Police Say Peyton Manning's Accuser Filed False or Exaggerated Complains in 2014

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post wrote a piece entitled “The Peyton Manning case is distracting us from today’s campus sex assault problem.” In it, she talks about how mentioning Peyton Manning in the recent University of Tennessee lawsuit, the same one where Drae Bowles alleges in an affidavit that head football coach Butch Jones called him a traitor to the team for helping a woman who accused other players of a sexual assault, distracts from the more important issues.

"On Tuesday, Tennessee moved to strike Manning’s name from the suit, saying it’s “immaterial,” and “doesn’t involve the plaintiffs.” Lawyers for the women who filed suit should concede the point. They included him only for the sensationalism, and it doesn’t strengthen the case and may even hurt their chances of courtroom success. Including Manning was a serious miscalculation, for two reasons. From a practical standpoint it has us fixated on two decades ago while ignoring the current rape allegations. From a legal standpoint, it invites real trouble."

Among the issues that Jenkins raises are the credibility of a witness from twenty years ago, when the details are murkier. She also cites two previously unreported police reports out of Polk County, Florida (where former Manning plaintiff Jamie Naughright has a home). In those, the police concluded that Naughright made complaints that were exaggerated or false.

Those include emergency calls where she claimed to have been threatened by a male houseguest, where she claimed to have been harassed by a caretaker, and where she alleged someone had launched a porn site in her name. She also claimed to be an informant in a New Jersey federal criminal investigation, but a New Jersey agency relayed to the Polk County authorities that Naughright had been instructed, “to stop calling their agency and making false accusations.”

Does this mean that things she said in 1996 or 1997 were false? No. It would appear, based on other witness statements, that what happened was more than an accidental mooning, regardless of the dispute over actual physical contact. But in the context of very serious allegations today–allegations that could bring down Butch Jones with them–trying to divine her credibility does not add anything to the current situation in Tennessee.