In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a state-funded organization aimed at boosting biotech research in Maine gave a woman about $22,000 to work on a beauty supplement made from bison collagen.

But prosecutors say the Maine Technology Institute was scammed.

Linda Ellison was criminally charged in 2021, about a year after receiving the grant. She was ordered to appear in court last month for jury selection, ahead of her trial in early October.

She didn’t show up. Now, there is a warrant out for her arrest.

Ellison, who also uses the name Linda Edelin, was indicted in March 2021 on five counts of aggravated forgery and one count of theft — each is a Class B offense, carrying up to 10 years in prison. An attorney entered not guilty pleas on her behalf that June.

Prosecutors have accused her of stealing funding from the Maine Technology Institute by submitting several fake lab and banking documents to the institute, a publicly funded nonprofit created by the Legislature in 1999 to grow the state’s economy, in part by providing financing for science and tech-minded businesses. The state alleges she signed the documents using the names of real businesses and people.

Ellison, in an email to the Portland Press Herald, called the case against her a “civil contract dispute transformed into criminal prosecution” and said the institute demanded full repayment and rebuffed her request for a structured repayment plan.

The state has made a significant effort to prosecute Ellison — including taking a trip to Montana during a snowstorm to depose a witness — while the case has languished in Cumberland County Superior Court, which is still dealing with a backlog five years after having to pause and delay thousands of proceedings because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ellison, who court records indicate lives in California, has spent the last several years alternating between canceled trial dates and unsuccessful settlement conferences.

Records show she has cycled through four sets of Maine-based criminal defense attorneys that she hired, all of whom she now accuses of misconduct. She has requested permission from the court to represent herself.

In recent weeks, Ellison filed a slew of motions in court accusing her latest set of attorneys of colluding with prosecutors and asking for more time to mount her defense.

Last month, she asked a federal judge in California for a restraining order against the state of Maine, filing the request as Linda Edelin. The judge refused to immediately grant her request, but gave her additional time to argue her case. No further orders had been issued by the federal judge as of Monday.

In emails to the Press Herald and her court filings, she claims the state is charging a “fictitious person” and that her legal name is Dr. Linda Edelin. She is charged under the name Linda Ellison and court records show that, in 2020, she was referred to by that name in documents prosecutors say were sent to the Maine Technology Institute for her grant.

The Press Herald was unable to independently verify her legal name and is referring to her as Ellison because that’s the name the state uses in its criminal filing.

The Office of the Maine Attorney General declined to discuss the case.

A judge issued a warrant for Ellison’s arrest on Sept. 22. As of Monday, there was no mention in her court file of her being in custody and no new court dates had been set. The most recent court filings list her address as a United Parcel Service store in Santa Monica.

PROJECT QUESTIONED

It’s unclear how long Ellison, who obtained a doctorate in theology from Harvard Divinity School in 2008, had been living in Maine when she formed her company Ivy & Grace in early 2020. She registered the business under the name Linda Ellison Edelin and used a Portland apartment as her mailing address, according to the Department of the Secretary of State’s database. Prosecutors say she used the company to apply for the research grant.

Ellison told the Maine Technology Institute in February 2020 that it would cost roughly $44,000 to research the functionality of a product she was developing — buffalo collagen powder, according to court records. The product is referred to as being developed from bison in lab reports that prosecutors alleged Ellison forged and gave to the institute.

She submitted an estimate, featuring the logo of a lab in Ravalli, Montana, with a list of costs for nutritional and shelf-life testing, as well as what it would cost for another lab in Minnesota to conduct a third-party review.

The Montana lab purportedly agreed that it would dedicate bench space for Ellison’s research, under an agreement with Harvard University.

The institute agreed to give her grant money to cover half of the costs. According to her indictment, that happened on or about March 25, 2020.

Supplements and beverages infused with collagen — a protein that people produce less of as they age — have grown popular in recent years, claiming to improve skin and joint health. Scientists say research is limited on how well they work. The products are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

The Maine Technology Institute’s president, Brian Whitney, declined to comment on how the institute chose Ellison’s research proposal for funding. He said in an email that the institute has “zero tolerance for fraud.”

Within months of giving Ellison the grant, the institute began auditing her, although it’s unclear from court records why. An investment officer emailed the Montana lab about Ellison’s estimate on May 12, 2020.

“We would never dedicate our lab to one study only — and I have never heard anything about this,” the lab’s president, Kimberly Nuccio, replied, according to court records. “Not sure if this person/company has ever been a client of ours, ever.”

Nuccio said during a deposition in January this year that the lab doesn’t have the bench space to dedicate to private research. As of earlier this year, Nuccio said her lab only had five employees, who focused mostly on testing vitamin supplements, meat plants and well water for microorganisms and heavy metals.

“Does this look like a quote you would have prepared?” Assistant Attorney General Kendra Lychwala asked Nuccio, referring to Ellison’s estimate, according to a transcript of the deposition.

“Absolutely not,” Nuccio said.

Both a prosecutor and Ellison’s defense attorney, Thomas Hallett, had to depose Nuccio in person, in Montana, after a judge in Cumberland County declined to order that the lab president appear for questioning under oath in Maine. Nuccio had said she would suffer financial hardship if ordered to leave work. A judge also denied Ellison’s request that Maine pay for her and Hallett to travel to Montana.

The transcript indicates that Lychwala said a Zoom link of the deposition was available. Ellison did not attend. Hallett told the prosecutor Ellison hadn’t been made aware of the virtual option.

SHIFTING FOCUS

In an email to the Press Herald last week, Ellison said the COVID-19 pandemic caused her to pivot from researching bison collagen to focusing on preparing an immunity-building supplement for distribution.

Court documents, including the lab records Ellison allegedly sent to the institute, use both bison and buffalo in describing the product she said she was developing.

“In that crucible of crisis, pursuing a beauty supplement felt not merely frivolous, but unconscionable,” Ellison wrote in the email.

She wrote that when she didn’t deliver on the beauty supplement, the institute demanded full repayment, which she said she couldn’t afford. 

She retained Portland attorney Frederick Lipp, who sent the institute several letters in 2020 on her behalf. He also sent the institute documents, purportedly from a Minnesota lab and First Republic Bank, confirming that Ellison’s buffalo collagen research had been conducted and paid for, according to court records.

Prosecutors claim those documents were also forged.

Whitney, the institute’s president, said in an email that “the awardee circumvented MTI’s safeguards by producing forged documents that caused MTI to investigate further” and, as a result of the investigation, the grant was terminated.

“When the awardee refused to accept responsibility, MTI referred the matter to law enforcement,” Whitney wrote.

When asked about the state’s forgery allegations on Monday, Ellison said in an email that the accusations are “vigorously contested, remain unadjudicated and involve documents whose provenance and admissibility are under judicial review.”

She referred the Press Herald to her court filings, but none address the forgery allegations. In the filings, Ellison argues several reasons the charges should be dismissed. She accuses her attorneys of conspiring with prosecutors and pressuring her to plead guilty. She says she wasn’t properly served with a copy of her indictment in 2021 and that she should have been notified early that year of the grand jury proceeding that led to her charges.

She also argues that by refusing to refer to her as Dr. Edelin, prosecutors are engaging in “a pattern that diminishes professional status and constitutes discriminatory treatment under state and federal civil-rights protections.”

The prosecution has asked for permission to call Lipp as a witness at Ellison’s trial, alleging that she used the attorney to “conceal and advance her scheme,” according to court records. Representatives from the lab and bank are on the state’s witness list.

“The state’s evidence in this case,” the attorney general’s office wrote in a court filing in March 2024, “shows that Ms. Ellison’s conduct was fraudulent from the beginning.”