In the Name of the Father by Mark Ribowsky

Author:Mark Ribowsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

MR. INHUMAN

The awkwardly structured dual memoir of Archie and Peyton, published in 2001, was a mostly harmless ego exercise. But it did have a sprinkling of candid personal takes, one of which was Peyton betraying a lingering grudge against Jamie Whited. Just addressing the little-noticed “mooning” episode meant that he was flouting the gag order attached to the 1997 settlement agreement between Whited and the University of Tennessee. Apparently, he, and the lawyers who vetted the manuscript for HarperCollins, believed he was on safe ground by admitting he had acted in an “inappropriate” manner, and that Whited should have nonetheless “shrugged it off as harmless.” Bizarrely, he added that had Cooper done the same thing, his gift for joking would have made it all benign, never mind the crudeness of the act. (Ironically, Eli, a sometime prankster, did moon someone in college—his backup quarterback, David Morris, whom he then spanked while singing, “How you like me now?!”)1 More bizarrely, Peyton could not stop fulminating about women in men’s locker rooms and about Whited, whom he tarred for having a “vulgar mouth” and for not appreciating how much he “went out of my way” to “be nice to her.”2

If the lawyers didn’t know of the gag order in force, Jamie Whited knew. Now divorced and using her maiden name of Naughright, she was working as an assistant professor at Florida Southern College and suffered more indignity when the school fired her after the book was published, for bad publicity—the second time, as she saw it, that Manning had cost her a job. She then filed a defamation suit in Polk County Circuit Court in Florida, naming as co-defendants Archie, Peydirt Inc., ghostwriter John Underwood, and HarperCollins, for portraying her as “an overly sensitive, predatory woman looking for incidents to bolster a lawsuit against her employer.” The Manning camp, trying to gain sympathy for him, released a letter written in December 2002 from Malcolm Saxon, the track man he claimed he was mooning when Whited got in the way, apparently hoping that Saxon confirming that scenario would obscure that the missive was full of damnation.

“Peyton, you messed up,” it read. “I still don’t know why you dropped your drawers. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not. . . . Please take some personal responsibility here and own up to what you did. . . . Bro, you have tons of class, but you have shown no mercy or grace to this lady who was on her knees seeing if you had a stress fracture. It’s not too late. She has had a tough go of it since leaving UT. . . . Do the right thing here!!”3

Rather than take the advice, the Mannings decided to fight. After hiring big-time New York lawyer Slade Metcalf, they filed a motion to dismiss the suit, characterizing it as an attempt to extort money from a famous athlete, though Naughright originally asked for only $15,000. When pretrial sessions commenced in March 2003, Naughright claimed that

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