Brett Favre Asks Appeal Court to Reinstate His Defamation Suit Against Shannon Sharpe

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Lawyers for former NFL quarterback Brett Favre will ask a federal appeals court Tuesday to revive a defamation lawsuit Favre filed against one other Pro Football Hall of Famer, former quarterback Shannon Sharpe, amid a Mississippi welfare scandal that’s one among the state’s largest corruption cases.

A federal judge in Mississippi dismissed the lawsuit in October, finding that Sharpe had used constitutionally protected speech in a sports broadcast by criticizing Favre’s connection to the welfare misuse case.

Favre hopes the U.S. Court of Appeals for the fifth Circuit will reopen the case.

Sharpe said during a September 2022 broadcast of Fox Sports’ “Skip and Shannon: Undisputed” that Favre “was taking money from people who didn’t have access to services,” that he “stole money from people who really needed it” and that somebody would have to be a pathetic person “to steal from the lowest of the low.”

According to Mississippi State Auditor Shad White, from 2016 to 2019, the Mississippi Department of Human Services improperly spent greater than $77 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — money intended to help the poorest people within the U.S.

Among White’s findings was that Favre had been improperly paid $1.1 million in speaking fees by a nonprofit that spent TANF money with the approval of the Department of Human Services. The money was supposed to go toward a $5 million volleyball arena on the University of Southern Mississippi, which he attended and where his daughter played the game.

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Favre repaid $1.1 million, but White said in February court documents that the previous quarterback still owes $729,790 because interest has increased the unique amount owed.

Favre, who lives in Mississippi, denies wrongdoing and has not been criminally charged. He is one among greater than three dozen people or firms sued by the state Department of Human Services.

In an October ruling, District Judge Keith Starrett said Sharpe’s comments within the case constituted constitutionally protected “rhetorical exaggeration.”

“No reasonable person listening to the broadcast would have thought that Favre was actually going into poor people’s homes and taking their money — that he had committed the crime of larceny/theft against any particular poor person in the state of Mississippi,” Starrett wrote.

Favre’s attorneys said in a transient that the ruling mischaracterized Sharpe’s remarks. “Here, a reasonable listener could and would interpret Sharpe’s repeated statements that Favre ‘stole money’ from the ‘underserved’ as factual allegations about Favre,” they said.

Sharpe’s attorneys argued of their filings that Starrett was correct to call Sharpe’s remarks “loose, metaphorical language used by media commentators about a serious public controversy that carries significant significance for the discourse of our country.”