One of Shannon Sharpe’s rape accusers has now claimed the former NFL star threatened to kill her in a bid to keep her quiet.
Michele Evans, now 52, came forward in a bombshell interview with Daily Mail on April 24 to detail disturbing parallels between the $50 million rape lawsuit Sharpe is facing in Nevada and her own 15-year legal battle with him.
A popular podcaster and occasional ESPN personality, Sharpe opted out of NFL Draft duties for the cable network last week after being sued by an unnamed former girlfriend.
In response to that filing, which makes passing reference to Evans’ 2023 defamation lawsuit against Sharpe, the retired NFL star and his legal team denied the claims while naming Jane Doe and identifying her as an OnlyFans model to reporters despite the objections of her legal team.
It was all too familiar for Evans, who explained in a phone conversation and emails to Daily Mail, as well as several New York State court filings, that she sees herself as a victim of retaliation by Sharpe.
Although they were never a true couple, as Doe and Sharpe are described in the Nevada filing, Evans claims she became romantically involved with the former Denver Broncos tight end in the early 2000s when she was working as a local television reporter covering the team, she told Daily Mail.
Michele Evans is pictured interviewing Sharpe during his time with the Denver Broncos
Evans blames a series of professional and legal issues on what she calls Sharpe’s efforts to exact revenge
A Sharpe spokesman told Daily Mail her ‘claims are ridiculous and completely without merit.’
But Evans’ relationship with Sharpe came to an abrupt end in 2010 when she said he raped her orally and vaginally, according to legal filings provided to Daily Mail. She filed a protective order in Georgia that briefly scandalized the three-time Super Bowl winner, but since then, Evans told Daily Mail, Sharpe has sought revenge against her.
In an interview with The Sun, Evans has now claimed she was ‘scared for her life’ at the time after he allegedly threatened to kill her.
She said: ‘He (Sharpe) started coming at me [saying] if I tell anybody you know, he’ll use everybody he knows to destroy me, which he basically has.’
Repeating claims from her restraining order application from 2010, Evans went on: ‘He started making other threats, threats against my life. He just was so worried that it would get out, and I wasn’t going to do anything.
‘But when he kept calling me at work, and when he kept very aggressively behaving, and I could see it wasn’t going to go away, and he said he was going to destroy me, and he was going to kill me, and he told me he was watching me and all that.’
Evans ultimately dropped her protective order against Sharpe in what she described as a desperate attempt to end the doxing she believed was endangering both her and her daughter.
In one incident, Evans told Daily Mail, someone came to their front door and yelled: ‘Shut up, b****!’. She now sees Sharpe’s latest accuser in a similar predicament.
Evans is pictured interviewing Sharpe during her days as a Denver-area reporter
Evans, who first met Sharpe as a reporter, later became romantically involved with him
‘I am disturbed how Shannon doxed [Doe] because that’s exactly what I said in my lawsuit is that he doxed me and that was one of the reasons why I dropped the protective order that I had against him,’ Evans told Daily Mail.
‘Then releasing the name of her OnlyFans so people could find that and find her Instagram, it was exact thing he was attempting to do with me. That’s why I say it’s triggering.’
Evans never filed rape charges against Sharpe in Georgia, but she did sue him in 2023, accusing him of making defamatory and erroneous statements about her in the media and encouraging others to do the same.
DailyMail.com reached out to Sharpe’s legal team for comment on the new allegations being made by Evans, before a spokesman repeated a statement also released on behalf of the ESPN personality last week.
‘It should be of no surprise that when someone famous is in the news, all sorts of people crawl out of the woodwork to share their connection to that person in an attempt to profit from that alleged relationship,’ they said. ‘In many cases those stories or accusations are nothing more than old news, fanciful exaggerations, or sometimes blatant misrepresentations of fact. They are shared on social media or fed to reporters with intentional factual omissions and no regard for the truth.
‘This is obviously purposeful, designed to create a fabricated narrative. This is exactly what is happening to Shannon Sharpe and the resurrection of the case involving Michele Evans is a perfect example.
‘Sadly, Ms. Evans became obsessed with Shannon and decided to manufacture a claim against him. When she could not find a lawyer to pursue her outrageous story, she filed a civil complaint on her own that is completely devoid of merit.
‘The fact is that Shannon has had no contact with this person for many years and it is our understanding that she is still on probation after serving 3 years in prison’.
The statement later added that Sharpe has ‘done nothing wrong’ and ‘intends to fight back against these malicious lies.’
The former NFL star ‘looks forward to his day in court’, his legal representative said.
Sharpe and Evans are pictured in the Denver Broncos locker room during a brief interview
After ending her relationship with Sharpe in 2010, Evans later married another man in 2015.
As she explained, that marriage became abusive, in part, because of her husband’s anger over her previous relationship with Sharpe. Evans shared audio with Daily Mail of a purported argument between herself and the man in which he’s heard admitting that he tried to kill her.
Evans said she attempted to flee in 2017, only to have her husband jump on the hood of her car in an effort to stop her, she explained.
‘In the midst of my effort to flee, he leapt upon the conveyance, resulting in a vehicular mishap wherein he sustained injuries,’ she wrote in her 2023 filing.
As a result, she was charged with assault, accepted a plea deal and later sentenced under the Domestic Violence Survivors Act.
Over that lengthy legal process, Evans served 18 months at New York’s infamous Rikers Island as well as another 14 months in state prisons, where she endured solitary confinement and later missed the funeral of her beloved eight-year-old niece, Macie Hill, who was tragically killed at a Utah parade in 2022.
According to Evans, it was Sharpe’s decision to get involved in the case that made her legal nightmare possible.
‘My lawyer said it’s actually the reason it kind of blew up my case,’ Evans said. ‘It contributed to me doing 14 months in prison.’
Sharpe, a podcaster and ESPN personality, is also facing a $50million rape civil lawsuit
Sharpe delivered a pair of sworn affidavits ‘replete with falsities,’ according to Evans’ 2023 filing. Those allegedly false statements included Sharpe’s claim that she stalked him, threatened him and falsely accused him of rape to both the police and his employer, she wrote.
‘That was his way of getting back at me,’ she told Daily Mail.
When announcing his decision to step away from ESPN, Sharpe stressed that the allegations against him are ‘false and disruptive.’
‘My statement is found here and this is the truth. The relationship in question was 100% consensual,’ he said.
‘At this juncture I am electing to step aside temporarily from my ESPN duties.
‘I will be devoting this time to my family, and responding and dealing with these false and disruptive allegations set against me. I plan to return to ESPN at the start of the NFL preseason.
‘I sincerely appreciate the overwhelming and ongoing support I have received from my family, fans, friends and colleagues.’
