A separate Shannon Sharpe accuser has come forward in a bombshell interview with Daily Mail to detail disturbing parallels between the $50 million rape lawsuit he’s now facing in Nevada and her own 15-year legal battle with the NFL great.
‘I was triggered, totally triggered,’ Michele Evans, now 52, said of the 56-year-old Sharpe’s denials. ‘I believed her right away. How could I not after going through what I’ve been through?’
A popular podcaster and occasional ESPN personality, Sharpe opted out of NFL Draft duties for the cable network this week after being sued by an unnamed former girlfriend. In response to that filing, which makes passing reference to Evans’ own 2023 defamation lawsuit against Sharpe, the retired NFL star and his legal team have denied the claims while naming Doe and identifying her as an OnlyFans model to reporters despite the objections of her legal team.
For Evans, it’s all too familiar. As she explained in a phone conversation and emails to Daily Mail, as well as several New York State court filings, Evans sees herself as a victim of retaliation by Sharpe.
Although they were never a true couple, as Doe and Sharpe are described in the Nevada filing, Evans claims she became romantically involved with the Denver Broncos tight end in the early 2000s when she was working as a local television reporter covering the team, she told Daily Mail. A Sharpe spokesman told Daily Mail her ‘claims are ridiculous and completely without merit.’
But Evans’ relationship with Sharpe came to an abrupt end in 2010 when he raped her orally and vaginally, according to legal filings provided to Daily Mail. She filed a protective order in Georgia that briefly scandalized the three-time Super Bowl winner, but since then, Evans told Daily Mail, Sharpe has sought revenge against her.
‘He told me that he would use everybody he knows to destroy me,’ Evans said. ‘That’s basically what he did.’
Michele Evans is pictured interviewing Sharpe during his time with the Denver Broncos
Evans blames a series of professional and legal issues on what she calls Sharpe’s efforts to exact revenge
Evans ultimately dropped her protective order against Sharpe in what she described as a desperate attempt to end the doxing she believed was endangering both her and her daughter. In one incident, Evans told Daily Mail, someone came to their front door and yelled: ‘Shut up, b****!’
She now sees Sharpe’s latest accuser in a similar predicament.
‘I am disturbed how Shannon doxed [Doe] because that’s exactly what I said in my lawsuit is that he doxed me and that was one of the reasons why I dropped the protective order that I had against him,’ Evans said.
‘Then releasing the name of her OnlyFans so people could find that and find her Instagram, it was exact thing he was attempting to do with me. That’s why I say it’s triggering.’
Evans never filed rape charges against Sharpe in Georgia, but she did sue him in 2023, accusing him of making defamatory and erroneous statements about her in the media and encouraging others to do the same.
That original complaint, filed in New York, shares a number of disturbing similarities with Doe’s Nevada lawsuit, including specific details of the alleged sexual assaults.
Before allegedly raping Doe in October, Sharpe is accused in the Nevada filing of telling the plaintiff: ‘I’m going to punish this a**hole. I’m going to make it so no man will want you again.’
Evans described a similar statement in her 2023 complaint.
‘… Shannon’s coercion escalated as he maneuvered me onto the bed and achieved non-consensual vaginal penetration, all the while proclaiming his intent to ”Make it so no other man would want me.”’
Evans is pictured interviewing Sharpe during her days as a Denver-area reporter
Evans refiled her lawsuit in New York earlier this month, naming a number of media outlets as defendants and adding allegations, including sexual assault, against Sharpe. That amended complaint, which Evans said she filed without any foreknowledge of Doe’s Nevada lawsuit, has now been exclusively provided to Daily Mail.
‘He’s been going on TV saying stuff about me,’ Evans told Daily Mail of the origin of her lawsuit.
According to one count in Evans’ filing, Sharpe made a 2014 appearance on CNN’s ‘State of the Nation,’ where he allegedly tried to discredit her 2010 request for a protection order.
‘They mentioned the 2010 protective order Plaintiff had on Sharpe but then dismissing (sic) it by saying it was totally dropped. Implying Plaintiff was not one who dismissed it, creating a false narrative and understanding for viewer,’ Evans claimed in her filing.
To Evans, the discussion of the dropped request for a protection order painted her accusations as spurious. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
Back then, Evans was working for CNN’s parent company, then known as Turner Broadcasting. But after Sharpe’s apparent insinuation about her 2010 protective order, Evans was laid off by the company.
Warner Bros. Discovery, as the company is now known, did not immediately respond to Daily Mail’s request for comment.
Evans, who first met Sharpe as a reporter, later became romantically involved with him
Evans also took issue with a 2010 Denver Post article that quoted a man described as her ‘Denver-area acquaintance.’
‘My first reaction was: ”Oh, my God, this woman [Evans] is trying to put the screws to this guy [Sharpe],”’ the man is quoted as saying in the article. ‘Everyone knows this is a lie. This is what the woman went out to do. To hear this woman drag his name through the mud made me mad.’
As Evans explained in her filing and told Daily Mail, she never met this man who claimed to know her to the Denver Post – one of several media outlets named in her amended filing.
Daily Mail has reached out to the Denver Post and its parent company, Digital First Media, for comment.
Sharpe is not accused of planting that article in the Post, but Evans does blame him for her decision to take a plea deal that resulted in her imprisonment.
Sharpe and Evans are pictured in the Denver Broncos locker room during a brief interview
After ending her relationship with Sharpe in 2010, Evans later married another man in 2015.
As she explained, that marriage became abusive, in part, because of her husband’s anger over her previous relationship with Sharpe. On Thursday, Evans shared audio with Daily Mail of a purported argument between herself and the man in which he’s heard admitting that he tried to kill her.
Evans said she attempted to flee in 2017, only to have her husband jump on the hood of her car in an effort to stop her, she explained.
‘In the midst of my effort to flee, he leapt upon the conveyance, resulting in a vehicular mishap wherein he sustained injuries,’ she wrote in her 2023 filing.
As a result, she was charged with assault, accepted a plea deal and later sentenced under the Domestic Violence Survivors Act.
Over that lengthy legal process, Evans served 18 months at New York’s infamous Rikers Island as well as another 14 months in state prisons, where she endured solitary confinement and later missed the funeral of her beloved eight-year-old niece, Macie Hill, who was tragically killed at a Utah parade in 2022.
According to Evans, it was Sharpe’s decision to get involved in the case that made her legal nightmare possible.
‘My lawyer said it’s actually the reason it kind of blew up my case,’ Evans said. ‘It contributed to me doing 14 months in prison.’
Sharpe delivered a pair of sworn affidavits ‘replete with falsities,’ according to Evans’ 2023 filing. Those allegedly false statements included Sharpe’s claim that she stalked him, threatened him and falsely accused him of rape to both the police and his employer, she wrote.
‘That was his way of getting back at me,’ she told Daily Mail.
Daily Mail did contact Sharpe’s legal team for comment on Evans’ accusations.
‘Michele Evans’ claims are ridiculous and completely without merit,’ a spokesman told DailyMail.com. ‘She could not find a lawyer to take her case and if you read her complaint you’ll see it is filled with nonsense. Shannon has had no contact with her for many years and we understand that she is still on probation after serving three years in prison.’
Shannon Sharpe and Big Boi attend ESPN First Take at Clark Atlanta University on November 8
Evans used her time in prison to learn the legal system and type out her initial complaint on a throwback typewriter. She is now out of prison and has written a number of fiction books, including one titled ‘Rikers Island.’
Evans insists Sharpe is not entirely bad. She even credits him with helping her quit drinking.
‘He gave me an ultimatum,’ she said. ‘He told me ”You have to choose the alcohol or me,” and that might’ve saved my life. So I have to give him props for that.’
But as thankful as she is, Evans can’t ignore the pain she’s endured or his behavior towards the ex-girlfriend suing Sharpe for rape in Nevada.
‘I want to emphasize the harm he’s causing this woman by doxing her and putting her name out and her OnlyFans out there,’ she said. ‘It can lead to violence by somebody who read what was said about her, so I think that is very, very troubling.’
