More than two years after Al Jazeera reported quarterback Peyton Manning was one of many athletes who used performance-enhancing drugs, unsealed court records in the case against the network claim Peyton Manning confirmed the doping allegations against him.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, court documents in the defamation case against Al Jazeera indicate Manning “confirmed” many of the allegations made by the now defunct network in 2015.
The network tried to have the case dismissed in 2017, but a judge ruled against them and the case moved ahead.
According to report, Charlie Sly, a pharmacist who claimed on camera to have distributed banned substances to athletes, was not the lone source in the story. The network argued that the Mannings were also a source in the story.
“Plaintiffs claim that Sly was the ‘single’ source and that Al Jazeera’s outside law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine, served as a second or ‘corroborating source,’ ” states Al Jazeera, via The Hollywood Reporter. “Although contradictory, both claims are false. First, DWT was retained long before any Al Jazeera reporter ever met Sly, to act as Al Jazeera’s pre-broadcast libel review counsel for the Documentary. DWT was not a ‘source’ for anything that appeared in the Documentary. And the Documentary did not rely on a single source,” Al Jazeera said.
“The second, corroborating source for some of Sly’s statements was the Mannings, who voluntarily communicated facts to Al Jazeera through their lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.”
It serves as a bombshell in a story that seemingly went away back in December 2016 when the NFL’s independent investigation cleared Manning of any PED use.
The lawsuit is being brought upon by Washington Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman and former Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard.