Back in 2013, Jenn Sterger went in search of another opinion. Yet another opinion.
‘I was constantly in and out of doctors’ offices with these rare, chronic illnesses,’ the former NFL reporter tells the Daily Mail. No one could quite diagnose the problem.
Finally, she went to see a doctor who had worked with stars of the NFL and NBA. He recognized her symptoms right away. ‘He just looked at me and said: ‘Jen, someone did something really bad to you… I’m sorry.’
It was the first time anyone had connected the dots all the way back to 2008 and the year she crossed paths with NFL legend Brett Favre. ‘It had never occurred to me that reliving this in my body – constantly – was causing me to get sick,’ Sterger says.
By then, half a decade had passed since her phone buzzed and the torment began.
Sterger, a former model and TV star, was just 25 when she was hired by the Jets as a gameday host. Around the same time, Favre signed with New York ahead of the 2008 season. He was 38.
Over the next few months, she alleges, the married, Hall of Fame-quarterback sent her inappropriate messages and voicemails and even explicit pictures.
Sterger says it began with mysterious messages on Myspace. Then came texts asking her to come over. Then came voicemails. Then came a picture of his penis and even attempted advances in the tunnel.
Eventually, she claims, Sterger tried to avoid the field on game day. She would have an escort to and from the security office in between stints behind the microphone.
Jenn Sterger was working for the Jets when Brett Favre allegedly sent her inappropriate messages and voicemails and even explicit pictures
The Hall of Fame quarterback joined the Jets in 2008 after leaving the Green Bay Packers
Some of the alleged messages sent by Favre to Sterger while they were both at the Jets
After going viral at a college football game, she modelled for Playboy and Maxim
Sterger kept a lid on the scandal until 2010, when the story was leaked and she found herself in the eye of a tabloid storm. Favre managed to ride it out and move on with his career. Sterger went into ‘hiding.’
‘It was very hard to relive that time in my life,’ she says. But Sterger, now 41, recently retold her tale in a damning new Netflix documentary, ‘Untold: The Fall of Favre.’
‘[He] ultimately destroyed my life,’ she tells the cameras.
The documentary details Favre’s alleged womanizing, his relationship with his father and the scandals that have stalked the quarterback. They include Sterger’s story and Favre’s alleged misspending of welfare money meant to help some of Mississippi’s poorest people. Favre has denied wrongdoing over the affair in his home state and has not faced criminal charges.
‘Before all of this,’ Sterger says, ‘my only real knowledge of Brett Favre was just the same folklore that everyone else has heard.’ Soon, though, ‘my life was ruined and he went to the Hall of Fame,’ she says in the documentary.
Favre’s story is being rewritten in real time and Sterger has altered her own script, too. Over the past decade, she has rebuilt her life and refashioned herself as a comedian. But she paid a price for digging into her past.
‘It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,’ she says of appearing in the documentary. ‘It wrecked my nervous system.’
But there were other – more curious – side-effects: clarity, even sympathy.
She now feels sorry for Favre. ‘I understand why this person is the way they are,’ Sterger explains. They have never probably met or even shared the same room. But, nearly two decades later, Sterger has a question should they ever come face to face: ‘I would just want to know why?’
Back in 2010, Favre – who has been married to wife Deanna since 1996 – reportedly admitted to leaving Sterger voicemails but denied sharing any pictures of his penis. He was later fined $50,000 by the NFL for failing to cooperate with the league’s investigation.
The story first emerged a few months earlier, on the sports website Deadspin. Sterger and Favre had both left the Jets by then. She claims to have raised the issue with the team, only to be ‘shrugged off’ by co-workers. Her contract was not extended beyond the 2008 season.
The irony was not lost on Sterger. As a student in 2005, she had appeared – scantily clad – on the broadcast of a Florida State football game. Deadspin then published pictures of her in the crowd, she went viral and – as Sterger tells Netflix – ‘it just totally changed the trajectory of my life’.
Sterger recently re-told her story on a new documentary, ‘Untold: The Fall of Favre’
She worked as a the gameday host for the New York Jets when she crossed paths with Favre
The Netflix documentary details some of the scandals that have stalked Favre in recent years
Soon she was appearing in Playboy and Maxim and carving out a career in the media. Then, she says, Deadspin ‘destroyed’ her by publishing the story against her wishes.
The fallout – detailed in ‘Untold’ – was brutal. One radio host asked why Sterger was shocked a football player wanted to sleep with her. She was ‘selling sex,’ after all.
‘It’s not the pictures that caused all of the damage and the trauma,’ Sterger said today. ‘It was society… CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is real. And I experienced all of it.’
She assumed it was all a prank when messages from an unknown account first appeared on her Myspace. Only when the voicemails arrived did Sterger realize: ‘I’m in serious trouble here.’
Given all she endured, many will wonder why Sterger decided to dig up old graves. Sterger has been approached by nearly a dozen filmmakers in the past few years. But she said ‘Untold’ director Rebecca Gitlitz promised that her story ‘would be told correctly.’ So Sterger decided: ‘It has to be this time, because I’m done talking about it.’
She believes the Favre scandal cost her jobs. It also consigned her to years of online abuse. ‘The internet’s a terrible place,’ The 41-year-old says. But? ‘People still need to hear this.’
Sterger spent months preparing for the documentary. She spoke to the cameras for nearly seven or eight hours.
‘You have to take accountability for your own healing,’ she says. ‘I don’t want someone who’s been a victim of something horrendous… to hear that and think I’m blaming them. I want them to hear that and know that there’s a path forward.’
Her refuge has been comedy. It seems a strange choice – after all the abuse and all those years in the spotlight, why put herself back in the firing line?
‘Comedy is the thing that saved me, honestly,’ she says. ‘When I found comedy, I [realized]: ‘Oh, this is what I was supposed to be doing all along.’
Sterger, who now works as a stand-up comedian, opened up on the decision to tell her story
The former quarterback, pictured alongside Donald Trump, has been married since 1996
After leaving New York, Sterger moved to Los Angeles and began taking acting classes. One covered stand-up comedy. She was taught to write about her own experiences – and never looked back. ‘Comedy has made me do a deep dive on who I am,’ she says.
‘The issue for me was, for a long time, the internet told me who I was… they got it wrong [but] I don’t blame them.’
That journey of self-discovery has led her all the way to back to Favre. ‘At some point you stop telling your story for you,’ Sterger says. ‘And you start telling your story for other people.’ For all those who have experienced similar trauma but don’t have the same platform. ‘That’s who this is for,’ she explains.
Since ‘Untold’ was released, Sterger has received messages from people in Scotland, France and Germany. ‘I’m so incredibly touched by the number of people that have reached out to me and felt safe enough to tell me their story,’ she says. ‘It makes me realize that I did do the right thing.’
Last year, Sterger responded to news that Favre was battling Parkinson’s disease by claiming ‘Karma never forgets an address.’
A year on, her tone on the quarterback and all they went through has changed. ‘I guess I had never stopped to consider his side of it, because I was just so drowning [in the fallout],’ she says.
‘I understand why this person is the way they are, but then there’s the flip side… that didn’t give them the right to do what they did to me.’
The Daily Mail reached out to Favre’s representatives and the New York Jets for comment. They did not respond.
