‘Maybe no one listened’
LOS ANGELES – Jenn Sterger has spent most of the past decade trying to build a career — and life — far away from the stories that made her famous.
Yet earlier this year she went back into her past, returning to Florida State, where she first became known, to meet with students in a journalism class who were just children when Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre allegedly texted Sterger sexually explicit pictures.
Then Sterger did something unexpected: She shared everything. She recounted being a woman trying to find her way in a field dominated by men. She spoke of being objectified and sexually harassed. And she talked about living through all of this years before the #metoo movement took hold.
She wanted to speak for the same reason she agreed to sit down with
only days before her wedding to minor league baseball player Cody Decker.
She wants to tell her story again because she hopes it can help her move on and maybe prevent it from happening to someone else.
And she’s hoping to finally move past the thing that made her famous.
“I’m not the Brett Favre girl. I tell people that every chance I get. Including dumb drunks at a bar. People meet me say, ‘You’re a lot different than I thought you would be,’ ” she said. “I say, ‘What were you expecting?’ ”
Sterger, 34, has struggled to let go of the Favre incident largely because so many other people won’t let go of it.
She has been heartened to see so many women speak out against sexual harassment, and yet she still receives inappropriate photos on Twitter.
But one day last November she noticed a tweet from somebody asking why there had never been a #metoo movement in sports. She couldn’t resist and her fingers started to slam at the keyboard.
“Or maybe they have,” she replied. “And no one listened because ‘she looked a certain way.’ ”
That has been Sterger’s story. She was vaulted to fame by Brent Musburger’s prolonged focus on her and some friends at a Seminoles football game in 2005 — though she doesn’t have a problem with him — but she was also marked that day as a woman who would use her looks to get ahead. So when the Favre story broke in 2010 — a Deadspin story for which she did not cooperate — she found little sympathy.
Sterger was 24 years old and working as an in-game host for the New York Jets in 2008 when she says a team employee told her that Favre, whom she had never met, requested her phone number.
Sterger recalls giving a “smartass” response. “Well, I like my job a lot and I look a lot like his wife,” she said. She walked away, but Favre — or at a least a person believed to be Favre — apparently didn’t get that part of the message.
She said she started receiving text messages and voicemails from the star quarterback. At first, they were awkward conversational texts.
“He started off talking to me about dumb stuff and he really never told me who he was, it was very implied,” she said.
When she asked other people in the industry for advice, she said, she was told to just stave it off and let it go. Finally, she said, she alerted a Jets employee and was told it would be taken care of.
“And I changed my phone number and he got that number,” she said. “And the only way I can figure it out how he got that number is I had to give my employer my number — so how does he get an unlisted cellphone number? I mean to this day I don’t know that it was Brett Favre, but I go off of what I was told and what I was led to believe and the voice I heard on the voicemails.”
Rich Davis, a sports radio host who Sterger dated off and on during that time, remembers her being scared. Either she speaks out and risks her career, or she continues trying to fend off what she believed to be advances from Favre.
“She wasn’t crying or mortified or anything like that because Jenn’s a pretty well-balanced person, which is the sad part,” Davis said. “Because she’s cool, because she can handle herself, because she’s a tough cookie, because of that, people assumed like, ‘Who cares?’
“But I remember her being pretty upset about the idea of ‘Oh no, if I say something, I don’t want to lose my job. But if I don’t say something, people are going to think I brought it on, which clearly I didn’t.’ I remember her just being confused about what a woman does in that situation.”
Midway through that season, she said, she was depressed and feeling anxious — and scared to tell anyone.
“My parents had no idea what was going on,” she said. “My parents are my best friends, so not being able to tell them — I was nervous what they would think about me. My parents already put up with so much of me living this alternate life that they knew was a character basically but they put up with so much and I honestly didn’t know how to tell them. And I didn’t know what they would want me to do about it.
“You know my parents have always taught me to stand up for myself, and to basically feel like I was rolling over, letting people treat me poorly, I felt like I was an embarrassment to them at that point.”
Sterger didn’t return to the Jets hostess position after the 2008 season. In 2010, she joined the cast of the shortlived show on the Versus Network in an attempt to move on with her career. That year, the Deadspin story published and the NFL launched an investigation. Sterger said she turned over months’ worth of text messages and emails to the league and was interviewed by NFL investigators. For her cooperation, she insisted on meeting with Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“I (told him), ‘I don’t know why this matters because you’re not going to do anything,’ ” she said. “And he was like ‘Are you saying I’m not going to do anything because I can do whatever I want?’ And I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m not saying you can’t do anything. I’m saying you won’t. At the end of the day I’m not worth it to you. Even in retirement, his retirement jerseys are worth more to you than I ever will be. Like there’s no protection in this for me at all.’ ”
Sterger, who said she never actually met Favre in person, said she demanded that the NFL state she had done nothing wrong.
“That’s all I want,” she said. “For you to clear my name.”
Davis said investigators never contacted him, Sterger’s roommate at the time or any of their mutual friends.
“No one ever seemed to care about her side of the story,” he said.
When asked if the league’s investigators had ever contacted friends of Sterger, league spokesperson Brian McCarthy pointed to a 2010 news release about the investigation.
“The investigation included an analysis of publicly available reports; a series of interviews with knowledgeable individuals, including Sterger and Favre; a review of communications between the two furnished to our office; and independent forensic analysis of electronically stored material,” the release said. “The investigation was limited in several respects because the conduct occurred in 2008 but was not brought to our attention until this fall. As a result, certain records and individuals were unavailable to the NFL.”
In the end, the league found that Favre did not cooperate with the investigation but said it could not conclude that Favre had sent the lewd images.
“Commissioner Goodell also determined that Favre was not candid in several respects during the investigation, resulting in a longer review and additional negative public attention for Favre, Sterger and the NFL,” the league said in its release.
Goodell fined him $50,000. Favre, who after his stint with the Jets went on to play his final seasons for the Minnesota Vikings, still remains a beloved figure.
Favre did not return a request for comment sent through his longtime agent, Bus Cook. He repeatedly declined to answer reporters’ questions about the allegations in 2010. The Jets declined to comment. Sterger, meanwhile, has never really escaped the infamy from the incident.
“Ten years ago, women still had that mentality of ‘Oh, I must have done something wrong.’ Or it was always, ‘What did she do? Was she dressing a certain way?’ ” Davis said. “Which is absurd. If you really think about it, the whole #metoo, ‘Time’s Up’ Hollywood movement was always there. People just always somehow accepted it.” Trying out for ESPN
This wasn’t the first time Sterger second-guessed herself.
After Musburger’s on-air comments about her in 2005, she posed for and and then left school (she later graduated in 2007) after being offered an audition for a spot on an ESPN show about fantasy sports.
During an audition in Charlotte, Sterger was asked if she wanted to go out with some of the other job candidates. “I thought I was going to a nightclub to have a drink or two and go home,” she said. Instead, they ended up at a strip club. She said she alerted the show’s producer the next day.
That producer was Jamie Horowitz, who was fired from Fox Sports amid claims of misconduct last year. Sterger said he told her that that “shouldn’t have happened.”
“Then he proceeded to lecture me on why I went,” she said. “I was like, ‘I was taken there. … I didn’t know where I was going. You can’t be mad at me for being taken somewhere in a city that I don’t know and I don’t have a rental car.
“What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t rolling in money. I couldn’t just get myself a car. I didn’t even have the address for the hotel because everything had up until that point been a car service. They structured every part of my day when I was in Charlotte.”
ESPN spokesperson Josh Krulewitz, in a statement, said that no ESPN manager had prior knowledge that the job candidates were going to a strip club. “There was no management employee at the club,” he wrote. “Upon learning of this the next day, the on-site staffers admonished the candidates for their poor exercise in judgment.” ‘Definitely affects her’
Sterger and her husband, Cody Decker, met, as she jokes, the old-fashioned way: on Twitter.
She followed him first — the 31-yearold has spent all but eight games of his career in the minors but, like her, is active in the comedy scene in Los Angeles. Decker said they quickly learned after connecting over social media that they already had a ton of mutual friends.
“I made a couple of stupid comedy films that I would throw on YouTube. I unfortunately was getting better known for those than I was for baseball. And she thought they were funny,” Decker said. “And eventually we just got into talking. That’s really all there was to it. And once our friends found out we were talking, they said really you guys are perfect for each other, you should talk more.”
A year and a half later, they were engaged. Last month, they were married.
Decker said he had no idea that she was the woman associated with the Favre scandal until after about two weeks of them talking. “I just didn’t know,” he said. But then one day, he mentioned that he had just gotten “a ton of hate mail.” Sterger replied that was probably nothing compared to what she received.
“I was like ‘Why would you get any hate mail?’ ” he said.
Sterger told Decker to Google her. He did, and then he called her and told her he really had no idea that she was the woman involved in the Favre incident.
“She eventually sat me down and took me through the whole thing. I think she was really worried about my reaction to it. She would just say every few minutes, she would say, ‘Listen, if you don’t believe me, I have all of the documentation.’ I said I don’t need to see any documentation. I believe you. I think she went through such a thing where nobody believed her despite all this copious amounts of proof and I think she was just afraid I wouldn’t believe her either. Which of course I did. But it’s something that definitely affects her.”
He said he thinks she still feels guilty — even though none of it was her fault.
“There’s still a part of her, she knows she didn’t do anything wrong, but when so many people come at you like that, I think she just second-guesses herself.” ‘Why I speak out’
Davis Houck, the Florida State professor who invited Sterger to address his class, found Sterger’s tweet in which she said there had been #metoo moments in sports but “no one listened” as he was working on a lesson about women in sports media.
The class discussed Sterger’s comment, and one of the students, Katherine Wright, contacted Sterger. She hopes to go into sports journalism and saw Sterger’s story as something she could learn from.
“I read (Sterger’s tweet) and felt so inspired because I’m someone who can be naive and think the world’s a great place,” she said. It “made me realize that it’s not all rainbows and butterflies in that world (of sports media).”
Now Sterger and Houck are considering making her talk a yearly part of the class.
“When I sit there in front of these classes of young college women, I don’t want them to go through what I went through,” Sterger said. “You know, I want them to have it better. I want them to be treated as equals and not eye candy.
“I had one girl tell me, ‘I wanted to get into broadcasting but I’m not pretty like you,’ and I said, ‘It’s not about being pretty. It’s about what you have in your head. It’s about your knowledge. It’s about your expertise. It’s about creating a brand for yourself that people trust and know.’
“That’s why I speak out whenever I can. Because I don’t want to see this happen to someone again.”