MY LIFE WITH JOHNNY FOOTHBALL
Manziel ex reveals what it was like inside the NFL star’s violent, scary downward spiral
LOOKING back on it, Colleen Crowley is surprised by her reaction to the first time Johnny Manziel hit her.
When the police pulled up alongside his Nissan parked on the shoulder of Interstate 90, near Avon, Ohio, that Monday in October 2015, she felt the need to defend the Cleveland Browns quarterback whom she had been dating for 14 months.
Crowley, who was 23 at the time, first told officers that Manziel had “hit her a couple times” and “shoved her head into a window,” according to a police report. But minutes later, as she recalled to The Post, her “protective instincts” kicked in. “Your instinct is to be like, ‘ What do we need to do — what do I need to say — to get him out of this?’ I constantly felt like I had to protect him.”
So Crowley told officers that she did not wish to press charges — although she confirms now that her claims in the report are “true.” Thinking back on it, she has “no idea” what the two were fighting about.
While Manziel’s troubles were nothing new at that point, she pinpoints one thing that had sent the athlete into a deep spiral: losing his status as a starting QB.
“He would say he felt like he was trying really hard and going in the right direction, but he wasn’t starting,” Crowley, now 25, said. “With someone with his issues, when you are performing well and you’re not getting what [you think] you’re supposed to be getting . . . it was probably like, ‘Well, why even try?’ ”
(Manziel’s agent had no comment on this story.)
A year and a half earlier, the athlete’s future seemed among the brightest in the league. Having set records at Texas A&M — including one as the first freshman to ever win the Heisman Trophy — “Johnny Football,” as he had been known since his high-school days in Kerrville, Texas, had signed a four-year, $8.25 million contract with the Browns in 2014.
Crowley was the gorgeous Texas Christian University student on his arm. In social-media posts and paparazzi photos, the duo was pictured loved up — and partying — across the country. Soon, the public would discover what the photos didn’t show: the drug and alcohol abuse, the rehab visits, the temper and violence. Manziel, Crowley said, was using Xanax and cocaine.
Within the next six months, Manziel would lose his NFL job, his longtime manager and an endorsement deal with Nike. But Crowley stuck with him — at first. The two dated on and off until January 2016, when he allegedly beat her again.
“He was just very volatile and angry and scary,” she said. “Someone I did not know.” G ROWING up, Crowley — one of three daughters of an oil executive and his wife — lived in Singapore, Malaysia and Scotland. But her identity is rooted in the Lone Star State, where the family settled in Houston when she was in the fifth grade.
Even though she graduated from TCU, where she studied education of the deaf, Crowley has a love of Texas A&M football. She and Manziel, who was the Aggies’ star, “had a bunch of mutual friends” before they were introduced after her sophomore year.
“We went to a dinner together [with friends] and just clicked,” she recalled.
Manziel already had a turbulent rep. In 2012, as a college freshman, he was arrested after getting into a fight and giving police a fake ID. In 2013, he got in trouble for oversleeping while working at a kids football camp, then left early because of “dehydration.” A month later, he was slapped with a half-game suspension for an “inadvertent violation” of NCAA rules after reportedly being paid to sign autographs.
After meeting, he and Crowley were spotted at a Drake concert in Houston, a Red Sox game at Boston’s Fenway Park and the X Games in Austin, Texas.
The couple’s partying, according to Crowley, was “pretty average for [our] age,” she re- called of those early months. “It wasn’t overtthe-top crazy.”
What was supposed to bbe “a fun summer fling” — ggiven that Manziel had deccided to drop out of school aand play for the Browns that fall — quickly turned serious. In August, he asked Crowley be his girlfriend.
“He [said], ‘I want you to ccome up [to Cleveland] every weekend [or] I’ll come down there,’ ” she said.
But when Manziel moved into his apartment in downtown Cleveland, she sensed a change: “[He was] on edge . . . more aggressive. Really sad.”
At first, she tuned out rumors of Manziel’s out-of-control substance abuse and infidelity.
But there was no denying his issues when he “came to me crying, saying, ‘I need to go to rehab,’ ” Crowley recalled.
In April 2015, following 10 weeks of substance-abuse treatment at a Pennsylvania facility, Manziel moved to a $438,000 home in the suburb of Avon. Crowley moved in, too, opting to continue her degree online.
“If he was going to stay on the right track, I was going to have to go up there,” she said.
The plan worked at first. After a quiet summer, Manziel’s performance spiked at the start of the 2015 season. “Johnny Football is back and better than ever,” The Post wrote after the Browns’ first preseason game against the Redskins, when he completed seven of 11 attempts for 42 yards.
Crowley recalled how Manziel, now 25, “was in a good place after rehab.” He bought her a French bulldog, Ollie, and the two were “Netflix and chillin’ every night, cooking dinner. We were homebodies.”
But the honeymoon didn’t last long. Manziel’s fight to take over the starting quarterback spot took a toll on the young athlete, Crowley said. After starting in three of the first six games, Manziel went back-and-forth with Josh McCown between the No. 1 and backup positions throughout the season.
As a result, he became “closed off” and “depressed,” she added. “He didn’t hang out with his friends . . . LeBron [James] would invite him over and he just wanted to be at home.”
Crowley also struggled to adapt to her new life in suburban Ohio. “I was unhappy,” Crowley said. “I didn’t have someone that made me
feel . . . like I had a purpose. I was just a baby sitter.” Crowley admits that the two had been drinking the day of their October 2015 domestic dispute and said that she was intoxicated, but that Manziel, who was driving, had “probably a little more than two drinks. Not wasted. He wasn’t out of his mind.” After that incident, Browns fans and even Manziel’s fellow players blamed her for his downfall. Browns linebacker Paul Kruger — who had been driving by when he saw the two on the side of the interstate and stopped to see if they needed help — told cops, “She’s not the right one he should be with, I’ll tell you that much,” according to the police report. Some media reports insinuated that Crowley’s assault claims were unreliable because she was intoxicated and turned uncooperative with police. “People thought I was this party girl — crazy,” she said. “I read things about me that were just not true.” Crowley admitted that she was “addicted” to the relationship. Even after he hit her in Avon, “I didn’t want to believe it. I remember being convinced I was drunk and nothing happened.” T HE roadside dispute was one of many times Crowley saw Manziel lose his temper. When the two would argue, she said,“I would have to [lock] myself in a closet or a room or a bathroom just to get him away from me. I felt like I didn’t have control over my own body. It was aggressive.” Manziel would often take her cellphone away from her when the two fought and he “smashed” four phones, Crowley said. “It was a controlling thing. He didn’t want me to contact my parents,” she said.
In November 2015, she caught Manziel in a lie. While she was in Las Vegas with friends, he told her he was staying home in Cleveland; in fact, he was partying in Austin. Confronted by Crowley over the phone, he agreed to meet her at the Austin airport so they could fly back to Ohio together — but never showed. The athlete chartered a private jet and came home around 3 a.m., hours before he had to be at a Browns practice, according to Crowley. She said Manziel appeared intoxicated.
“I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” Crowley recalled telling him before retreating to the guest room. But he wanted to work things out and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I locked the door and stuck a chair under it,” she said. “I was on the phone with his parents. They could hear him trying to beat the door down until he eventually did. I gave him the phone, and his dad was just like, ‘ You need to leave Colleen alone or we’re going to fly up there.’ ” (The Post was unable to reach Manziel’s parents.)
She stayed a few more weeks but, by Christmas, had moved back to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend classes. Manziel, having left Cleveland in disgrace, split his time living with her and at the Hotel ZaZa in Dallas. Although the two were on and off, Crowley said, “[After] what happened in Avon, it was never the same after that . . . I had had enough.”
In January 2016, she dumped Manziel. He cried, she recalled, but “it was just fake crying . . . I was so used to seeing it all the time.”
The next night, she was out with friends in Dallas when he asked her to meet him at Hotel ZaZa for an “after-party” in his room. Crowley, who had had “maybe two drinks, tops,” that night, said Manziel did not seem significantly intoxicated when she and two pals showed up at the hotel around 2 a.m.
“[My friends] wanted to go, and he wouldn’t let me,” she said. “As soon as they left, I basically said, ‘I’m not sleeping in this bed with you’ — and that’s when all hell broke loose.”
According to Crowley’s written statement to Dallas police, Manziel “restrained” her and led her downstairs, where he forced her into his car. Then he drove to a bar where her car was parked and the two switched vehicles “against my will,” according to Crowley. As Manziel was backing out, she “jumped from the car.” He “grabbed me by my hair and threw me back into the car,” according to the statement, then “hit me with his open hand on my left ear.” Crowley told The Post that the blow made her “completely deaf in one ear for three and a half months.”
On the drive to her apartment, Manziel threatened to kill them both, Crowley said, and was laughing and crying simultaneously.
“I think there was some mental breakdown because the way he was acting, it wasn’t anything like drugs or alcohol would affect a person,” she said. “This was more deep-rooted.”
Back at her apartment, the arguing contin- ued until after 5 a.m. when Manziel discovered she had been trying to call her parents.
“Out of fear for my life, I pulled a knife out of my knife block and advanced toward him,” she said. “He ran out of the apartment.”
A neighbor who heard Crowley screaming called 911. When police arrived, Crowley, according to reports, became “uncooperative” and refused to answer many questions. A week later, she filed a written complaint with Dallas police, and a judge ordered Manziel to stay away from her for two years.
“I was lucky to have survived,” Crowley told The Post. “I fought for my life that night.”
The next month, Manziel was cut from the Browns. In April 2016, he was indicted by a Dallas grand jury on a misdemeanor assault charge.
After Dallas, Crowley said, Manziel’s fans sent her “death threats” on Instagram. She had campus police escort her to class. S INCE that day in Fort Worth, Crowley has seen Manziel just once, when they ran into each other at Liv Nightclub in Miami over New Year’s Eve weekend in December 2016. Shortly after, Crowley said, Manziel tweeted part of her restraining order against him, including her address and phone number. He took it down after a mutual friend reached out to him on her behalf.
In November 2017, a judge dismissed the assault charges after Manziel attended anger-management classes and participated in the NFL’s substance-abuse program.
The athlete has since gotten engaged to Instagram model Bre Tiesi and reportedly has plans to play in a Spring League for potential NFL players in March. In February, Manziel told “Good Morning America” that he is sober and taking medication for bipolar disorder, which was diagnosed about a year ago.
“I am working to try to make sure I don’t fall back into any type of depression because I know . . . how slippery a slope that is for me,” he said.
Crowley is not surprised by the diagnosis, but feels he hasn’t totally come clean about how he coped with the disorder. “He turned to drugs and alcohol,” she said.
Now Crowley is starting fresh in New York with her boyfriend of a year, a Wall Street banker. They moved from Houston to the Financial District in January, and she is now interviewing for marketing and eventplanning jobs. She said she is telling her story to inspire other women struggling to move on from abusive relationships.
“Immediately after [an assault], you feel so powerless — you’re stripped of your dignity, your self-worth,” Crowley said. “Trying to get back to that place where you really know yourself is a journey.”
And while she’s moved on from Manziel, the ordeal weighs heavy on her heart.
“I will never have closure. I will never publicly get an apology,” she said. “That’s really hard, being so close to someone and you both knowing what happened.”
I was lucky to have h survived. I fought for my life. — Colleen Crowley on a night Johnny Manziel assaulted her