NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Lawyers for retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre will ask a federal appeals court Tuesday to revive a defamation lawsuit Favre filed against another Pro Football Hall of Famer, former tight end Shannon Sharpe, in a Mississippi welfare scandal that is one of the state’s biggest public corruption cases.
A federal judge from Mississippi dismissed the lawsuit in Octoberclaiming that Sharpe used constitutionally protected speech during a sports broadcast when he criticized Favre’s connection to the case of misuse of social benefits.
Favre hopes the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will reinstate the trial.
Sharpe said on a September 2022 broadcast of the Fox Sports show “Skip and Shannon: Undisputed” that Favre was “taking from the underprivileged,” that he was “stealing money from people who really needed it,” and that someone would have to be a sorry person “to steal from the poor.”
Mississippi State Auditor Shad White said that between 2016 and 2019, the Mississippi Department of Human Services spent more than $77 million from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — funds intended to help some of the poorest people in the United States
Among White’s findings was that Favre had improperly received $1.1 million in speaking fees from a nonprofit organization that spent TANF money with approval from the Department of Human Services. The money was to be used to fund a $5 million volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi, which he attended and where his daughter played the sport.
Favre repaid $1.1 million, but White said in a court filing in February that the former quarterback still owes $729,790 because growth generated by interest in the original amount he owed.
Favre, who lives in Mississippi, has denied any wrongdoing and is not facing criminal charges. He is one of more than three dozen people or businesses being prosecuted by the state Department of Human Services.
In his October ruling, U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett said Sharpe’s remarks about the case were constitutionally protected “rhetorical hyperbole.”
“Here, no reasonable person listening to the show would think that Favre actually went into poor people’s homes and took their money – that he committed the crime of theft/larceny against a particular poor person in Mississippi,” Starrett wrote.
Favre’s lawyers said in a brief that the decision mischaracterized Sharpe’s remarks. “Here, a reasonable listener could and would have interpreted Sharpe’s repeated statements that Favre ‘stole money’ from the ‘disadvantaged’ as factual assertions about him,” they said.
Sharpe’s lawyers argued in their briefs that Starrett was correct, calling Sharpe’s remarks “vague and figurative language among media commentators about a public controversy important to our nation’s discourse.”
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Associated Press writer Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this report.
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