OS ANGELES - Ezola Foster, Pat Buchanan's running mate on the Reform Party ticket, collected workers' compensation payments for a year for a mental disorder she now says she did not have.
The disability claim, which was contested by her employer, the Los Angeles Unified School District, capped a checkered career in which Foster struggled financially as a result of bad business deals and twice resigned as a teacher after becoming embroiled in controversy, according to court records and interviews.
Foster applied for workers' compensation in 1996, shortly after refusing to return to her job as a typing teacher at Bell High School.
''I have two choices to survive,'' Foster said this week. ''Since it wasn't physical, they make it mental, don't they? If I don't have a broken leg or they don't see blood, or I'm not dead, they said I have to be crazy. And I would have been to go back there.''
The real reason she could not return to work, she said, was that her outspoken opposition to illegal immigration had made her a target of what she said was hatemongering and physical threats at an overwhelmingly Latino school.
The diagnosis of a mental disorder - which she declined to specify - was worked out ''between my doctor and my attorney. ... It's whatever the doctor said that, after working with my attorney, was best to help me,'' she said.
But although she claimed a mental disorder to receive the benefits, she strongly asserted that she has no mental problems and never did.
''I am perfectly sane,'' Foster said.
Queried further about the matter, Foster asked whether a story was being done about her. She then told a reporter that it was his decision ''if you want to put down there I pretended to be crazy when I'm not'' and hung up.
In a statement, Bay Buchanan, the candidate's sister and executive co-chairwoman of the campaign, said, ''Ezola Foster is an outstanding individual. Pat could not be more proud of his choice for vice president. As for her personal life from many years ago, we have no comment or concern.''
Buchanan, a conservative commentator and former speech writer for Richard Nixon, is battling a rival Reform Party faction for $12.6 million in federal campaign financing that goes to the party's nominee. The party was founded in 1992 by billionaire businessman Ross Perot.
Two weeks after the Reform Party's national convention was supposed to choose a nominee, the battle continues over which person is the true presidential candidate for the Reform Party.
Buchanan, a former Republican, is being opposed by John Hagelin, the Natural Law candidate embraced by supporters of Reform Party founder Ross Perot as a way of blocking Buchanan.
Each candidate says he is the party's legitimate nominee. State election officials, facing deadlines for printing ballots, are caught in the middle, sometimes even resorting to lotteries.
''Right now we consider that party over-nominated,'' said Larry Perosino, a spokesman for Connecticut's secretary of state.
In California, Buchanan had been briefly listed, but was pulled from the ballot yesterday at the request of party leaders, said Alfie Charles, a spokesman for the secretary of state there.
Faced with conflicting instructions from party officials, election officials in Iowa and Montana turned to lotteries.
Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver drew Buchanan's name from a glass bowl, while Montana Secretary of State Mike Cooney pulled Hagelin's name from a ballot box. But further court action is expected to contest these drawings.
In Kentucky and South Carolina, election officials are waiting to see if the Reform Party itself can sort through the issue. Those officials, and their counterparts in Oklahoma, say they might ask the Federal Election Commission for guidelines.
In Alabama, both will be listed as independents, and in Minnesota the Reform Party is considered a minor party, though Governor Jesse Ventura was a member.
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.
