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Brett Favre won 186 games during the NFL regular season with the Packers, Jets, Vikings and Falcons, but he just took a big “L” in his defamation lawsuit against his NFL contemporary Shannon Sharpe.
In July, Brett Favre tried to get his dismissed 2023 defamation lawsuit against Sharpe revived by a federal appeals court.
Favre’s lawyer, Amit Vora, argued to the three 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges in New Orleans that the lawsuit should be reinstated because “Sharpe accused Favre, who has not been charged with a crime, of theft.”
On Monday, those three judges ruled against Brett Favre, affirming the decision of U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett of the Southern District of Mississippi, who threw out the lawsuit last year.
“At the time Sharpe made the statements, the facts on which he was relying were publicly known, and Sharpe had a right to characterize those publicly known facts caustically and unfairly,” Judge Leslie H. Southwick wrote in the nine-page decision. “Sharpe’s statements were his ‘strongly stated’ opinions ‘based on truthful established fact[s],’ and thus nonactionable.”
According to Brett Favre’s attorney’s oral arguments before the appeals court in July, the Hall of Famer quarterback is “unable to counteract this insidious and spreading lie. There’s readily available evidence that viewers, in fact, took this accusation literally [and] that this accusation harmed Favre’s reputation. In fact, [Favre] has never stolen money from anyone, and yet that evidence may never see the light of day.
“It renders Favre powerless to counteract this attack on his reputation,” Favre’s attorney added.
Unfortunately for Brett Favre, the appeals court’s decision has left him even more “powerless,” especially in the lawsuit brought by the Mississippi Department of Human Services against 40 defendants, one of whom is Favre.
One of Favre’s former business partners, Jake VanLandingham, founder of the drug company Prevacus, has already plead guilty in the case.
Favre has so far not been charged with any crime.