“You have the manners of a field hand,” she said to one offender, according to Forbes. She told a bullying male colleague: “I know you have a wife, niece, daughter. I hope when she is out there trying to make a living no one treats her as badly.”
Help Group
She was an early backer of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, a New York-based organization focusing on educational events, professional networking andphilanthropy.
In 2005, Hennessee Group clients lost most of the more than $56 million they had invested in the hedge fund Bayou Management before it collapsed, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The advisory firm in 2009 forfeited more than $800,000 to settle regulatory claims filed by the SEC for failure to perform adequate due diligence before steering clients to Bayou.
Hennessee Group’s advisory business was acquired by New York-based Terrapin Asset Management in 2013.
Elizabeth Lee Hennessee was born Sept. 1, 1952, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Mary Frances Dillon and William E. Hennessee, according to her 1992 wedding announcement in the New York Times. Her father was an executive with Dillon Supply Co. The business, which supplied tools and industrial material, was owned by her grandfather and took up six city blocks, according to the Forbes profile.
Hennessee graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, today’s Randolph College, in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1975.
Early Career
After a year working as a teacher, she got her start in the securities business in 1976 as a retail and institutional sales representative at Thomson McKinnon Securities in New York. She teamed with a more senior female colleague to run seminars on finance for women.
Hennessee served as a finance chair for the 1999 presidential campaign of Elizabeth Dole, a family friend from North Carolina. She also helped Billy Graham, another family acquaintance, organize his 2005 crusade in New York.