In 2001, Peyton Manning and his father, Archie Manning, with ghostwriter John Underwood, collaborated on a book called ‘Manning: A Father, His Sons, and a Football Legacy.’ The book details the story of a family that is sports royalty. Filled with insightful anecdotes about the Manning boys from high school to college, it shows some of the best father-son moments one can ever read about. But there was one incident that left the former New Orleans Saints QB dazed.
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Peyton Manning has always had a squeaky-clean image in the league. He is considered one of the best signal-caller and is a Pro Football Hall of Famer. But the five-time MVP award winner was involved in a controversial case. It all stemmed from a matter that was mentioned in the book.
Peyton Manning once behaved inappropriately in front of a woman athletic trainer
When the two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback was a student-athlete at the University of Tennessee, he did something that confused his father. Not only did it confuse his father, but it also brought a lot of problems in the life of the then-19-year-old QB.
The book states that Peyton Manning entangled himself in a harassment charge by mooning a woman athletic trainer. Mooning is when a person flashes their bare buttock to others. According to the book, it was only an exaggeration because the young QB was aiming at somebody else and so was the trainer.
Archie responded to the event this way: “I knew he wouldn’t have done it deliberately, because that’s not Peyton’s style.”
That might not have been Peyton’s style, but it certainly got him in trouble. That is because the athletic trainer, Dr. Jamie Naughright, filed a defamation lawsuit against Peyton Manning, Archie Manning, John Underwood, and the company that published the book HarperCollins.
Why was Peyton Manning Manning hit with a defamation case?
When the incident happened, Naughright left the university in 1997 after receiving a $300,000 settlement from the school. The settlement was not exclusively for the Manning incident, but also for the other 32 claims she made against the school. Everybody forgot about the incident and treated it as something that happened in the past.
Five years later, Peyton became the starting QB of the Colts and Naughright was the program director of Florida Southern’s athletic training program. They sent an excerpt to Naughright in 2001 when the book was released. It was addressed to ‘Dr. Vulgar Mouth Whited.’ Whited was her last name when she worked in Tennessee.
While Peyton insisted that he only ‘mooned’ Naughright, she claimed that it went further than that. According to USA Today, Naughright says Manning used his “gluteus maximus, the rectum, the testicles and the area in between the testicles. And all that was on my face when I pushed him up. … To get leverage, I took my head out to push him up and off.”
The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2005. Both parties agreed to never talk about it again.
