Jenn Sterger and Brett Favre
The NFL has handed Brett Favre a $50K fine for his lack of cooperation with league investigators. The investigation into allegations of his inappropriate contact with Jenn Sterger, an employee of the Jets at the time, is now considered a “closed matter” per the league.
Based on the response from Ms. Sterger’s attorney, Joseph Conway, the most critical issue is unresolved.
“… Mr. Goodell completely failed to address the complicity of the New York Jet organization in Favre’s conduct. The evidence was explicit that Ms. Sterger’s personal telephone numbers were provided to Favre by still-current employees of the New York Jets. This was done without Ms. Sterger’s knowledge and consent.”
Going with the assumption that the allegations against Favre are accurate, that he did in fact leave the messages and send Ms. Sterger illicit images, our opinions about those actions are irrelevant. For whatever reasons, Favre, a married man, made the decision to pursue a woman he found himself attracted to. People do it every day.
What makes this incident different is that Brett Favre is an NFL icon, a celebrated 20 year league veteran, future NFL Hall of Famer. Who, by all accounts, has represented the league well. His personal trials, including an addiction to painkillers, have been well documented along the way. Brett isn’t a perfect man, has never claimed to be. Yet we, as football fans, tend to hold men with these exceptional accolades to a higher personal standard.
In the other corner, Jenn Sterger isn’t a professional journalist, nor is she just a pretty girl the Jets put on the sidelines for a home crowd TV show. This is a woman who made a career in sports/tabloid journalism by leading with her sex appeal, starting in her years as an FSU co-ed who dressed provocatively in the stands to attract camera time.
During Favre’s flirtation, Ms. Sterger never complained to the Jets or the NFL about the incident, citing her fear of losing her job if she complained. Instead filing a grievance, instead of changing her number, per Deadspin (a tabloid sports website) she uploaded the phone messages, text messages and pictures to her computer so she could more easily laugh over them with her girlfriends. She met with AJ Daulerio of Deadspin in the winter of 2009 and shared the electronic files “off the record.” However, the content was subsequently published on their website the following year. It’s rumored she was paid $12K for the messages and pictures, a rumor she is denying.
As far as Favre is concerned, this matter should have been closed a long time ago. The NFL is using the league conduct policy as a badge to act as the moral police of league personnel. Whatever ‘misconduct’, if any, took place between Favre and Sterger, it is a personal matter that most likely carried a far heavier consequence from Favre’s wife than $50K.
By pulling Favre in as a target of the investigation, the league lost the opportunity to work with him as a witness in order to find out who divulged Ms. Sterger’s personal contact information. I find it much more disturbing to know someone in the Jets organization found it perfectly acceptable to give Favre a private phone number than I am to know a high profile athlete pursed an attractive woman. Misappropriation of personal data is the sort of “conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the National Football League” I would be concerned with.
