Like father like son? Jamiel Terry made a lot of gay friends when he came out two years ago and vowed to do battle with his famously antigay father. But Jamiel's plans went nowhere, and his friends claim they were just being used.

Regan DuCasse first met Jamiel Terry shortly after Terry came out, making national headlines as the son of notorious homophobe and antiabortion activist Randall Terry. She had sent him a note of support after reading a gripping online account of his decision to write the 2004 article in Out magazine.

The two hit it off in an intense correspondence. DuCasse, a 48-year-old published writer and dedicated activist, was intrigued by Terry's plans to start a political action committee to do battle against his adoptive father, who had just disowned him. Jamiel found in DuCasse a nurturing supporter willing to help his cause. "We had marathon conversations--plans for working together as a team of activists, articulating the goals, and how to deal with his father's political ambitions," DuCasse says.

But those plans didn't turn out as hoped. DuCasse filed criminal charges against Terry in August and is now claiming that he is not all that different from the antigay father who rejected him. And Terry says he is the victim of a meaningless vendetta.

Late last December, DuCasse says, she invited Jamiel Terry to visit her Los Angeles home, where he stayed off and on for the next seven months, putting together plans to defeat his father--who was running for a Florida state senate seat--and other antigay candidates. She claims she supported Terry, loaned him money, and added him to her cell phone account in support of their political activities. Her friend Michael Coulombe also became acquainted with Terry and joined in planning for the PAC, which Terry dubbed the Equality Fund and said would be financed with funds he had secured, quoting amounts as high as $300,000, from philanthropic sources.

Terry appointed DuCasse the PAC's treasurer and had Coulombe and his boyfriend, Jorge Moreno, sign the Federal Election Commission application for the committee. Terry and Coulombe, a 31-year-old poet, playwright, and screenwriter, also spoke of launching a media production company together.

DuCasse introduced Terry to the many activists and groups she had worked with, such as the Matthew Shepard Foundation. All were impressed by the articulate, charming 26-year-old with cocoa skin, a chic shaved head, and a lower lip stud. They sympathized with his hard-knocks life--Terry was born in jail to a mother Randall Terry says was a prostitute--and they were inspired by his devotion to a cause so antithetical to his ultraconservative upbringing.

But DuCasse and others began to wonder about Terry's promise of money. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in PAC financing, Terry also pledged $150,000 to produce a lesbian-themed film by screenwriter Michael Buttiglieri. DuCasse and Coulombe generally accepted Terry's assurances that the money was simply held up because he needed to open a local bank account to deposit his checks, since many were in large sums. Terry had, after all, become a darling of the media and of gays and lesbians, with interview requests from major newspapers and networks. And he had been offered paid speaking engagements all over the country.

Terry left Los Angeles in July for what he said would be a short visit to friends on the East Coast. DuCasse alleges she soon received a credit card bill with several charges she hadn't made, and she found the cell phone she'd given Terry had racked up hundreds of dollars worth of calls. Terry says he had opened an account with cards in both their names for Equality Fund expenses, but DuCasse denies that this ever happened, claiming that he had made unauthorized charges to her personal account.

DuCasse also grew concerned when she got a call from Buttiglieri asking for the $150,000 check. Buttiglieri said that his writer and director had flown out from New York City to discuss the deal, that he thought the costs would be compensated, and that Terry had told him DuCasse was his "financial manager."

Then Coulombe received a letter from the FEC warning that the application he had signed was incomplete and that he could be subject to an audit. "I was freaked out," he says. "I didn't realize he had actually filed the papers."

When DuCasse's August statement showed more unauthorized credit card charges, bringing that total to over $2,000, she started to get frantic, she says. But she was reluctant to take action. "I thought Jamiel was a friend," she says. "He made me feel like we were a team and that a lot of good work could have been done."

It was a call from Washington, D.C., that finally sent DuCasse to the police. A friend with whom Terry was staying, Erik Powell, called to tell DuCasse he'd seen Terry trying to cash a check from her account for $500 with what appeared to be her forged signature. He told her that Terry was also checking the balance on her credit card. Though he had never met DuCasse, Powell says he was growing concerned about Terry. "Hotels Jamiel's stayed in are holding his luggage hostage from coast to coast" for unpaid debts, Powell claims, so he decided DuCasse needed to be warned.

Michael McPherson, a Los Angeles police department detective, confirms that DuCasse has filed a complaint but says he can't comment on an ongoing investigation.

Terry flatly denies he stole any checks from DuCasse. In an interview with The Advocate on September 18, he admitted he didn't immediately respond to all her calls about the credit charges. But he says that was because he believed they were for only a few small items that were charged on the Equality Fund card that he had issued her.

Terry also dismisses Buttiglieri's charges of false promises on the film deal. "That's absolutely ridiculous," he says. "We had no legal agreement. We had no signed agreement. We had no nothing." When asked about the $150,000 check, Terry claims he did send it (though, he says, from his own funds and not the Equality Fund account) but that it was returned to him by the postal service because he accidentally sent it to the wrong address. He didn't resend it, he says, because "I thought he was scamming me."

Plans for the PAC were genuine, says Terry, who blames Coulombe for the incomplete application. He also says there was never a question of any audit, since there was no money in the PAC. His accusers in California are just angry, he says, because he did not return to them. "None of this would be happening if I were still [in Los Angeles]," he says.

Realizing he had been unhappy there, Terry says he decided to accept a job in D.C. as an organizer for the liberal political group MoveOn, recruiting phone bank workers in advance of the November 7 election. He says he often didn't return calls from California because he was so busy.

Terry's accusers deny they have a personal vendetta against him, but they do admit his political profile prompted them to go public with their charges. "I don't want to see him suffer, but I want him to stop. He did so much damage in the few months we knew him," says Coulombe.

DuCasse says she now sees a parallel between Terry and his father. "Randall Terry has the ability to work people up, but he doesn't really do anything," she says. "He makes them feel like they're doing something with their donations, but they're not."

Cook is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.