while the THP investigated the claims from the woman, who goes by the stage name Barbie Cummings.
The state is considering criminal charges against Moss related to her claims that he threw away her bottle of prescription pills before their encounter.
The trooper was sent a letter of termination but has the option of requesting a due-process hearing before he is officially dismissed, Department of Safety spokesman Mike Browning said Thursday.
Moss has not indicated whether he would contest his firing and did not immediately return a message left at his home Thursday evening.
Safety Commissioner David Mitchell has said the department would aggressively pursue charges of destroying evidence. Results of the department's ongoing internal investigation will be turned over to the local prosecutor for consideration, Browning said.
The department received an internal complaint about the allegations that were described on a blog kept by Cummings. The blog has been temporarily moved to another Web address and it does not currently carry a full description of the tryst.
According to the citation issued by Moss, he stopped the woman's pink Honda Accord for speeding outside Nashville on May 7, according to the citation that identifies Cummings by her legal name, Justis Richert, 21.
Cummings wrote on her blog that when the officer, whom she does not name, asked her if she had drugs in the car, she admitted to having some "happy pills."
"I sometimes have these pills as I may take one or two before going to a club," Cummings wrote in an entry dated May 7. "It was a small amount of pills, nothing major."
Moss' citation does not mention finding any illegal narcotics in the car.
When the officer told her a drug charge would mean she could not leave the state, Cummings replied that would be a problem because she frequently travels from Tennessee to Los Angeles for her work.
"I tell him I make dirty movies," Cummings wrote. "He says he wished he had gotten into that industry."
The pair then watched sex videos from her Web site using Moss' laptop computer in his patrol car, she wrote. He took the pills and scattered them in the brush beside the highway.
"Then he asks me, what does it cost for someone like me to get anything like you," she wrote.
She describes performing oral sex on the officer outside his car in a secluded area. Photos that appear to be video stills she said he took during the incident and posted on her blog show her face but nothing that identifies the man as a trooper.
Cummings did not return e-mails and phone calls from The Associated Press seeking comment this week, but told her story in a video interview with The Knoxville News Sentinel.
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