Thirteen years ago, USA Today obtained 74 pages of explosive court documents on Peyton Manning, Archie Manning, the University of Tennessee, and Florida Southern College that revealed allegations of a sexual-assault scandal, cover up, and smear campaign of the victim that was so deep, so widespread and so ugly that it would've rocked the American sports world to its core.
Yet USA Today never released those documents for reasons I can't explain.
Mel Antonen, now a baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, wrote about the documents for the paper on Nov. 3, 2003.
Three days later, Christine Brennan, longtime sportswriter for USA Today wrote an op-ed about Peyton Manning and the documents entitled, “Do you really know your sports hero?” but the scandal pretty much died right there.
The word “viral” was still only being used to describe the spread of infectious diseases.
But when the documents were sent to me on Tuesday, two days after the Super Bowl, it was immediately clear to me that had the world actually known what they contained, it’s doubtful that Peyton would have ever been the “swell, golly, gee-whiz” pitchman for Nationwide Insurance, DirecTV or Papa John’s Pizza.
...Less than 24 hours later, a source who claimed to see my article on the racial double standard, sent me a 74-page court document from Polk County court in Florida.
Sitting in the San Francisco airport, waiting for a flight home, I opened the PDF, began reading, and felt like I had stumbled on to state secrets.
I literally moved to where nobody could see my computer screen.
...This document says, in essence, that it's all a facade, an act, a well-designed for-profit creation, maintained and manicured at all cost.
For me, it was like reading proof that the first Apollo moon landing was really a fictional tale filmed in a Hollywood studio designed to dupe us all.
That flag, planted in the moon, seemingly blowing in the wind, was a ruse after all.
Maybe B.o.B. was right on this one fact.
I read every single page in the airport before I boarded my flight.
Maybe a good hundred times, I wondered to myself, Why — and how — had all of this been kept secret for so long?
Titled "Facts of the Case," and submitted to the court by the plaintiff's lawyers, the document, which warrants many more takes and reflections than what I will offer today, is simultaneously shocking, disgusting, painful, and infuriating.
It offers us the living, breathing human names and faces of the individuals the American sports machine is willing to mow down in the name of profit and fame..."
Read on!
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